PAPER MOON 1973

When most people think of cinema in the '70s, they think of a time of innovation, upheaval, and experimentation. And indeed, it was. But the '70s was also the decade that introduced the first generation of film-weaned filmmakers. The directors, producers, and writers who grew up watching movies.

Wholly uninterested in the experimental exploration of film's potential as an art form or means of creative expression, this new breed of nostalgia-prone, rear-view-fixated filmmakers—many of them former movie critics or film scholars—not only seemed to have spent the entirety of their formative years in front of movie screens (suggesting, perhaps, a lack of actual, real-life-acquired insights to impart in their work beyond those gleaned, secondhand, from movies); but when granted the opportunity to make films of their own, strove for no ambition loftier than to remake, revisit, and re-imagine the movies that meant so much to them while growing up.

The legacy of such willfully arrested artistic development in today's Hollywood can most certainly be seen in the industry's worrisome over-reliance on remakes and reboots and the almost-surreal global dominance of mega-budget, adolescence-coddling comic book superhero movies. But back in the day of the Auteur Theory, Nouvelle Vague, and the New Hollywood, the regressive filmmaker was primarily dismissed by so-called serious cineastes. Luckily for these filmmakers, they were taken to the bosom of a moviegoing public growing weary of avant-garde filmmaking techniques, artsy pretensions, and non-linear storytelling. Indeed, in the wake of the '70s oil crisis, inflation, Vietnam, and Watergate, many audiences found the notion of escaping into the romanticized idealization of the past to be a very appealing proposition.

Cinema Dreams
In the background of this shot, Bogdanovich pays tribute to one of his favorite directors, John Ford, by featuring a theater marquee advertising Ford's 1935 feature, Steamboat Round the Bend

Some directors, like François Truffaut, paid homage to the filmmakers they admired (Hitchcock, in his case) by reinterpreting that director's style through a modern prism. Others, like Francis Ford Coppola, found fame by applying auteurist theories to classicist filmmaking. Only Peter Bogdanovich—actor, film scholar, and critic—drew the ire of Hollywood Renaissance movie cultists (while gaining success as the Golden Boy of the nostalgia craze) by making new "old" movies.

Ryan O'Neal as Moses (Moze) Pray

Tatum O'Neal as Addie Loggins

Madeline Kahn as Miss Trixie Delight (alias, Mademoiselle)

P.J. Johnson as Imogene

Burton Gilliam as Floyd

John Hillerman as Deputy Hardin / Jess Hardin 

Randy Quaid as Leroy

Although Peter Bogdanovich is technically credited with being its director, Paper Moon, like its predecessors The Last Picture Show (1971) and What's Up, Doc? (1972), is a film so heavily influenced by Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Orson Welles, each gentleman, by rights, could share co-director billing. A point Bogdanovich himself would likely make no bones about, for on the DVD commentary, he states, "The movie was very 1935 with '70s actors." And to be sure, what with the film's salty language, racy humor, and a pint-sized, cigarette-smoking heroine so cheeky she'd take the curl out of Shirley Temple's hair; Paper Moon feels very much like some kind of pre-Code Preston Sturges movie shot through with a dose of '70s self-awareness.

Paper Moon, a Depression-era road comedy skillfully and hilariously adapted by Alvin Sargent (The Sterile Cuckoo) from Joe David Brown's 1971 novel Addie Pray, is the story of small-time con man Moses Pray (Ryan O'Neal), who meets his match in little Addie Loggins (Ryan's real-life daughter, Tatum O'Neal), an old-beyond-her-8-years, recently-orphaned waif who may or may not be his illegitimate daughter. Entrusted with escorting the child from Kansas to Missouri to stay with relatives, Moze's attempt to first swindle, then unburden himself of the cagey tyke results in the tables being turned on him in a manner ultimately binding the two as reluctant partners in cross-country flim-flams. The quarrelsome duo's misadventures swindling widows, bilking shopkeepers, and taking up with buxom carnival dancer Trixie Delight (Kahn) and her beleaguered maid, Imogene (Johnson), are played out against a bleak Midwestern landscape of barren skies and vast Kansas plains redolent of The Grapes of Wrath.

Paper Moon's grim depiction of the Midwest during The Great  Depression not only served as dark subtext to the film's comedy, but  resonated with '70s audiences contending with gas-rationing and rising inflation

Gloriously shot, cleverly conceived, superbly acted, and consistently laugh-out-loud funny, Paper Moon is a feast of period detail and sharp comedy writing that manages to be sweetly sentimental without veering into the saccharine. And while I find the film to be a little draggy in its third act (perhaps because things take a darker turn), the first two-thirds of Paper Moon is very nearly perfect.

Following a tight, 3-act structure, Paper Moon, with the introduction of Trixie and Imogene to the narrative in the second act, reaches such a giddy height of comedy incandescence that the film never fully regains its footing once they depart. These characters bring so much variance to the interplay of Moze and Addie that when nothing is there to take its place but a sinister bootlegger and a fistfighting hillbilly, one can almost feel the air leaving the movie. Almost. The O'Neal chemistry is too strong to let the film flounder completely.

The Only Time We See Addie's Mother
(and we understand why Addie is so attached to that cloche hat)

From a storytelling viewpoint, it makes perfect sense for things to take a darker turn once Addie & Moze's overconfidence in their con leads to greed. But both the bootleg swindle and hillbilly car swap sequences play out with the appropriate tension but not much wit, leaving the rest of the film—excluding the marvelous denouement—feeling somewhat anticlimactic.

If it can be said of Bogdanovich that he is a director who has spent his life forever at the feet of The Masters, then at least he's a student who learned his lessons well. For as with all of his early films, Paper Moon reveals Bogdanovich to be a deft and sensitive storyteller, versatile and fluent in the language of cinema. He understands what he's doing, knows what he's going for, and, despite a film-geek tendency toward stylistic imitation-as-flattery, has an inspired touch when it comes to comedy. Rare among nostalgists, Bogdanovich has a talent for making the familiar feel engagingly fresh.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Paper Moon is one of my favorite comedies, one I've always regretted never having seen at a theater in the presence of an audience. But as I recount in an earlier post on this blog about The Last Picture Show, as a young man, I was less than enthralled by the whole '70s nostalgia craze:

"As an African-American teen inspired by the emerging prominence of Black actors on the screen and excited about the upsurge in positive depictions of African-American life in movies of the 70s; these retro films, with their all-white casts and dreamy idealization of a time in America's past which was, in all probability, a living nightmare for my parents and grandparents, felt like a step in the wrong direction. The antennae of my adolescent cynicism told me that all this rear-view fetishism was just Hollywood's way of maintaining the status quo. A way of reverting back to traditional gender and racial roles, and avoiding the unwieldy game-change presented by the demand for more racial diversity onscreen, the evolving role of women in society, and the increased visibility of gays." 

And while I still feel this to be true and witness the same thing happening today in Hollywood's focus on fantasy films populated with mythical creatures, elves, gnomes, wizards, and superbeings of all stripes (anything but those pesky, problematic people of color); the passage of time has literally transformed Paper Moon into what it was always designed to be: an old movie. And old movies I can watch through a prism of the past I'd otherwise find unacceptable, if not reprehensible, in a contemporary film.

If there's a method to Bogdanovich's retro madness, it's that Paper Moon is often at its funniest when it uses our familiarity with '30s movie tropes as the setup for contemporary, very '70s comic reversals. Tatum O'Neal's tough-talking Addie amuses in part because she's so very unlike the kind of little girl every parent wanted their daughter to be in the '30s: Shirley Temple. Trixie's maid, Imogene, may recall the sassy Black maids of '30s comedies, but it's her uproariously open and blatant hostility toward her employer that lays to rest the comforting stereotype of the childlike devoted domestic.

I think it was Bogdanovich who once made the observation that people of a certain age visualize the 1930s in their mind's eye as a black-and-white era because that's the only way they know it; through black-and-white-photos, black-and-white movies. When Paper Moon, with its meticulous recreation of the look and feel of a 1935 movie (which is, importantly, not the same thing as recreating real life in 1935), has its very period-specific characters using language unthinkable in films of the day, the visual and behavioral incongruity is riotously funny.

Ryan's Daughter

PERFORMANCES

As everyone knows, 10-year-old Tatum O'Neal made history by being the youngest person to ever win a competitive Oscar when she won Best Supporting Actress for Paper Moon in 1974. And on that score, you'll get no argument from me. I'm really not very fond of kids (either on or off-screen), a predisposition compounded by Hollywood's fascination with precocious kids whose mature behavior I'm supposed to find adorable. But Bogdanovich works a minor miracle with Tatum O'Neal. She actually IS an adorable, precocious child…sweet of face, husky of voice, and inhabited, apparently, by the soul of a 50-year-old grifter.

Paper Moon's great, unsung asset is Ryan O'Neal. Looser and funnier than you're likely to see him in any other film, he is a real charmer with an impressive range of exasperated reactions

Tatum O'Neal is nothing short of a marvel in a role in which she's required to play a range of emotions a seasoned professional would find challenging. And even if the rumors are true that Bogdanovich shaped every gesture, nuance, and line reading (easy enough to believe given the flatness of her subsequent performances in The Bad News Bears and International Velvet), hers is still an amazingly assured and natural performance for one so young (O'Neal was eight when filming began).

Now, with all that being said, I do have to lodge my one complaint: there is no way in hell Addie Pray is a supporting role. It's a lead. The entire film rests on her shoulders, and she appears in more scenes than anyone else in the film. It's patently absurd that Tatum O'Neal was entered in the Best Supporting Actress category.

Of course, my rant is based on my ironclad certainty that, taking absolutely nothing from O'Neal's great performance, it was Madeline Kahn who deserved that award. As good as Paper Moon is, my A+ rating would drop to a B-minus without Kahn's Trixie Delight. She's that good.

I'm sure someone somewhere must have tallied the length of Madeline Kahn's screen time in Paper Moon. She's not onscreen all that long, but every moment—from her memorably jiggly entrance, past her umpteenth speech extolling the virtues of bone structure, all the way to her magnificent scene on that hilltop—is sheer brilliance. That hilltop scene is one of the finest onscreen moments in Kahn's entire career. I love when an actor can make you laugh while at the same time touching upon something vulnerable and sad behind the facade.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

The off-kilter charm of Paper Moon is in it essentially being a romantic comedy. An uneasy love story between a father and daughter who may or may not be biologically related ("It's pothible!"). That Addie doesn't really see herself as a little girl and Moze not seeing himself as anything closely resembling a father, makes for several amusingly awkward scenes where the querulous duo is forced to play-act the roles of loving father and daughter in order to perpetrate a swindle. Scenes made all the more touching by all the other times we see them reluctant to yield to even the slightest display of affection for one another. 

Waitress - "How we doin', Angel Pie? We gonna have a little dessert after we finish up our hot dog?"
Addie - (never taking her eyes off Moze) "I dunno."
Waitress - "What d'ya say, Daddy? Whyn'y we get precious here a little dessert if she eats her dog?"
Moze - (slowly and through gritted teeth) "Her name ain't precious."

Two days and 36 takes (!) produced this exceptional continuous shot sequence

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Over the years, Peter Bogdanovich's unrealized potential as a director and the dysfunctional family circus that has become the O'Neals has lent a bittersweet air of nostalgia to Paper Moon that's wholly unintentional and unrelated to the film's roots in 1930s wistfulness. For years it had been hinted that Bogdanovich's success was significantly reliant upon his wife, production, and costume designer, Polly Platt. Paper Moon marks their last collaboration (they divorced after Peter fell in love with Cybill Shepherd during the making of The Last Picture Show) and, perhaps tellingly, the end of Bogdanovich's success streak. As a longtime admirer (if not idolater) of Orson Welles, it couldn't have been lost on Bogdanovich the degree to which his drop in popularity mirrored Welles' own tarnished Golden Boy career decline.

By way of talk shows, memoirs, and tabloid headlines, Ryan and Tatum O'Neal have practically built a cottage industry around airing the dirty laundry of their familial discord. Watching Paper Moon these days, one can't help but respond to the almost documentary aspects of Moze and Addie's push-pull relationship. This is especially true of scenes depicting Addie's possessiveness toward Moze and jealousy of any female attention directed towards him (Addie's relationship with Trixie is like being given front-row seats to how the whole Tatum O'Neal/Farrah Fawcett thing played out).

When I watch the classic TV show, I Love Lucy, it often crosses my mind that I'm watching a wish-fulfillment version of the real-life marriage of Lucille Ball & Desi Arnaz. In light of the painful reality we've come to know about the relationship of the O'Neals, Moze and Addie have become, for me, the idealized image of Ryan and Tatum.

As I do with Orson Welles, I always associate Peter Bogdanovich with the genius work of his early career and largely overlook his latter contributions. And while I know it to be a departure from the sad reality, I like to imagine Tatum and Ryan O'Neal driving off to an uncertain but happy future together, devoted father and loving daughter, down that long and winding road into the horizon.
Isn't nostalgia all about remembering the past as we would have liked it to be?

And They Lived Happily Ever After

BONUS MATERIAL

On the DVD commentary, Bogdanovich reveals that it was his friend Orson Welles who came up with the idea to title the film "Paper Moon." Before the property fell into Bogdanovich's hands, the film was still known as "Addie Pray" (the title of the Joe David Brown novel) and conceived as a project for Paul Newman and his daughter Nell, working under the direction of John Huston. 

YouTube clip of Tatum O'Neal winning her Oscar for Paper Moon - HERE

In 1974, Paper Moon was turned into a short-lived TV series starring Jodie Foster (just two years away from her own Oscar nomination in Taxi Driver) and Christopher Connelly, the actor who played Ryan O'Neal's brother in 1964's popular TV soap opera Peyton Place (itself a spin-off of a motion picture). 
 YouTube Clip of the series' opening sequence.

Newspaper ad - Paper Moon had its World Premiere at
the Coronet Theater in New York on Wednesday, May 16, 1973

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2014

HELLO, DOLLY! 1969

Hello, Dolly!, indeed.

I’ve wanted to write about this movie since I started this blog way back in 2009.

The only thing preventing me was the promise I’d then made to myself—in response to what felt like (in the days of IMDb’s message boards and forums) a pervasive trend toward negativity and combativeness in online film writing and discourse—that I would devote this retro movie blog exclusively to the films I loved and admired most.  

And when it comes to Hello, Dolly! ...well, let's just say my relationship with it is complicated.

Barbra Streisand as Dolly Levi

Walter Matthau as Horace Vandergelder

Michael Crawford as Cornelius Hackl

Marianne McAndrew as Irene Molloy

Danny Lockin as Barnaby Tucker

E. J. (Edra Jean) Peaker as Minnie Fay

Louis Armstrong as Louis, the Orchestra Leader

Hello, Dolly! is the much-hyped, megamillion-dollar 1969 screen adaptation of that enduring, now-classic 1964 Tony Award-winning musical (with the annoying exclamation point) about a meddlesome matchmaker from Yonkers who sets her personal matrimonial sights on a curmudgeonly, wealthy client. I’m old enough to have seen Hello, Dolly! when it was released in December of 1969, but not being much of a Streisand fan at the time (that changed with 1972’s What’s Up, Doc?) I foolishly backed out of every opportunity to see it. 

That was the winter when I, a precocious, self-serious, hormonal adolescent, was busy spending my weekends and most of my allowance money going to see Easy Rider, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Midnight Cowboy, and The Sterile Cuckoo...over and over again. The last thing I was interested in was seeing anything rated “G.” Much less a G-rated thing that sang and danced.

Of course, now I could kick myself for not having given up at least one weekend of “Suggested for Mature Audiences” nihilism for the chance to experience the opulent excesses Hello, Dolly! on the big screen. More’s the pity because I just know that impressionable, 12-year-old me would have gone utterly gaga over the whole "event" spectacle that is Hello, Dolly! 

If anyone can upstage 4,000 extras, it's Barbra Streisand

I absolutely live for that moment in “Before the Parade Passes By” when Streisand, arms aloft, striding toward the camera, flanked on both sides by a red-jacketed marching band, brings herself to a theatrical halt to end all theatrical halts, dropping her arms and that big ol’ hat, grounding herself like a rocket before liftoff, then lets fly with that voice that soars to the heavens and shattering all the artificiality around her. It’s a genuine “goosebump moment” in a film with all too few. 

My family lived in San Francisco in 1969, and Hello, Dolly! played in movie theaters for at least a year after its exclusive, reserved-seat, $ 4.50-a-ticket roadshow engagement ended (at which time it became available at “popular prices” in neighborhood theaters on weird-ass double bills with The Battle of Britain or The Kremlin Letter, of all things). But I didn’t get around to seeing Hello, Dolly! until 1974…when it was broadcast on TV, in cropped format, with commercials, on our family’s ginormous living room console. Not the most advantageous of circumstances under which to see my first Barbra Streisand musical, to be sure, but at least by this time, I was an interested party.

Hello, Dolly! had its broadcast TV premiere on Thursday, February 28, 1974. I’m not sure why CBS thought scheduling a 3-hour special movie event on a non-holiday weeknight was a good idea (I was exhausted in school the next day). Maybe timing was a factor: earlier that week, the 1973 Academy Award nominations were announced, and Streisand was up for Best Actress for The Way We Were. 

So… what were my first impressions of Hello Dolly!? 

(1) Well, I loved Jerry Herman’s tuneful score (although the beautifully sung, written-for-the-screen ballad [a.k.a., shameless Oscar-nomination bid] “Love is Only Love” was, is, and will forever remain for me, a total slog). 

(2) I enjoyed Michael Kidd’s strenuous “The word I think I’d use is athletic” choreography. 

(3) And although Barbra Streisand’s Dolly Levi makes not a lick of sense to me in the context of the story and casting—I’m supposed to believe this young, glamorous, sexy, and vivacious firecracker of a woman is wasting her time meddling in the love lives of four vapid virgins and one grumpy old man?—I was nevertheless utterly charmed and entranced by her. 

The movie itself…not so much.

As Hello, Dolly! is set in 1860, I've selected a quote from a 19th-century author (re: drawing-room entertainments of the day) that cannily echoes my thoughts on seeing it for the first time. 

If You Ain't Got Elegance
"All is forced, coarse, heavy. The jokes are like cannon-balls, smashing everything in their passage.
 No wit, nothing natural, no sprightliness, no elegance."  

Guy de Maupassant - The Moustache 1883

As I said, perhaps television wasn't the best showcase for a film of this scale, and likely influenced at least a part of my initial response to Hello Dolly!  

For example, the film's lack of visual distinction (all static shots and overlit sets) was ill-served when subjected to the then-standard practice of cropping the edges of wide-screen movies to better fit the square TV screen. The sight of blandly colorless dancers with fixed, joyless smiles leaping about with mechanical precision in a New York set that, in the minimalized format of television, resembled nothing so much as Disneyland’s Main Street; didn’t scream "$25 million movie musical" so much as suggest a “The Doodletown Pipers Meet The Ernie Flatt Dancers"  TV variety special.

While singing groups like The Doodletown Pipers and Up With People always gave off "cult" vibes to me, their popularity during the "let it all hang out" Sixties reflected a market for aggressively wholesome, MOR entertainment. Hello Dolly!, pitching itself as the family-friendly alternative to the saturated R and X-rated market of the New Hollywood, emerged as one of the top 5 highest-grossing films of 1969/70. (But, due to its hefty production and marketing budget, still wound up losing 20th Century Fox [depending on the source] in the neighborhood of 10 to 30 million dollars.)

The widow Levi serving up a little wholesome, G-rated sex appeal

Given my penchant for falling in love with waaaaay less-than-perfect movies, none of the above-stated would have factored significantly in my feelings for Hello, Dolly! had I just felt something…ANYTHING…for the characters or the story. Outside of the allure of Dolly’s fin de siècle fabulousness, I had no love story to root for and no investment in anything that was going on. By the film’s two-hour mark, I found myself wishing Ambrose and Barnaby would run off together and that Dolly would hook up with one of the Harmonia Garden waiters. 

In the end, I was so disappointed that so much money, talent, and obvious hard work hadn’t resulted in a movie that was more fun. Or even funny.

Coke Eyes and Gaping Maws
No small part of my annoyance with Hello Dolly! is Michael Crawford's creative decision to convey boyish American enthusiasm by imitating a largemouth bass. Similarly, director Gene Kelly has the cast adopt an acting style of contrived naivete that's all cartoonish "takes" and eyes held open so wide that everyone looks like they've just taken a bump 

Despite my complaints and primarily due to the immense pleasure I derive from Streisand's The Three Faces of Eve take on the character of Dolly Levi (she's Mae West! She's Fanny Brice! She's a drag queen!...the fun to be had is in never knowing from scene to scene which Dolly is going to show up), I've always owned a copy of Hello, Dolly! and watched it countless times over the years. Usually à la carte...with the TV remote at the ready, finger poised over the "fast-forward" button. 

So, how does a lifelong cinephile and movie musical lover reconcile himself to this paradox? Well, you take the good, you take the bad, you take them both, and there you have: Hello Dolly!…a film for which I’ve never fully resolved my love/hate feelings. (Thank you, Al Burton, Gloria Loring, and Alan Thicke.)

Until now. 

The way Dolly sexily grinds her hips against Horace in "So Long, Dearie" convinces me her matrimonial gameplan is to induce a honeymoon heart attack and go on living happily solo on the old man's half-a-million 

Ironically, the one thing that got me to stop evaluating Hello, Dolly! exclusively through the prism of unrealized potential—putting me on the path toward appreciating the film, warts and all, for what it is—was my late-to-the-party discovery of The Matchmaker (1958), the screen adaptation of the 1954 Thornton Wilder Broadway play that inspired Hello, Dolly! 

The Matchmaker Cast: Shirley Booth, Shirley Maclaine, Paul Ford, Anthony Perkins, and Robert Morse

One of the smartest decisions screenwriter John Michael Hayes (Rear Window, The Children's Hour) made in adapting The Matchmaker to the screen was to dump the superfluous characters of  Ambrose and Ermingarde. If only Hello, Dolly! had done the same

I had never even heard of The Matchmaker before seeing it on TCM sometime in 2001, but it instantly won me over with its abundance of heart, humor, engaging performances, and genuinely sweet-natured charm. The very things I’d always felt were missing in action from Hello, Dolly!. I initially thought that my falling in love with a practically-perfect-in-every-way adaptation of Wilder’s story would only amplify my dissatisfaction with Hello, Dolly!, but to my surprise, it had the opposite effect.

 

Finally seeing Thornton Wilder’s frothy farce presented on a scale appropriate to its slim plot and humble characters led me to conclude that perhaps part of my issue with Hello, Dolly! might stem from evaluating it by motion picture standards when it’s really not a movie at all; it’s a monument.

An eager-to-please, pull-out-the-stops, Barnum and Bailey Circus of a monument erected to commemorate and pay tribute to the institution that is Hello, Dolly!...a show that, at the time, was one of the most lauded (10 Tony Awards), lucrative, and long-running musicals in Broadway history.

Suspended in Time 
The movie I once dismissed as the kind of musical Hollywood needed to stop making, I now appreciate as a last-gasp souvenir of a style and type of Hollywood filmmaking that is gone forever 

Thinking of Hello, Dolly! this way has gradually turned me into a more appreciative audience. I once felt the film’s chief liability was its dogged devotion to the proved-to-be-fatal Hollywood dictum that bigger, busier, noisier, and more expensive was ALWAYS better. Now, simply because these qualities affix Hello, Dolly! squarely in a specific time and place in Hollywood history—the sets, costumes, production numbers, and sheer spectacle of it all shine brighter for me than they ever did. 

On Feb. 29, 1968, a month before Hello, Dolly! began filming (and nine months after Streisand's casting), Carol Channing not-so-subtly thumbed her nose at 20th Century Fox while giving America a glimpse of what it stood to miss in the way of comedy chemistry by having Walter Matthau guest on her TV special. 

As Broadway’s first singing Dolly (from 1964-1967), Carol Channing was so affectionately identified with the role that the casting of anyone else in the film version was bound to be controversial no matter who it was. But when news broke that the Hollywood parade had passed by 46-year-old Channing in favor of 25-year-old, hot-as-a-fuse Barbra Streisand—the very person Channing had beat out for Best Actress at the 1964 Tony Awards (Channing won for Hello, Dolly! against Streisand in Funny Girl)—the outcry over perceived miscasting turned it into a cause célèbre that raged unabated for over a year.

 

Billboard - May 9, 1964

Hello, Dolly! has often been dismissed as a "one-song musical" by critics. But when it comes to that one song, no one is more responsible for its widespread recognition and success than Louis Armstrong. His 1964 recording won Grammys for Best Song and Best Male Performance and gave the 62-year-old jazz legend his first and only #1 hit, famously dethroning The Beatles. I’ve always thought of Armstrong’s brief guest appearance in Hello Dolly! as one of the film’s few moments of magic. It’s the only moment in the entire film when Streisand looks relaxed and genuinely happy.

GOOD GOLLY, MISS DOLLY or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

If part of my making peace with Hello, Dolly! means accepting that my heart will be on a bit of a starvation diet, I take comfort in knowing that—thanks to the modern innovations of Blu-ray, restoration, widescreen HD television, and impeccable digital audio—my eyes, ears, and nervous system will be treated to a veritable feast. Watching the title song production number and the breathtaking "Waiter's Gallop," I found myself feeling for the first time a sense of gratitude that Hello, Dolly! is such an overinflated totem of studio-era excess.

PERFORMANCES 

Time has made the supporting cast of Hello, Dolly! less of an irritation to me (they're all so young, they're kind of cute now). Walter Matthau will ever be a favorite, his reactions and line deliveries being the source of many of the film's meager laughs: "Any man who comes to the city deserves what happens to him." 

But I've often wondered if the creators of Hello, Dolly! didn’t fully recognize what a screen presence powerhouse they had in Barbra Streisand (Funny Girl hadn’t yet been released when "Dolly" went into production); otherwise, it's hard to understand why they didn’t see it as a problem that her character is offscreen for so long. The stage show is built to give an older actress lots of rest…but when you’re fortunate enough to have Streisand in a musical, do you really want to give so much screen time over to those dull ingenues and juveniles?   

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

"I thought she did the BEST job she could do."
 - Carol Channing's slightly shady appraisal - Dec. 29, 1969 

Perhaps because I don't think of Hello, Dolly! as a "great" musical in the first place (ergo, impervious to being "ruined" in any significant way), I don't have any problem with the built-in contradiction of my thinking Barbra Streisand is most definitely miscast as Dolly, yet I find her to be ideal as an musical comedy star.  There's just no way I'd ever be disappointed to have one of the preeminent entertainers of my generation showcased in a vehicle like this. As unpleasant an experience as it was for Streisand in the making (as detailed in her EPIC memoir), I will be forever grateful that it exists. Streisand's not perfect in it...but in many ways, she's better than perfect, she's exquisite.

Hello, Dolly! is over 55 years old. Barbra Streisand is over 80. And I’m somewhere there in between. Sure, Hello, Dolly!, much like myself on certain mornings, can be lumbering and stiff. But just as I’ve found peace in not focusing on my aches and pains and learned to simply celebrate the fact that I’m still here, I'm glad—after so many years of back and forth—I can at last accord Dolly Levi a similar grace. 

BONUS MATERIAL:

Gene Kelly puts his handprints in cement in the forecourt of Hollywood’s Grauman’s Chinese Theater on November 24, 1969, just prior to Hello Dolly!’s December 16th West Coast premiere.

The young ladies behind him are the stars of Fox's forthcoming X-rated release Beyond the Valley of the Dolls - Marcia McBroom and Cynthia Myers in Irene Sharaff-designed costumes from Hello, Dolly!. 

During the '90s I worked for a time as Walter Matthau's personal trainer. After taking months to win over his confidence, he was finally comfortable enough with me to share some anecdotes about the making of "Dolly" after I begged to know the details. Without going into it, let me just say that in having heard the exact same story Streisand relates in her memoir more than 20 years before she wrote it, the talk about their not getting along during the filming is true (his recounting of the rude comment he made to her was accompanied by a surprisingly spot-on Streisand impersonation), as is the fact that they became good friends...or at least friendly...later. 

The hemlines of women's skirts fluctuated rapidly in the 1960s, but it's got nothing on the 1890s, as evidenced by these screencaps of the "Dancing" sequence, showing Minnie Fay's dress growing shorter by the second.  

Barnaby Tucker and Minnie Fay

Two-time Tony Award winner Robert Morse made his Broadway debut at 24, originating the role of Barnaby Tucker in The Matchmaker, later reprising his performance in the film. In 1968, Morse co-starred with E.J. Peaker (24 when she made her screen debut in Hello, Dolly!) in the musical sitcom That's Life, which ran for a single season on ABC. 

Richard Amsel, one of my all-time favorite illustrators, was just 21 and a recent art school graduate when his submission for 20th Century Fox's nationwide talent contest (to design a poster for Hello, Dolly!) was selected, launching his brief but prolific career. His iconic artwork for the Hello, Dolly! poster is noted for the era-specific, Boomer-recognizable Spirograph-style design of the flowers adorning Mrs. Levi's enormous hat.

Streisand & Matthau in a clip from Hello, Dolly!

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