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GOODBYE, DOLLY With perverse irony, 20th Century Fox threw so many millions into the elephantine disaster of Hello, Dolly that movie musicals, about which it was longed Barbra Streisand would revive, never fully recovered (until Chicago). There are other musicals more lacking of wit, grace and real music than Hello, Dolly but how many of them end up as vehicles for Barbra? (Well, two more: the no-brainer On A Clear Day You Can See Forever and that drugged-up mess A Star is Born.) If viewers have no trouble seeing the utter hopelessness of Dolly as a musical, did not Fox see it while in production? Was the name Gene Kelly enough to prevent the executives from stepping in and halting his traffic managing? Were they blind to his 1940s time warp redux of Meet Me in Saint Louis and The Harvey Girls? According to producer-adapter Ernest Lehman, Kelly utilized the threat of physical violence against him (and presumably others) if anyone dared interfere. Was there such confidence in Barbra, on the basis of Funny Girl, that nothing mattered except that she was in it? Barbra's speedy New Yorker sass is infinitely more tolerable than Carol Channing batting her lashes and croaking out inanities, but much of what's wrong about the movie is the casting of Barbra; in overpowering everyone she becomes an ironic gilded anachronism—a textbook case for being too good to be a matron, a matchmaker, a love interest for craggy-faced Walter Matthau who, to put it mildy, not only doesn't bring much to the party but ended it early when he informed his co-star that she “didn't have the talent of a butterfly's fart.” When she was selected over embalmed Baby Jane Channing, few outside of Broadway were heard to loudly object (though Lucille Ball might have been a more appropriate choice, or Bea Arthur) because most of us assumed the musical would be built around Barbra, and that in any event we'd have a few hours of her warbling to enjoy. This movie's been built around her, all right, like a giant, pseudo-Baroque mausoleum and comes fully loaded with nerdy, sexless, sweetened up gargoyles like Michael Crawford and Marianne McAndrew—an unnerving cross of Sally Ann Howes, Barbara Parkins and Joan Hackett—sabotaging its structure. (Ann-Margret's test for the part has been uncovered and watching it you perceive this risky casting would have likely helped and not hurt.) Unlike the reviewers at the time who did somersaults to avoid attacking Barbra, even winning a few votes as best actress by the Kael brigade within the National Society of Film Critics, the public wasn't buying the phenomenon as Dolly. They sensed the real problem: Barbra allowed herself to be cast in a stale contraption that couldn't be saved (and did so again with On A Clear Day) and while she may have “suggested” a bit of latitude here and Mae West there, and inspired Irene Sharaff to create a few splendid gowns which accentuate a natural bustle, she apparently wasn't able to demand more, except from herself. Delivering the best version of “So Long, Dearie” we'll probably ever hear, we end up asking what she's on that she can be this into all the creaking mediocrity? We might have been able to get past the stupefying miscasting and sets (Harmonia Gardens is like a football field-size steal from John De Cuir's own deluxe banquet on Liz's barge in Cleopatra). the rotting athleticism Kelly thinks passes as choreography (the only one to survive is that giraffe Tommy Tune) and the ugliest ever costumes for a supporting cast had there been more singing for Barbra. We wonder how it came to be that a studio would pay five million for a juvenile musical and not force Jerry Herman to write several new numbers for the movies' greatest voice. So miscalculated is Dolly that the idiots storyboarding and editing didn't even have the decency to give her a full-throttle rendition of “Before the Parade Passes By.” The camera inexplicably zooms away from her as she's revving up and even on the big screen you'd need binoculars to find her among those dumb blobs of marching bands. When she starts up the title song and reaches the lyrics “bridging the gap,” our thoughts may not be as generous as her Affirming Actions: the gravel-throated Louis Armstrong, the only honest performer in this garish junk yard, comes close to unintended condescension—a quota. Barbra was hired to give the decaying material her special brand of electricity, but what she delivers is power of a different kind—wattage derived out of desperation. There's a certain justice to the panoramic church setting finale: Barbra officiates at a High Mass celebrating a total waste of talent. Some brief roadshow engagements. Filmed in TODD AO. Text COPYRIGHT © 2001 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved. |