FUNNY GIRL B+
USA (155 mi) 1968 ‘Scope d: William Wyler
I'm the greatest star there is by far, but no one knows it.
—Fanny Brice (Barbra Streisand)
It has been commonly said that the musical 'Funny Girl' was a comfort to people because it carried the message that you do not need to be pretty to succeed. That is nonsense; the 'message' of Barbra Streisand in 'Funny Girl' is that talent is beauty.
—Pauline Kael
One of the few films that opens with a six minute orchestral interlude and plays with an intermission, where the film up to that point is marvelous, falling flat afterwards in a story that resembles Judy Garland’s career ascent and James Mason’s descent in A STAR IS BORN (1954). Like that film, an old veteran director, William Wyler (in his only musical), a guy who directed 35 Academy Award winning performances, was brought in to replace Sidney Lumet who had artistic differences, as George Cukor was Garland’s choice, as he was known at the time as an actress’s director. Cukor was much more successful, but what each film has in common is the explosive performances of the stars, as in this film Barbra Streisand, who also appeared in the Broadway role in 1964, put her name up in lights and proved beyond a doubt that everyone else in the production was secondary, as she was a full blown star, while Garland rose to heights never before reached since THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939), and pulls off perhaps the greatest performance ever in a musical production. Streisand’s career took a similar descent afterwards, but not due to any lack of talent or a deterioration of her performances, but due to her “diva” temperament where her public persona took a nosedive, known for telling everyone exactly what she wanted them to do, where she insisted that things be so perfect all the time until no one wanted to work with her anymore, developing a reputation as a control freak, this despite winning two Academy Awards, one for Best Actress in this film, another for composing the Best Original Song, “Evergreen” from the 1976 remake of A STAR IS BORN, also eight Grammy awards, four Emmy awards, a special Tony award, an American Film Institute award and a Peabody Award, while also recording over thirty Top Ten best selling albums with nearly a fifty year span in between, and is the only artist to release number one albums in each of five consecutive decades. But due to her partisan activism in the Democratic Party, Streisand made President Nixon’s infamous Enemies List in 1971, just 3 years after the release of this film.
The story revolves around Fanny Brice (Streisand), a turn of the century vaudeville star whose talent could easily have made her one of the first Talkies’ female stars, but her looks didn’t conform to the Hollywood standards of beauty, which is a theme that opens this film, as Brice has been raised with realistically lowered expectations of her own self image and has profound issues over her lack of what she feels are society’s standards of beauty, claiming “I'm a bagel on a plate full of onion rolls!” Even in her initial performance as a Ziegfeld Follies girl, her self-deprecating sarcasm, altering the script (without permission), appearing pregnant on a stage filled with Busby Berkeley style beauties, won the endearing affection of the audience, and five curtain calls. Her never take no for an answer and nothing-can-stop-me determination is what won the hearts of theater companies, where she’s seen singing “I’m the Greatest Star” to an empty theater which immediately wins her a job performing an ensemble singing act on rolling skates, a hilarious skit that veers out of control since she doesn’t know how to skate, an outlandish performance that Bette Midler would immediately replicate on stage with mermaids and wheelchairs. Her brash wit and non-conformist style are a revelation in a business that is used to tried and true routines. But what really bowls them over is her voice, as she’s sensational, actually acting out the songs she’s singing, adding humorous asides as if she’s speaking to an invisible character in the song. In my lifetime, only Judy Garland and her daughter Liza Minnelli, think Bob Fosse’s CABARET (1972) and Martin Scorsese’s NEW YORK, NEW YORK (1977), come close to providing the same personal magnetism and electrifying voice on stage.
Fanny’s onstage performance earns her a backstage admirer, Omar Sharif (an Egyptian born actor who was vilified in both the Arabic and American press for sharing his role with a Jew, including a screen kiss, shot during the deflating impact of the 1967 Six Day War) as gambler and high roller Nick Arnstein, a gorgeously handsome guy in a perfectly pressed suit who lives each day as if it was his last, where his charming and impeccable style is impossible for Fanny to resist. Nonetheless, as his business calls him to places around the world, nothing serious develops except an initial infatuation, where she sings “People” to Nick with tears of joy in the alley behind her mother’s house on Henry Street in the Jewish slums of New York’s Lower East Side. Meanwhile, she becomes a blossoming star whose magnificent voice and unprecedented comic timing make whatever production she appears in a smash hit. But when they meet again, set in a luminous brightly colored red dining room, which includes a bed, Fanny is swept off her feet to the duet “You Are Woman, I Am Man,” which leads to their marriage and firstborn in a montage that stretches no more than 30 seconds. And when people question Nick’s character, she blows the lid off their objections by belting out “Don’t Rain On My Parade.” But as her career ascends, Nick has money troubles and he’s too proud to live off her accumulated wealth, ending in a disastrous embezzlement charge where he’d rather plead guilty than create negative publicity that might derail her career. Streisand is magnificent in this film, as is much of the restored art direction where the eye-popping colors jump off the screen. Her modernized, bringing the curtain down rendition of “My Man” My man - Barbra Streisand - YouTube (2:38), the only song in the production to be shot on film live, is reminiscent of Garland’s off the charts power and stage showmanship, star qualities that we haven’t seen in nearly half a century since the release of this film.
