Old Yorker

  • Funny Lady

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Herbert Ross (1975)

    This sequel to Funny Girl is fifteen minutes shorter than its precursor but feels hours longer.  It’s a miserable experience for anyone who loves Barbra Streisand’s performance in the first film.  At the point of her life at which Funny Lady begins, Fanny Brice has been a theatre and radio star for some time.  Fanny’s manner is overbearing and though her fast-talking wit is intact it seems to have been drained of humour since we last saw and heard her.  Her quick-as-a-flash putdowns come across as merely a form of self-assertion, a way of reminding everyone around her that she’s in charge.  It’s conceivable that a celebrity such as Fanny Brice started impersonating herself or, at least, behaving in a way that blended an aspect of her public image, as a wisecracking comedienne, with the hard-headed businesswoman she felt she had to be.  In the early stages of Funny Lady, I was prepared to believe this was the interpretation of Brice that Barbra Streisand had in mind but I soon had to stop giving her the benefit of the doubt.  It’s more the case that she’s impersonating her own great performance in Funny Girl.  As the film drags on, the woman on the screen is less and less Streisand as Fanny Brice, more and more Simply Streisand.

    Fanny Brice was remarkable in that she combined a style of comedy deriving from Yiddish vaudeville with the ability to move audiences as an emotive balladeer.  This combination of gifts made Barbra Streisand, who is also a good dramatic actress, the right person to play her in Funny Girl.  The ‘My Man’ finale to William Wyler’s film works both as an illustration of Fanny Brice’s power as a torch singer and as the emotional climax to the heroine’s tormented love for Nick Arnstein that Wyler and Streisand had explored.  At the start of Funny Lady, Fanny is shown as true to the promise of the closing line of ‘My Man’ (and Funny Girl):  ‘For whatever my man is, I am his for evermore’.  In her dressing-room after a show, she is still waiting for Nick to come back to her; instead, he serves her with divorce papers.  (In reality, it was Brice who initiated the divorce proceedings.)  Fanny’s enduring love for Nick is meant to preserve the vulnerable side of her personality.  When he eventually does come to watch her on stage, after they’re divorced and he has remarried, the dressing-room conversation between Streisand and Omar Sharif has more weight than almost anything else in Funny Lady – but this is less because it’s well done than because it recalls their relationship in, and taps into feelings of goodwill one carries forward from, Funny Girl.  The emotionally bereft Fanny, as Streisand plays her in this second film, has a glazed, glamorised quality; she’s going through the motions of heartache rather than feeling it as she did the first time around.

    The musical numbers that enlarged and deepened Barbra Streisand’s portrait of Fanny Brice in Funny Girl do nothing of the kind here.   The main narrative thread of Funny Lady is Fanny’s partnership – in show business and marriage – with the lyricist and impresario Billy Rose, played by James Caan.   The inclusion of numbers co-written by Rose – among them ‘More Than You Know’, ‘Paper Moon’, ‘Me and My Shadow’, and ‘I Found a Million Dollar Baby (In a Five and Ten Cent Store)’ – greatly strengthens the musical content of Funny Lady but it says a lot about the film that ‘More Than You Know’ is featured principally in a sequence that describes Fanny recording it in a studio.  The sequence conveys, in other words, rather than the substance of the song, the technical expertise of Fanny, and particularly of Barbra Streisand.  The original songs for the film are by John Kander and Fred Ebb.  The catchiest of these, ‘How Lucky Can You Get?’, doesn’t compare with the best of Jule Styne’s numbers for Funny Girl but is considerably better than Streisand’s bitterly sarcastic rendition of it, after Fanny learns that Nick has remarried.  The number is staged by Herbert Ross – in an empty theatre, after the audience has gone home – so as to emphasise the hugeness of both Fanny’s celebrity and her loneliness.  The staging merely reinforces the bombastic, vengeful hollowness of Streisand’s delivery.  When you think of the rich emotionality of, say, ‘People’ in Funny Girl, it’s upsetting that the best you can say of her execution of ‘How Lucky Can You Get?’ is:  that’s one powerful singer.  The other main Kander and Ebb number, ‘Let’s Hear It For Me’ (the title is a good clue to what kind of song it is), features Streisand on different forms of transport.  Ross’s deliberate evocation of ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade’ is a misjudgement:  the recollection of the Funny Girl sequence serves only to magnify the gulf, in quality and imagination, between it and this follow-up.

    Far too much time in Funny Lady is devoted to Billy Rose’s Crazy Quilt show – during which little happens in the relationships offstage.  You suspect this emphasis, and the survival in the final cut of feeble sequences like Fanny’s attending a polo match in which Nick is playing, are the result of the film-makers’ anxiety to show where they spent the budget, including the many costumes designed for Streisand by Ray Aghayan and Bob Mackie.  (Perhaps this was a sound commercial instinct on the part of the studio:  the film did well at the box office and more than recouped the $9.5m that it cost to make.)  When Crazy Quilt first opens, Billy has refused to heed Fanny’s warnings that the show’s production is dangerously overambitious, and the result is a fiasco.  It’s difficult to film a show going wrong and Herbert Ross’s direction of the episode itself seems clumsy.  The theatre audience’s reaction to Crazy Quilt is inexplicably polite:  they neither boo nor laugh as things on stage fall apart but walk out in silence.  For the audience of Funny Lady, things go from bad to worse:  the improved Crazy Quilt – judged on the basis of the ‘Great Day’ number that Ross uses to represent it – is as grotesquely overproduced as the version of the show it’s meant to surpass.

    We and Fanny first meet Billy Rose when he’s working as a stenographic clerk for the financier Bernard Baruch (Larry Gates).  James Caan is splendid in his opening scene, as he reads back, verbatim and at very high speed, the conversation between Baruch and Fanny that Billy has written down.  Caan is good throughout at conveying Billy’s amiably grubby, hustling spirit even if he never quite suggests the steel that must also have been part of the man’s nature.  The argument between Fanny and Billy in their train sleeping compartment on honeymoon is overplayed, though – you sense that Streisand is dictating this exchange and Caan struggling to compete with her.  A more basic problem with their relationship, as the centre of Jay Presson Allen and Arnold Schulman’s screenplay, is summarised in Fanny’s reply to one of the wedding guests, who asks why she’s chosen to marry Billy.   ‘I fell in like with him’, says Fanny, and that’s how much is at stake.   Once they’re wife and husband (in that order of celebrity status), it’s just a question of how long they stay together before they split up.  Billy never matters to Fanny – or, therefore, to the viewer – the way Nick Arnstein did.  The cast of Funny Lady also includes Roddy McDowall, as Fanny’s loyal gay assistant, and Ben Vereen, who performs ‘Clap Hands, Here Comes Charley’, as part of Crazy Quilt.  The film was the last to be photographed by James Wong Howe, before his death in 1976.

    21 February 2015

  • Good Night, and Good Luck.

    Old YorkerFilm review

    George Clooney (2005)

    George Clooney’s second feature begins and ends with a 1958 ceremony to honour Edward R Murrow.  (The opening credits appear over images of the people we come to know as his CBS work colleagues and others seated at dinner tables.  The film ends with Murrow’s speech to the gathering.)   And this is just what the picture does – and just about all it does – in the intervening, swiftly-paced ninety minutes:  it honours Ed Murrow.   Good Night, and Good Luck doesn’t tell Murrow’s life story.  It focuses on his See It Now series in 1953-54, climaxing in Murrow’s famous taking on of Senator Joseph McCarthy.  As it’s not a biography, the film can’t strictly speaking be described as a hagiography either – but it treats its main character very reverently indeed, admiring him as a journalist of outstanding integrity and, as such, the epitome of a lost age of American public broadcasting.

    Murrow (David Strathairn) is presented as saintly in his moral purpose and a cut above in his percipience.  A colleague, Don Hollenbeck (Ray Wise), is being hounded in the press for his ‘pinko’ tendencies.  Murrow alone can see that Hollenbeck is on the edge.  (Since Ray Wise rather telegraphs the inner miseries behind Hollenbeck’s desperate smiles, Murrow’s insight is probably matched by most of the audience.  And when Hollenbeck commits suicide – too obviously ironic shots of a gleaming, symbol-of-50s-American-affluence gas oven appear on the screen – Murrow’s shocked incredulity doesn’t quite make sense.)  The heroic Murrow has all the best lines – even when they’re self-deprecating, they’re so on the button they seem to add to his stature.   David Strathairn gives a meticulous, intelligent performance, quietly dominating the film in the way Clooney clearly wants – although I kept feeling that Strathairn was slightly too aware of the camera (or didn’t quite get a satisfying distinction between Murrow’s awareness and his own).   Strathairn looks ordinary (perhaps more so than the real Murrow).  That doesn’t in itself make him authentic – but there’s always a pleasure in seeing an actor who can make his ordinariness luminous, as Strathairn does here.  Murrow’s high standards make him self-doubting:  each time he signs off a show with his signature ‘Goodnight, and good luck’, he registers a private was-that-enough look as soon as he’s off-camera.   Strathairn is perhaps asked to do this once too often but he’s good throughout at suggesting a man who’s an inveterate worrier, and who uses wit both to express and to deflect that side of him.

    Murrow’s contest with McCarthy never involves a face-to-face confrontation.   Murrow does a piece condemning McCarthy’s tactics in his anti-communist crusade; McCarthy comes on the next week with his rebuttal statement; then Murrow has another monologic go.  McCarthy’s next and last appearance in the film is when he’s censured by the US Senate (where he appears tearful, deflated and even less prepossessing than he was before).  The juxtaposition of these sequences implies that the stand taken by Murrow was a major cause of McCarthy’s fall from grace.   At an earlier stage of the film, we see Murrow’s successful campaign on behalf of a man whose career in the US Air Force is being threatened by his sister’s political views (it’s this that appears to spark McCarthy’s accusing Murrow himself of communist tendencies).   Interspersed with the serious stuff are star interviews that Murrow conducts with the likes of Liberace (shown on archive footage, while David Strathairn speaks Murrow’s part of the conversation).  We get the point, effortfully made, that Murrow is not just unfulfilled but intellectually famished going through the motions of this kind of interview.

    I’m not denying that Ed Murrow is worth praising and the bracing candour and seriousness of what the film shows him doing on TV – which seems pretty unthinkable now – are startling.  Even so, this eulogy-elegy is dramatically thin.  (I saw it on its original release in Britain in early 2006 and a second viewing hasn’t much changed my mind about it.)  It seems Clooney learned an awful lot about directing a picture between his debut feature in 2002 and this film.  Good Night (at least as Clooney and Grant Heslov, who also produced, have written the screenplay) is straightforward compared with Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.  Even so, Clooney’s direction here is trim, focused and elegant – qualities present in his own performance in Confessions but absent from most of the rest of the film.  The look of Good Night is clean and stylish (the black-and-white photography is by Robert Elswit) – in some ways it’s too stylish.  It’s hard to blame Clooney for the fact that the excerpts from the HUAC hearings are so gripping that they overpower the rest of the film.  But these excerpts also draw attention to the fact that the CBS men are very sleek and uniformly well-groomed compared with those at the hearings.  McCarthy was evidently one of those men who can never look tidy (and look more untidy in a suit and tie than in casual clothes) but there’s a variety about the HUAC line-up – almost an austerity – that’s missing in the newsmen (who, with the exception of the ascetically lean Murrow, have a well-fed appearance).  The effect is to reduce the inhabitants of the CBS newsroom to part of the film’s design.  I think the slickness of the visual style also tends to throw into relief the film’s dramatic superficiality.

    George Clooney’s father Nick was a television journalist and anchorman; and you sense the director’s affection, as well admiration, for this milieu – albeit that he didn’t personally experience it (Clooney was born in 1961).   It’s there in the camaraderie of the newsroom, perhaps too in the numbers from a jazz singer (Dianne Reeves) which punctuate the action.  This nostalgic warmth, even if it’s based in sentimentality, gives the film a bit of emotional texture that it badly needs.   In other respects, it can seem like a pastiche documentary.  The editing, by Stephen Mirrione, is very fluent but occasionally draws attention to itself.  The overlapping dialogue sounds too rehearsed – perhaps because the actors know that these routines are all they have to work with.   Except for the suicide and a couple of bits in the bedroom of Joseph and Shirley Wershba (Robert Downey Jr and Patricia Clarkson), who are flouting the CBS rule that married couples can’t work together and are trying to keep their matrimony a secret, there’s next to nothing about the background and home life of the characters – Murrow included.   The team sit in a bar, apprehensively awaiting the arrival of the first editions of the papers containing reviews of Murrow’s first onslaught on McCarthy.  You might expect some nervy small talk but none is supplied.  The actors stay in character but their roles are mostly written in a way that makes those characters nothing more than the members of a crusading journalistic team.  This is also true of Murrow’s co-producer Fred Friendly, although Clooney, who plays Friendly, may just be aiming for self-effacement here.  It’s the actors playing the CBS senior management – Frank Langella as chief executive William Paley and, especially, Jeff Daniels, as a character called Sig Mickelson – who make the strongest impression after Strathairn.   They suggest people with lives outside the office, who existed before they appeared on screen.

    When Paley tells Murrow and Friendly that he’s going to take See It Now out of its 30-minute Tuesday evening slot and repackage it as an hour-long programme on a Sunday afternoon (five shows only), he explains his decision on the grounds that, ‘People want to enjoy themselves – they don’t want a civics lesson’.  Although the film seems to present this as a crucial moment in the degradation of political independence in American television, the wording of Paley’s line is interesting because it hints (perhaps inadvertently) at the didactic style, as well as the serious content, of Murrow’s journalism.  The line also refers – in effect (and almost certainly inadvertently) – to George Clooney’s own approach in Good Night, and Good Luck.  The film combines a slightly tedious desire to instruct with a potentially formidable aptitude for entertaining us intelligently.

    3 February 2009

Posts navigation