William Wyler (1968)
As Fanny Brice, Barbra Streisand gives what is the best starring performance that I’ve seen in a film musical. At the start of Funny Girl, it’s suggested that the stage-struck New York City teenager Fanny hasn’t a hope of making it in the theatre because she isn’t pretty enough. Barbra Streisand isn’t pretty but her face is so extraordinary and she’s so compelling – as a singer, a comedienne and a dramatic actress – that she can never seem an underdog, let alone a no-hoper. It’s just as well, then, that Fanny Brice gets her break in vaudeville as quickly as she does and you don’t need to suspend disbelief for too long. (This is a relief also because the opening scenes of the film are uneasily frenetic; it settles into a comfortable rhythm only once Fanny is on the road to success.) The idea of song and dance in musicals being a heightened expression of the characters’ emotions is fully realised by Streisand in Funny Girl – in the singing department anyway. (What dancing there is consists largely of comedy numbers: the roller-skating routine, in which Fanny, at first inadvertently but increasingly intentionally, upstages everyone and everything; the Swan Lake parody.) Her voice is marvellous in its range, as delicate as it’s powerful. Her singing is also so intensely dramatic that, silly as this may sound, there are times you can forget she’s singing at all – she seems rather to be acting musically. (Her performance of ‘People’ is a particularly good example.) Streisand has beautifully expressive long fingers – with nails here that elongate them even further – and slender, graceful arms; yet her reading of Jewish wisecrack lines keeps bringing Fanny back to earthiness and, however classy she looks and behaves, this quality always seems part of her. Barbra Streisand had become a star playing Fanny Brice in the Broadway production then the West End production of Funny Girl but what she does on screen is wonderfully fresh.
It’s conventional in a showbiz rags-to-riches story that the star’s enormous success on stage or screen or behind the microphone is bought at the cost of a happy personal life. In Funny Girl, the romance of Fanny Brice and the gambler Nick Arnstein is delightful until they tie the knot. It then goes wrong not only because the marriage goes wrong – Fanny’s unending winning streak makes Nick’s losing one all the more humiliating – but also because the film concentrates too much on the marriage, and particularly Nick’s travails, at the expense of showing Barbra Streisand’s Fanny enjoying repeated successes on Broadway. (You begin to feel starved of musical numbers.) Omar Sharif is fine as Nick for as long as he’s the relatively minor partner in Fanny’s life offstage, complementing Walter Pidgeon as Florenz Ziegfeld, the main man in her professional career. (Under William Wyler’s sensible direction, neither Sharif nor Pidgeon is at all competitive with Streisand.) Sharif is also effective for as long as the audience sees him through his wife’s adoring eyes: it’s a good moment when Fanny’s mother (well played by Kay Medford) warns her daughter that her love for Nick is blinding her to his misery. Omar Sharif isn’t strong enough, though, to be the tragic focus of the story that Nick verges on becoming in the later stages of the film. And when music and comedy aren’t in the ascendant, the dramatic material is exposed as strained and pedestrian.
Funny Girl, William Wyler’s penultimate feature film, was the only musical he ever directed and it’s far from his best work. As well as the anxiously hectic opening and the miscalculation around Nick Arnstein’s role in the story, there are sets and costumes in evidence that are crudely coloured and designed (although not the clothes that Irene Sharaff designed for Streisand). The diner à deux at which Nick eventually agrees to marry Fanny takes place in a private restaurant painted in bordello red. But Wyler gets the most important things right, in his staging of the big numbers (especially ‘Don’t Rain On My Parade’) and in the way he captures on camera Barbra Streisand at her very best. (Most of the story is a flashback in Fanny’s mind. In the prologue, Wyler provides Streisand with a memorable entrance, leading up to her look in the mirror and her first line, ‘Hello, gorgeous’.) The songs are a mixture of those written by Bob Merrill and Jule Styne for the stage show and older numbers which were part of the real Fanny Brice’s repertoire, such as ‘Second Hand Rose’ and ‘My Man’. The screenplay is by Isobel Lennart.
13 February 2014
