Gene Kelly (1969)
Even on television, Hello, Dolly! looks a million dollars – and so it should. Ernest Lehman and Gene Kelly’s adaptation of the 1964 Broadway musical (based on Thornton Wilder’s stage comedy The Matchmaker) cost $25m – the equivalent of $209m today. You can see from the production design and set dressing (John DeCuir and others), as well as the costumes (Irene Sharaff), where some of that money was spent. The cinematographer was Harry Stradling, the choreographer Michael Kidd, the director a still more famous name in the annals of screen dance. Lehman wrote the screenplay as well as producing: his two immediately preceding writing credits were for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) and The Sound of Music (1965). All these people must have commanded fees to match their standing in the movie industry; for playing Dolly Levi, Barbra Streisand was paid ‘$335,000 for twenty weeks of work, plus 10% of net profits’ (the Barbra Archives website). The film wasn’t quite a commercial flop but 20th-Century Fox expected a return of far more than $26m from theatrical rentals and the soundtrack’s album sales were disappointing. Hello, Dolly! proved to be one of the mega-budget ‘family’ musicals of the late 1960s and early 1970s that doomed the (sub-)genre as a bankable proposition for Hollywood studios.
This white elephant is made on an elephantine scale: the foolish thinking behind Hello, Dolly! was evidently that it had to be a comprehensively big deal. Every location – whether outdoor or indoor, in New York City or upstate Yonkers – seems designed for the film’s Panavision format. The ostentatious Harmonia Gardens restaurant, where the showiest dance routines and the title number are staged, is vast. The business premises of rich but miserly animal feed merchant Horace Vandergelder (Walter Matthau) are ranch-like. The main sub-plot involves two of Vandergelder’s underpaid employees, Cornelius Hackl (Michael Crawford) and Barnaby Tucker (Danny Lockin), taking an impromptu trip from Yonkers to NYC, where they pair up with Irene Molloy (Marianne McAndrew), a milliner, and her assistant Minnie Fay (E J Peaker), and spend way beyond their means. Judging from their appearance, though, none of the quartet is on their uppers (and Irene’s shop is as palatial as everywhere else). Among several good numbers in Jerry Herman’s song score, ‘Put On Your Sunday Clothes’, its melody a winning blend of jollity and yearning, may be the best; the de luxe world of the film dilutes, though, the poignant charge of the song’s assertion that ‘There’s no blue Monday in your Sunday clothes’.
As in Thornton Wilder’s play, the protagonist of the Broadway Hello, Dolly! is Dolly Gallagher Levi, Irish-American widow of a New York Jew. Unless I missed it, the film gets rid of the ‘Gallagher’ bit so that its star is ethnically right for Dolly; even so, twenty-six-year-old Barbra Streisand is much too young to play this middle-aged matchmaker. Streisand’s imperious domination of proceedings gives her a kind of seniority but the wrong kind: it’s startling to see that, just a year after Funny Girl, she had already become the phenomenal but invulnerable presence that, more often than not, would make her hard to take on screen. Although there’s characterisation in the performance, it’s eclipsed by her own star persona; as a result, Dolly Levi barely registers – you’re aware only of how lavishly talented a singer and comedienne Barbra Streisand is. As Cornelius and Irene leave her to watch a procession down 14th Street in Manhattan, Dolly sits alone on a park seat. Streisand, her large hat tilted, uses the visible part of her face to indicate Dolly’s emotional need for a life partner to replace her late husband, Ephraim (cue for a song: ‘Before the Parade Passes By’). While it’s already clear that Dolly has her sights set on ‘half a millionaire’ Vandergelder, whose marriage broker she supposedly is, this expression of need is new in the narrative. Streisand switches it on like a light, the effect impersonal rather than luminous.
She and Walter Matthau got on notoriously badly on the shoot – there’s no chemistry of any kind between them – but Matthau is uncomfortable and bad-tempered beyond what’s expected of his grumpy character whether or not he’s in a scene with Streisand. The little singing he’s given to do is still too much. When Horace finally capitulates and admits he wants to marry Dolly, you don’t believe it for a moment: you just think – oh, it’s obviously time to wrap things up. Whenever Cornelius Hackl is hesitant or nervous, British audiences will hear Frank Spencer’s nasal bleats issuing from him; that said, Michael Crawford is the only performer who combines musical comedy skill with a bit of soul. Compared with everyone else’s dancing, Crawford’s is flexible, athletic and amusing.
The most bizarre miscasting is Marianne McAndrew as Irene. The character seems meant to be a would-be gold-digger (rich Horace Vandergelder can ‘rescue me from the millinery business’) who eventually finds a heart of gold to fall in love with Cornelius. McAndrew, in her screen debut, is physically imposing but remarkably inexpressive. The storyline suggests a borderline coarse working girl; the actress seems, if anything, rather well bred. I spent the film assuming she must have played the role on stage or at least been cast for her strong singing voice: it turns out that (according to Wikipedia) ‘All the actors did their own singing, except for Marianne McAndrew … whose singing was dubbed by Melissa Stafford for Irene’s vocal solos and Gilda Maiken for when Irene sings with other characters’.
Gene Kelly, alas, also seems miscast as a director. The film opens with a still frame of a New York street in 1890. After a while, the still turns into a moving image but you wait in vain for Hello, Dolly! to burst into life – as distinct from effortful, engineered exertion or confusion. When the parade does pass by – a cast-of-thousands procession, of course – it doesn’t look either to be actually happening or satisfyingly stylised. It gives the impression only of crowds of people gathered for a film shoot. Even allowing that Michael Kidd has sole credit as choreographer, it’s distressing to see Gene Kelly preoccupied by logistics at the expense of choreographic feeling and vibrancy. In smaller things, too, he lacks finesse. One of Walter Matthau’s few good moments – what should be a good moment anyway – comes when Vandergelder looks silently aghast at what confronts him in the Harmonia Gardens. His stricken face is funny but Kelly keeps the camera on it long after Matthau’s expression has passed by.
We watched Hello, Dolly! with the benefit of subtitles: at least I now know that I’ve been mishearing a line in the famous title number for fifty-odd years: I’d always thought ‘You’re still glowin’, you’re still crowin’’ was ‘You’re still glowin’, you’re still growin’’ – though I’d never understood why Dolly was getting larger. The BBC aired the film and Funny Girl consecutively and in that order. There wasn’t time to watch the whole of William Wyler’s only musical but I saw enough of it to be reassured I hadn’t imagined how much better it is than Hello, Dolly! And how refreshingly different Barbra Streisand is – not only dazzling but varied, vulnerable and affecting – as Fanny Brice.
29 December 2023
