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