Bloated, miscast and over-produced musical that nearly sank the genre and studio
Director: Gene Kelly
Cast: Barbra Streisand (Dolly Levi), Walter Matthau (Horace Vandergelder), Michael Crawford (Cornelius Hackl), Marianne McAndrew (Irene Molloy), EJ Peaker (Minnie Fay), Danny Lockin (Barnaby Tucker), Joyce Ames (Ermengarde Vandergelder), Tommy Tune (Ambrose Kemper), Judy Knaiz (Gussie Grander), David Hurst (Rudolph Reisenweber), Louis Armstrong (Band leader)
The old-fashioned musical had always been a winner for Hollywood. So, I guess it made perfect sense to pump $25 million (just over $200 million in today’s money) into Hello Dolly!. Reality didn’t agree though. Hello Dolly! was a massive box-office bomb which, despite its seven Oscar nominations (including Best Picture, due to intense studio lobbying) pretty much killed the traditional, Freed-style musical stone-dead. After this, musicals would have drama at their heart (like Fiddler on the Roof or Cabaret) and scale down the production numbers.
It also didn’t help that the mega-budget, colossal production values across its bum-numbing two-and-a-half hour run time ruthlessly exposed Hello Dolly! as a perilously slight story, in a way its years playing on Broadway hadn’t. Dolly Levi (Barbra Streisand) is a widowed matchmaker, hired by grumpy “half-a-millionaire” Horace Vandergelder (Walter Matthau) to find him a wife. However, Dolly rather fancies getting back into the game with Horace herself. Around them other parties flirt, such as Horace’s niece Ermengarde (Joyce Ames) with artist Ambrose Kemper (Tommy Tune) and his clerks Corenlius Hackl (Michael Crawford) and Barnaby Tucker (Danny Luckin) with fashion store owner Irene Molloy (Marianne McAndrew) and her assistant Minnie Fay (EJ Peaker).
I’ll grant the scale and sets are impressive. Whole streets and parks were built. Grand, elaborate costumes (some of Streisand’s costumes cost thousands and thousands of dollars by themselves) add wow factor. If you believe “more is more” Hello Dolly! is for you, it’s Oscar for set design well deserved. But as you watch Streisand hit a high note in long shot while an entire parade of thousands takes place around her, you start to realise you’ve not formed a bond with the characters. When we finally get them all in one place (a crowded restaurant in New York) the best part of thirty minutes is taken up with three massive numbers (Dancing waiters! Streisand’s entrance number! Comedy foot-tapping from Crawford! Louis Armstrong cameo!) that piles so much stuff on, that you almost forget what the scene was meant to be about in the first place.
What this probably needed to be is a tighter, American in Paris style romantic comedy, the sort of stuff Arthur Freed would have run out in 100 minutes with a few set pieces. Instead, it’s a bloated mega-production with colossal sets, 12,000 extras, widescreen soaking up the action and vast, never-ending dance numbers that fail to progress either story or emotion. After being bludgeoned by balletic leaps, you suddenly realise not only has nothing much happened, but you are being asked to invest in the future happiness of characters you barely know and often hardly even like.
It’s not helped by the chronic miscasting of the leads. Barbra Streisand was the hottest star in town – the studio was (correctly) convinced mega-stardom was inevitable after watching the rushes of Funny Girl – but she is wrong on almost every level for Dolly Levi. A part intended for a slightly-over-the-hill widower in her late 40s, was barely retrofitted for a glamourous diva aged 26. Streisand, clearly painfully aware she was wrong for the part, struggles to work out how to play it. Sometimes she’s coquetteish, other times she goes for a mother-in-law largeness, most of the time she ends up channelling Mae West sauciness. While her singing is (of course) outstanding, she never looks comfortable. Equally out-of-place is Walter Matthau, whose grouchy comedy style never meshes with the tone of the film (although he has a great bit of business with a walking stick which he hammers down onto a table with such irritated force it almost rebounds and hits him in the face).
It also doesn’t help that Matthau and Streisand all-too-clearly can’t stand each other (their closing kiss is hilariously awkward – try replicating their physical positions to see how unnatural and unromantic it is). On set Matthau felt Streisand was too big for her newcomer boots while Streisand saw him as envious of her star quality. The two frequently fell into heated rows: this at least meant they fitted in naturally on a set where almost no-one got on. Streisand and Kelly’s working styles (both being demanding perfectionists) proved incompatible, Kelly stopped speaking to the official choreographer who also stopped speaking to the costume designer.
With the leads struggling, most of the film’s charm actually relies on its secondary leads. Hello Dolly! is, actually, an effective showcase for Michael Crawford’s physical dexterity (some would say recklessness) and his sweet romance with Marianne McAndrew’s charming Irene Molloy is the film’s emotional heart. It’s a shame both their film careers effectively ended here (though Crawford would go on to greater things on stage). Their dance number Elegance is one of the film’s most engaging while their duet It Only Takes a Moment is the simplest filmed and most moving moment in the film.
Bloat and bombast overwhelms the rest. Although Kelly knows how to shoot dancing – effective camera moves and having the dancers move towards the camera, increasing their dynamism is very well done – he’s far less suited to the character moments which Stanley Donen and Vincente Minnelli excelled at. The gags very rarely land, either because the timing is off or the camera is so focused on getting the mammoth sets in that the bits of business look like minor irrelevances.
Fundamentally, Hello Dolly! bet the house on throwing all the budget on the screen to wow audiences the way something like The Great Ziegfeld had over thirty years ago. But audiences needed an emotional connection with what they were watching. Hello Dolly spectacularly fails to deliver on this. What we were left with is a very slight story about matchmaking, basically a chamber piece with about six characters, transposed onto the sort of epic backdrop that makes Gone with the Wind look humble. The mismatch never works and the entire enterprise eventually collapses under its own gravitational pull. A box office dud that nearly sank the studio, the musical would never be the same again.
Movie Musings 