and opinions some people might find offensive but for which I won’t apologise.
Don’t read any further unless you are open-minded.
Also, hard as I try not to give away too much, I can't guarantee there are no spoilers.
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Hello Dolly! - Movie 1969 USA 148 Mins
This Great Big Box Office Flop is The Best Musical Ever
In 1890 the widow Dolly Levi travels to Yonkers New York to arrange a match for the well-known half-a-millionaire Horace Vandergelder. She convinces Horace, his niece and the two clerks from Horace’s store to travel to New York City for the day.
For someone who is anything but a musical nut, I can’t help but sound like a musical nut when talking about Barbra Streisand – brilliant actress, comic genius and unreasonably gifted songbird. (Her sister has a voice that’s exactly the same, but I can’t tell you the woman’s name without looking for it – for Barbra to have made a career for herself there might have been some special personality traits to complement the acting talent, the comic genius and the unreasonably special voice.)
Within the first 2 minutes of Hello Dolly we’ve got horses, brooms, footsteps and more providing percussion. This is a film based on a tried and tested Broadway show based on a tried and tested… well, some success stories go way back, in a chain, and this one began in England with an obscure play in 1835. No wonder the dialogue is snappy and polished by 1969 when it gets to Hollywood.
Walter Matthau, who plays Horace Vandergelder, can’t sing for shit, but has made me laugh in a dozen movies and shines in this one too. He hated having to work with Streisand, but apparently the choreographer Michael Kidd clashed with the costume designer Irene Sharaff who clashed with the director Gene Kelly… no wonder there is little “chemistry” on screen. Imagine if they had all got along how good it would be.
The great thing about DVDs is that one can fast forward through the dud bits of a show. As if musicals aren’t corny and hokey enough, some numbers are overblown padding – we don’t need a cast of thousands, I’m content to enjoy the work of especially talented people. Michael Crawford and Danny Lockin were a joy to watch, as is Streisand making an entrance to the title song.
The gold dress is one of the most stunning I’ve ever seen.
I want.
The other great thing about this movie is that a handful of songs have great, often hilarious lyrics.
It's not just the song setting out Horace Vandergelder’s ideal of femininity.
When I worked in Quality Control and wasn't saying "trust me, I work in Quality Control" I loved to go around humming "I'll proceed to plan the whole procedure".
Streisand has made some good movies and some which were real duds, but she has always had comic timing (a gift, if people have it) and I've always been a sucker for Jewish Humour. (Yes, it's a thing. Leo Rosten wrote the book, it's called The Joys of Yiddish). And the quotes... for someone who loves economics I can't go past lines like "money is like manure".
And, okay, I admit this is the whitest production since The Exhibition Buildings hosted a wingding in Melbourne on the 1st of January 1901. If Louis Armstrong hadn’t already had a number one hit song with Hello Dolly in 1964 the movie could have been called Hello Honky (or something less aggressively insulting but sadly, not alliterative).
(I do get it. I know that as a teen I tried reading Asimov's Foundation trilogy, and felt I had been reading and reading and reading and reading for forever when I realised there were no females in the story - well, none that mattered - and I asked myself "what am I doing here in a club that doesn't want me as a member?" and so I turfed the volume I was reading and never looked back. This movie might not be for everyone, but I still love some of the songs and that dress.)
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