The movie isn't exactly a comedy

In the latest of the musical biopics that I wanted to make certain I watched before it expired from my DVR, it's time for Funny Girl. It's finally coming up again on TCM, tomorrow, March 24, at 5:15 PM, as part of another day of musical biopics, so now's the time to put up this post.

Funny Girl is story of the earlier years of stage actress and singer Fanny Brice, played here by Barbara Streisand. As the movie opens, it's a bit before World War I, and although the second half of the movie covers events that are in Brice's real life after the war, I don't think the war itself is ever mentioned. Fanny was born to a Jewish immigrant family in New York, although the only family member we see is her mom, played by Kay Meford. Mom runs a pub/restaurant and plays poker with lady friends, while all the neighborhood cares about Fanny because that's the way this sort of neighborhood is.

Fanny, after the roadshow opening music, shows up at the New Amsterdam Theater that hosted the Ziegfeld Follies, where she hopes to get a job as a chorus girl in the follies run by Florenz Ziegfeld (Walter Pidgeon). But she's going to have to make her way up the ladder first, which includes doing a vaudeville act on roller skates, even though she can't really skate. However, she can sing, and the combination of singing that appeals to the audience combined with the comedic value of not being able to skate, makes her a hit. In the audience is Nicky Arnstein (Omar Sharif), who comes backstage and is so charmed by Fanny that he negotiates a salary increase for her right on the spot even though he has no real job in any theatrical production company.

Eventually, the Ziegfeld Follies does come calling, putting Fanny in a musical finale that will have her dressed as a bride while singing to a bunch of men. Fanny isn't comfortable with the number, so she changes things by having the costume altered to imply that the bride is already pregnant. Once again, Nicky is in the audience. It turns out that he's a professional gambler, but he's so taken by Fanny that when he goes to her mom's place after the show, he lets the old ladies beat him at very low-stakes poker. Fanny and Nicky run into each other again in Maryland when he's buying a race horse that he eventually loses betting on a race. He has to go back to the ungentlemanly routine of playing the cruise ship trade, playing cards against the rich gentlement to earn more than his passage. Nicky wants Fanny to pursue her dream, but she loves him so much that she gets on the boat and accompanies him to Europe.

In the next scene, they've just gotten married, although in real life that didn't happen until 1918 so puts a major hole in the timeline considering World War I was raging. (The real life Fanny and Nicky were romantically involved for several years but couldn't get married until Nicky's divorce from a previous marriage went through.) Fanny is a big star, and the house they buy could just as easily have been purchased by either of them. But things start to go south for Nicky when his gambling stops paying off, and he starts racking up debt to everyone in town save Fanny, who is totally oblivious to it all. One of the people to whom Nicky is in debt offers a chance to pay it off by taking part in a "bond deal" that's clearly fraudulent, while Fanny secretly tries to use her husband's name to help open a new high-class casino with Nicky as promoter. Nicky figures out what's going on, doesn't want to be beholden to Fanny in that way, and goes for the bond deal, which is going to land him in prison eventually.

The movie ends when Nicky gets out of prison, which was in December 1925 in real life, although the movie seems to imply it's earlier. The movie doesn't mention the less-than-happy ending of Fanny and Nicky's marriage crumbling, although at least Fanny would go on to have a fairly successful third act playing a character named Baby Snooks on radio before her untimely death at the age of 59.

Somewhat surprisingly, despite the well-known musical talents of Barbra Streisand, the material is something that I think would have worked better as a non-musical, or limiting musical numbers to scenes from when Fanny was on stage. Yeah, I know this would mean ditching a song like "People" which Streisand sings just after the evening with Nicky at her mom's place, and that people went to the movie to see the songs from the Broadway show from which this is adapted. But keeping the songs from the musical turns this into an overlong slog lasting right around 150 minutes, which is a good half hour too long, I think.

Streisand, of course, does well, even though I'm not the biggest fan of her style of singing. She tied in the Best Actress Oscar race that year with Katharine Hepburn for The Lion in Winter, and was deserving of that Oscar win. But for me that wasn't quite enough to make Funny Girl as worth watching as some of the other musical biopics out there.

Up the Sandbox

I am not the biggest fan of Barbra Streisand by any means, although I'm willing to give all sorts of different movies a try. So, when TCM showed the movie Up the Sandbox, I decided to record it because the one-sentence description they used sounded interesting enough.

Streisand plays Margaret Reynolds, a mother of two young children living in a Manhattan apartment with her husband Paul (David Selby), who is a history professor at Columbia University. It seems like a happy enough marriage although Margaret also has to do a lot of work with two little ones. Worse, she has a doctor's appointment the next day, and the doctor informs her that she is pregnant with child #3. (Presumably she knew she had missed her period, although I think Hollywood films still weren't really talking about pregnancy that openly in 1972.)

Margaret leaves the doctor's office and goes to her husband's office to tell him the news, only to find that he's talking to another professor, but this one being a female professor. So after Margaret leaves the office without having told Paul about the doctor's appointment because this isn't something you reveal first to strangers, she confronts the other professor: are you and my husband having an affair? And the other professor says, of course we are.

Or maybe that's all in Margaret's mind. On her way home, she stops off at what seems like a public lecture, where a man who is clearly supposed to be Fidel Castro is giving a speech on the state of women in revolutionary societies as opposed to bourgeois capitalist societies. Margaret disagrees with Castro, with the result that the two wind up in a hotel room together where Castro reveals that he is in fact a woman, and a lesbian to boot, who is more than willing to have sex with Margaret.

OK, that's clearly in Margaret's mind, although the film doesn't tell us this directly. Indeed, the film never directly tells us which stuff is in Margaret's mind and which isn't even though it's often obvious as Margaret doesn't suffer the consequences that would befall her if the daydreams were real. Nobody else knows about the fantasies, which include teaming up with a bunch of black revolutionaries to try to bomb the Statue of Liberty; more mundanely telling off her parents; and visiting the Masai with one of Paul's fellow professors (played by Paul Benedict) to learn about their allegedly painless form of childbirth. In and around having these fantasies, Margaret is finding herself decidedly less satisfied with her life as a housewife.

I can see why Barbra Streisand would want to make a movie like Up the Sandbox, although I can also see why the movie was a box office flop. The fantasy sequences are fairly clearly supposed to be comedic, while the rest of Margaret's regular life is more of a straightforward drama. However, the movie never really meshes the two sets of scenes together, with the result that the movie is tonally very uneven in a way that doesn't work to the movie's benefit at all. This is in contrast to a Streisand movie like For Pete's Sake which for me worked because of the absurdity.

However, a lot of Streisand's fans like Up the Sandbox for reasons I can understand. I just didn't like it as much as they did.

What's Up, Kid Natural; or, For Kid Natural's Sake

Another of the movies that had been sitting on my DVR for a while that I only recently got around to watching is one that brought back together the leads from one of the brighter comedies of the earlier 1970s. The movie in question is The Main Event. It's got another airing on TCM, tomorrow (May 18) at 7:45 AM.

Barbra Streisand stars as Hillary Kramer. Although the movie was released in 1979, Kramer seems more in keeping with with yuppie business types you'd see in 1980s movies. Hillary is the owner of a perfume company and has a great nose for what makes a good perfume to the point that she's become quite successful and lives a high-flying life full-up on business appointments as well as things like an aerobics class in what seems like a studio right next to her office.

One day, Hillary gets a call from her lawyer, David (Paul Sand), who also happens to be her ex-husband. He says it's important, although he keeps getting pushed off by Hillary since she's got so much business to transact. But his news is indeed important. It seems as though, unbeknownst to Hillary, her accountant has been embezzling money and has now absconded with that money to South America to evade extradition. Hillary, despite being successful at making perfume, doesn't seem so good at accountancy, and doesn't understand until David puts together piles of assets and liabilities, with the liability pile outweighing the assets.

Hillary is going to be forced to sell the company, and for some odd reason considering her great nose, she's also forced into signing a non-compete clause that not only means the end of her employment with the company she owned, but also keeps her out of the perfume business for two years. The only "asset" she has, if you will, involves a contract owning the rights to a boxer. But that contract was more for the purpose of being a tax write-off. Said boxer hasn't fought in years.

Hillary goes to the gym to find the boxer in question, Eddie "Kid Natural" Scanlon (Ryan O'Neal). Eddie has seen the money from Hillary as a way to make a modest living, and has even been able to use it to open a driving school. But his part of the contract requires fighting at least twice a year, and he hasn't done that since getting disqualified from the Pan Am Games for getting in a scuffle outside the ring with opponent Hector Mantilla. Hillary needs the money that Kid Natural would bring in from fighting, so she calls in the contract. Either fight, or she'll be able to take over the driving school.

Not that Kid Natural is the greatest of fighters; worse is that with nothing else to do, and needing to keep an eye on her contract, Hillary decides to take a rather more active role in managing Kid. It's the sort of relationship that's going to have the two at each other's throats, at least until it suddenly doesn't, which you know is going to happen in this sort of a movie since it's not a drama. Eventually, promoter Gough (James Gregory) is able to complete negotiations for the big fight everybody's been waiting for: the fight between Kid Natural and Mantilla that never happened at the Pan Am Games.

As you can see from the title of this post, I compared The Main Event to For Pete's Sake, one of Streisand's comedies from a few years earlier. That's not the one that co-starred Ryan O'Neal; instead, I found myself thinking of some genre similarities between the two movies. The Main Event really gave me vibes of the sort of thing that Hollywood could have churned out in the years before World War II as a fun little B movie, either from the rom-com angle or the boxing angle.

Fast forward almost 40 years however, and The Main Event comes up as something that doesn't quite sparkle the way those old B movies do. A large part of it is that it's material that works better as a B movie and not designed for someone like Streisand who was by this time a huge star. More specifically regarding Streisand, a little bit of her goes a long way, and there's a lot of Streisand here. Not that The Main Event is a bad movie; it's more that it would have worked better conceived as something smaller.

Yentl

TCM is running a double feature of Barbra Streisand films tonight. I've blogged about the second, The Way We Were at 10:30 PM, before. The first is Yentl at 8:00 PM. I was too young to see it in the theater when it came out, and never got around to watching it in the intervening years. But the last time TCM ran it I recorded it; with it showing up again in short order I decided to watch that showing in order to be able to do the blog post on it.

Yentl was famous in its day for, I think, its unique plot and the fact that Barbara Streisand had greater responsibility for a major motion picture than almost any woman had had up to that point. It's based on a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, a Jewish writer born in what would now be Poland but was then part of the Russian Empire, emigrating to the US to escape the Nazis and becoming a writer in Yiddish. Streisand had read the story and since the time of Funny Girl had wanted to make a movie version of it, but for various reasons that took a long time.

The title of the original Singer story, Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy, gives a good quick synopsis of the story. Streisand plays Yentl, a seeming spinster living with her father, Rabbi Mendel (Nehemiah Persoff), in a shtetl somewhere in Eastern Europe in 1904. Dad teaches local boys the Talmud, the commentaries on the Torah and the basis for Jewish religious law and dispute resolution. Yentl having overheard all her father's teachings, would like to study Talmud herself. But she's female, and since women are the only ones who can carry babies to term and provide the next generation of Jews, that and other domestic duties are a Jewish woman's lot in life, not Torah and Talmud study. Yentl chafes at this, studying with her father in secret and never getting married despite being in her mid-20s, which is seen as a bit scandalous for the early 20th century.

And then Dad dies, with Yentl reading the Kaddish at his funeral, something that is also seen as a bit scandalous because Orthodox Judaism even in its religous services kept men and women largely separate. The local women come to "help" clean Yentl's house of her father's things that she would no longer have any use for, but Yentl is aghast when they want to take the books. So she gets a brilliant idea. She cuts off her hear, starts wearing men's clothing, and runs away to the big city, where she'll try to pass herself off as "Anshel", using the name of her dead brother, so that she can study Talmud.

This being Barbara Streisand, you have to wonder how anybody would have taken the ruse that she's a man seriously; indeed, a major plot point in the movie is Yentl trying to navigate keeping her secret a secret. This becomes complicated when she meets Avigdor (Mandy Patinkin), a fellow yeshiva student. You get the impression that deep down inside, he already knows Yentl's secret, although the screenplay suggests he doesn't. He too is in mourning, for his late brother who died of, well, that's another plot point for later in the movie. Avigdor has been matched by the matchmaker with Hadass (Amy Irving), a woman who really does love Avigdor, and the feeling is mutual. In theory, Hadass and Avigdor should marry, Yentl should emigrate to America and become a Reform Jew, although even the Reform Jews weren't ordaining women until several decades later.

But that would end the movie fairly quickly. Instead, Hadass' family learns the truth about Avigdor's brother, which is that he killed himself, suggesting there might be mental illness in Avigdor's family and thus a valid reason to call off the marriage. Yentl as Anshel then marries Hadass in order to keep all three of them close together. Yentl obviously is not able to consummate the marriage, and this by itself should be a reason to invalidate the marriage. But it's still going to take a while to get to that point.

At the time of its release, Yentl both received critical praise and was the butt of quite a few jokes, picking up Razzie nominations as well as Oscar nominations. Part of the problem is that I didn't find Streisand believable as a man. Another part is that, in order to get the movie made, Streisand and her collaborators turned the movie into, if not a full musical like Funny Girl, something that was dominated by Streisand's singing. (The ending sequence also made me think of Streisand on the tugboat in Funny Girl. To me, this gave Yentl entirely the wrong tone.

On the other side, part of getting the movie made and I'd guess keeping costs down involved filming in Europe, with a lot of location shooting being done in Communist Czechoslovakia. The cinematography is lovely, and I think the best part of the movie. Streisand co-wrote the screenplay, and also directed. While neither is bad, I really did get the impression at a lot of points of a bit of self-indulgence in the direction.

So while I'd give a decidedly mixed review to Yentl, it's also the sort of movie you should definitely watch and judge for yourself.

The Way We Were

TCM ran a bunch of romances back on Valentine's Day. This gave me the chance to record a movie I hadn't done a post on before, The Way We Were. Recently, I watched it to do a post on here.

Barbra Streisand plays Katie Morosky, who at the start of the movie is working as an assistant on a radio show in 1944, during World War II. Katie openly uses her position to edit the scripts to make characters and people who don't hold her political views look like jerks. To be fair, there was a lot of propaganda during the war, but Katie turns it up to 11.

Katie and her boss go to a club for dinner that evening, and at the bar, she sees one Hubbell Gardiner (Robert Redford), looking resplendent in his naval officer's uniform. This being a young Robert Redford, it's unsurprising that Katie should get the hots for him, although in reality, she already had the hots for the guy since Katie and Hubbell had a past together, back in college in 1937, and Katie starts thinking about that....

Katie was just as politically active and naïve in college, supporting the Soviets' backing of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War as if this were somehow nobler than the Francoists getting backing from Germany and Italy. (The movie conveniently omits the time between the Molotov-von Ribbentrop Pact and Germany's invasion of the USSR during which America's communists did a complete 180.) Katie and Hubbell were in the same graduating class at college, and in a creative writing course together. The professor singles out Hubbell's work, whch pisses Katie off. But Hubbell admires Katie's gumption if not her political views, while Katie feels something more physical toward Hubbell.

Back in the present day of 1944, Hubbell gets drunk and needs a place to flop for the night, so Katie puts him up, leading to more meetings and a torrid love affair. After the war, this is going to take both of them to Los Angeles, since they're both writers. They continue their affair, to the point that they get married and Hubbell gets Katie pregnant.

But then comes the House Un-American Activities Committee. Lots of Hollywood folks started receiving subpoenas, while ten of them refuse to testify before the committee. Those ten of course would become the first Hollywood blackistees, and Katie as a committed Communist herself goes to Washington to support them, something which could be very dangerous both to her career and her husband's. Hubbell is more sanguine, figuring that everything will blow over in a few years, and what purpose will all of this have served. It would be enough to break up their relationship, but as it turns out Hubbell has been having an affair anyway.

If you want a poignant romance, you could do a lot worse than to watch The Way We Were. It's filled with fine performances, a memorable theme song, and a story that works reasonably well. However, I have to admit that at times I had difficulty finding any sympathy for Katie. After all, she was deliberately using her job to screw over other people politically, and in other ways she consistently comes across as selfish.

I also had some dislike of the triumphalism of Hollywood's communists somehow being the victims. I've argued on several occasions before that the government shouldn't have been involved in things like this, but most people seem to be fine with the government shafting other people as long as it's not shafting them. Budd Schulberg, when he named names, said something to the effect that the Communists were in favor of free speech as long as it was speech they approved of, and that attitude is even stronger in today's society with cancel culture.

Still, I understand that most people are going to overlook such flaws and enjoy this manipulative romance.

What's Up, Doc?

Back in April, TCM put out a podcast of interviews between Ben Mankiewicz and director Peter Bogdanovich called The Plot Thickens. In conjunction with this, they ran a couple of Saturday night doubleheaders of movies directed by Bogdanovich, backended with short interviews with the director. One of the movies that I haven't blogged about before is What's Up, Doc?, so I recently sat down to watch it again to do a blog post on here.

At the airport in San Francisco, a man named Smith (Michael Murphy) opens up a red plaid overnight bag, revealing a bunch of documents marked "Top Secret". The government is on to Smith, sending a man after him. Meanwhile, elsehwere in the airport, Howard Bannister (Ryan O'Neal) and his fiancée Eunice (Madeline Kahn) have deplaned, on their way to a conference of musicologists. Howard is a professor who has come up with a theory of early man banging on igneous rocks to create the first music, and is hoping to win a grant from Larrabee (Austin Pendleton), whose organization is hosting the conference. Howard has his rocks in an overnight bag that looks suspiciously like Smith's, although neither has ever met the other.

Checking in to the same hotel as Howard and Smith is wealthy Mrs. Van Hoskins (Mabel Albertson). She's traveling with a bunch of jewels that she should probably put in the hotel safe if you think the hotel safe is a safe place for such stuff. But for now, she's got her jewels in an overnight bag that -- you guessed it -- has the same red plaid pattern as the ones Smith and Bannister have.

Rounding out the cast of characters is Judy Maxwell (Barbra Streisand), a young woman who is aimless in life, having been kicked out of one college after another. She's wound up in San Francisco and it seems as though wherever she goes, she has a stream of chaos in her wake much like Mr. Magoo, not realizing what she's doing. And she too has an overnight bag like the other three, only hers is actually filled with stuff for an overnight stay.

Judy runs into Howard in a moment when he's away from Eunice, and immediately begins to make his life a living hell. She falls in love with him, and tells all the people she runs into that Howard is her husband, which is of course a lie. Howard is a bit of a milquetoast, and the absent-minded professor type, so everything he does is completely ineffective in getting people to believe the truth about Judy, or in getting Judy to stop harassing him.

Everybody but Judy (who doesn't have a reservation) is staying on the same floor of the same hotel, which leads to the next complication that you can guess: the overnight bags are going to be mixed up. This too causes all sorts of problems and chaos, as Howard needs his rocks; Smith and the people pursuing him want those government secrets; and Van Hoskins wants her jewels. Eventually all of the subplots come together in a wild chase throughout San Francisco.

There's a lot to recommend about What's Up, Doc?, which for the most part is incredibly funny. Bogdanovich and the screenwriters (including himself and Buck Henry) were clearly channeling Howard Hawks, especially Bringing Up Baby. But there's one thing I disliked about Bringing Up Baby that's also a problem in spades in What's Up, Doc?, and that's the female lead.

Katharine Hepburn is obnoxious in Bringing Up Baby, clearly only caring about herself and frankly being maliciously happy to cause all sorts of chaos for Cary Grant. Surprisingly, where Hepburn's character is bad in that regard, Streisand's might be even worse if that's possible. She deserved on multiple occasions to have Howard and/or Eunice march her right down to hotel security and have her booted out of the hotel, and possible even arrested if that were legally appropriate.

Still, despite the completely irritating character Streisand plays, What's Up, Doc? is an incredibly funny winner on all levels and one that definitely deserves a watch.