Barbra Streisand’s first film is the reason to watch it, and she is reason enough: loud, funny, unembarrassed, and then suddenly not. William Wyler builds a long, handsome musical around her that goes slack once the songs give way to the marriage.
William Wyler had made Ben-Hur and The Best Years of Our Lives and had never directed a musical when he took on Funny Girl, and he approached it the way he approached everything: carefully, expensively and at length. The film tells the story of Fanny Brice, the Ziegfeld comedienne, as the rise of a plain girl with a great voice and the marriage that came with it, and its real purpose is to put Barbra Streisand, repeating her stage part, in front of a camera for the first time. On that purpose it succeeds completely. As a film it is delightful for ninety minutes and patient for the rest, and the rest is considerable.
Streisand is the whole event. She plays Fanny as a girl who decided she was a star some years before anyone agreed, and she is funny in the old vaudeville way, with the body first: in the roller-skate number at Keeney’s she cannot skate, takes half the chorus down with her, and turns the wreckage into an encore. We laughed out loud, which we do not often do at a musical of this vintage. She reads Isobel Lennart’s lines as though she had thought of them a second before, and when she stops being funny, halfway through ‘People’ on a stoop at night, the change is so complete that the film goes quiet with her.
Wyler and Harry Stradling shoot the stage numbers straight on and wide, as if from a good seat in the stalls, and let Gene Callahan’s Follies sets fill the frame with staircases and ostrich feathers. Irene Sharaff dresses the Ziegfeld girls in white and Fanny in whatever will make the joke land, most memorably the wedding gown she pads out to ruin Ziegfeld’s bridal tableau. Jule Styne’s songs were written to be sung to the back of a theatre and Streisand sings them there. The peak is ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade’, which starts on a railway platform, moves through a train and ends with Fanny on the bow of a tugboat in New York harbour, the camera lifting away as she holds the last note. We sat up. It is the one moment the picture is as big as the woman in it.
After the interval it becomes another film, slower and sadder and less sure of itself. The second half belongs to the marriage, and Omar Sharif plays Nick Arnstein as a good coat with a moustache: courteous, handsome, and giving Streisand nothing to push against, so that whatever passes between them we take on her word rather than see for ourselves. Lennart’s screenplay keeps the story on rails and stops to say each thing twice, and Maury Winetrobe and William Sands cut at a stately pace that lets scenes end a beat after they are over. There is a stretch in the middle, all telephones and apartments, in which we noticed how long the film was and then could not stop noticing.
The supporting cast is better than most critics allowed at the time. Kay Medford’s Rose Brice, running her saloon on Henry Street, is a dry pleasure, a mother who believes in her daughter and would sooner die than say so, and Mae Questel’s Mrs. Strakosh gets more from one disapproving noise than others get from a page. Walter Pidgeon’s Ziegfeld is a monument in a waistcoat, which is what the part asks for. Anne Francis has little to do as the showgirl Georgia James and does it kindly, and Lee Allen’s Eddie Ryan is there to be loyal to Fanny and is.
Wyler’s best films gave actors room and then watched them think, and he does the same here; it works whenever the actor is Streisand and stalls whenever she leaves the frame. As a musical it belongs with the big roadshow pictures of its decade, long and plush and built around an interval, and it has their habit of underlining. Watch it at home, where you can stop for tea in the middle and come back for the closing number, which she sings alone in a black dress and which is worth the wait. It runs 155 minutes and carries a U.
