Review of Hello, Dolly! (1969) by Stephen M — 22 Mar 2008

I have loved this movie since I was a kid (in fact, I think this was the first record album I ever bought) and I know it is because it is fun and funny and bright and colourful and it has women in long dresses and beads and feathers and Streisand singing her guts out. I loved the enormity of the dance numbers and the intricate steps that I was never able to re create in my living room. I loved the humour and the line deliveries and I was fascinated by the way Barbra's breasts heaved up and down during the So Long Dearie number. I simply loved loved loved this movie as a kid.

I am an adult now. I still love it. I watch it from time to time, I listen to the cd now and then and I still love it.

But it ain't Hello Dolly.

I have, since, seen The Matchmaker on stage and on screen. I have, since, seen Hello Dolly onstage (most notably with Carol Channing - at which time I fully understood Hello Dolly).

By making this musical so very grand and gargantuan, Mr Kelly took away the most important part of the original source material: the intimacy. The original play and the original musical play upon which this movie is based is a music box - a confection to be enjoyed with smiles and giggles, rather than gasps and guffaws. In the stage play, the characters speak to the audience and bring us into their lives (they even do it in the film version of The Matchmaker). That intimacy is very important to the feel of the story and it is completely missing here.

As is the desperation we should feel for Dolly. Don't get me wrong - I love Barbra and her performance and I understand that the studio hired her because she was the biggest star in the world, the greatest singer in the world and everyone would go to it. Much ballyhoo has been made about the fact that she was 24 when she played the part -- truth is that at 50 she didn't look MUCH different and could have played the part to perfection. The reason is that we MUST believe that this woman is getting to the end of her rope. We have to understand that she is tired of having to work, work, work, to make ends meet and that she wants to marry Horace because she is lonely, she is financially unstable, she wants to kick back and enjoy living for awhile. That isn't something we can believe from a 24 year old who is talking about re joining the human race. What? Did her parents lock her away in a home for wayward youths at the age of ten, only to take her out at twelve to marry her off to Ephriam Levi. who died when she was fifteen, leaving her to work the next nine years of her life as a seamstress in a basement, and now, at 24, it is time to rejoin the human race?

I don't think so.

In spite of my criticisms of the finer points of the film, I watch it and I suspend my disbelief because I still love it ...

Every absurd frame.