HELLO, DOLLY! 1969
43%
Directed by Gene Kelly
Written by Ernest Lehman
Starring Barbra Streisand, Walter Matthau, Michael Crawford, Marianne McAndrew, Danny Lockin
Synopsis
New York City matchmaker and life fixer Dolly Levi travels to Yonkers on assignment to meet wealthy Horace Vandergelder. He has one job for her, but she has other business in mind, and soon Dolly, Horace, and a crew of potential young lovers are spending the day in the big city courting, dancing, and enjoying the mischief Dolly has made.
Why We Love It
In Hello, Dolly!, the bickering between title matchmaker Dolly Levi and curmudgeonly love interest Horace Vandergelder feels more authentic than their eventual romance, and with good reason: the actors portraying them—Barbra Streisand, twenty-five while filming, and Walter Matthau, many years older—despised each other. He couldn’t stand that Hollywood’s latest bright and uppity young thing, fresh off of the success of Funny Girl, would deign to ask for reshoots; she couldn’t stand his lack of refinement (it’s alleged she once presented him with a bar of soap for his “sewer mouth”). When it came time to shoot the characters’ wedding scene, the cameramen are said to have had to find angles that made it look like the two lovers’ lips were touching because, well, these two were definitely not going to be touching lips that day.
Director Gene Kelly had his hands full. And it wasn’t just bickering thespians (Matthau also stopped talking to costar Michael Crawford). He was overseeing a mammoth production—the $25 million budget was more than three times that of Fox’s The Sound of Music. It was shot on multiple locations and under the weight of almost crushing expectations: the Broadway musical, starring Carol Channing, had opened just a few years earlier to incredible acclaim, and beyond that, the studio needed Dolly to be a hit (it had been nearly half a decade since The Sound of Music). Perhaps that weight contributed to the leadenness that critics perceived in the end result, with many calling the 146-minute film a bloated, relentlessly opulent bore. Audiences weren’t so hot on it either: the movie barely recouped its budget. Later, it would be cited as one of the final nails in the movie musical’s coffin.
As far as failures go, though, this is a lavish one, and one imbued with enough pleasures that the film has drawn significant audience affection in the fifty years since its release. Streisand is primary among those pleasures. Though she is admittedly miscast—Dolly Levi is supposed to be middle-aged—she’s also beguiling, peppy, and lends the film her impeccable voice. The songs, too, with music and lyrics by Jerry Herman, are so sensational that Kelly could have been asleep at the director’s chair and you’d still be tapping your feet leaving the theater. He wasn’t, though: Kelly and choreographer Michael Kidd do fine work, particularly during an extended waiters’ dance at the Harmonia Gardens restaurant.
The Harmonia is host to the film’s other big highlight, when Louis Armstrong cameos as the restaurant’s band conductor and duets with Streisand for the title song (his recording of the track had been a hit after the stage play’s debut). Streisand looks ecstatic to be singing with the jazz legend, all wide smiles and twinkling eyes as they twirl arms and trade lines. It’s clear that no love needed to be faked there.