LOOK who’s here! It’s Funny Girl!
That was my reaction while surfing the film list on Netflix. Personal, familiar. It felt like seeing an old friend. It wasn’t just a film; it was a film I watched without knowing who the funny girl was. The lead, Barbra Streisand, was a veritable unknown among audiences when the film was released.
I believe it was in 1969 or thereabouts when the film came to our city. It was then a hilarious film with lovely melodies interspersed in between the dialogues. It helped a lot that my generation was exposed to films where characters suddenly burst into songs. However, from the late 1960s onward, musicals had lost their magic. We were bookended by the froth and fluff of The Sound of Music, released in 1965 (Pauline Kael called the film “the sugarcoated lie that people seem to want to eat” and “the single most repressive influence on artistic freedom in movies”), and Cabaret plus Lady Sings the Blues, both coming out in 1972. The last two films reintroduced the musical genre as a form that could confront the dark sides of society. No more would be the candy- and pastel colored world where happiness was lurking always around ready to banish even the most convoluted of conflicts.
Cabaret, with Liza Minnelli, was about, to use her character Sally Bowles’s words, divine decadence. The setting was Berlin before the rise of the Nazis. Bob Fosse’s choreography was risqué and the denizens of the nightclub where most of the showstopper songs took place reeked of dank sexuality and the coupling in the films involved persons with fluid genders. Lady Sings the Blues, on the one hand, was about a jazz giant, Billie Holiday, her music and her drug-addiction. Unforgiving, the film bio left the audience not with the memory of the singer’s style but her fall.
Funny Girl was almost an anomaly and Barbra made use of her own original charm and physical features. But did the people then catch the humor in that American beauty rose and the American beauty nose? Were we even conscious of the Jewishness of the film, traits that would form the base for the humor of many wonderful 197os films and literatures?
But Pauline Kael, my favorite film critic, liked Funny Girl and wrote: “It has been commonly said that the musical Funny Girl was a comfort to people because it carried the message that you do not need to be pretty to succeed. That is nonsense; the ‘message’ of Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl is that talent is beauty.”
Who knew about Fanny Brice? The film was based on the life of this star from the 1910s to 1930s. She did not become as big as Sophie Tucker, and not as controversial, as Tucker was hauled to jail for singing “obscene” songs. This was both a boon and bane for those who loved the film: bane because there was no recall of the person now being immortalized onscreen; boon, for Streisand who became Fanny Brice altogether to her fans.
Viewing the film presently creates a lot of mixed feelings. There is the production design, which is
very much late 1960s and early 1970s, fashion and all. I bet when women from the age of 60 up would watch the film again, they would not recall the tumultuous 1910s and the roaring 20s but the mode of dressing and accessorizing when they attended parties and balls then.
There is the casting, too. Was Omar Sharif so popular he had to be Nicky Arnstein, the gambler who became Fanny Brice’s husband who was also a con man? The Egyptian actor was deemed perfect, when he played an Arab opposite Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia. He would win awards for it. It is said he so impressed the director David Lean in this film that he cast Sharif as a Russian in Dr. Zhivago. Around the time Funny Girl was made, the actor was the Mongol emperor in Genghis Khan (1965) and the Cuban revolutionary in Che (1969). What escaped me and, I assume, many fans then, was the controversial kiss between Sharif, an Arab, to Streisand, a Jew, onscreen with the backdrop of the Israeli-Egyptian Six Day War that occurred in 1967.
How do I value Barbra and Funny Girl now? Whether she was approximating the broad comedic gestures of Fanny Brice or developing her own approach to building a character, the tragicomic person onscreen came across to me as camp. The affectations would mark Streisand in her future outings. Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp came out in 1964, a few years before Funny Girl, but no one it seemed pointed this trait about the film and the lead actress. And for Sontag, camp is when everything—the artifice, theatricality, etc.—is bracketed in quotation marks.
The pull-out-all-the-stops number “Don’t Rain on My Parade” happens in the middle of the film, bringing the scene to a rousing mid-section finish, and somewhat flash-forwards that ship scene in Yentl where Streisand’s character sings “Piece of Sky.” The song “People” still manages to steal my heart for a few minutes. Staged with dialogues breaking the song at the middle, and continuing after Nicky bids goodbye to Fanny, the song remains a gem. The film would end with Brice’s hit, “My Man,” later transformed into a dirge in the 1930s by Billie Holiday. That scene comes across as detached from the narrative.
Funny Girl is directed by William Wyler, who helmed Jezebel and Ben-Hur, among other classics. Barbra Streisand would win the 1969 Oscar for Best Actress in an unprecedented tie with Katharine Hepburn (as Eleanor of Aquitaine for The Lion in Winter), with both actresses receiving, according to documents, 3,030 votes each. Streisand received it alone because Hepburn, by tradition, never attended the Oscars until she was asked to present the Irving Thalberg Award to a producer in 1974.
In 2016, Funny Girl was declared “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the United States Library of Congress.