Funny Girl (Columbia Pictures, Rastar Productions, Polyphony Digital, 1968)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, February 24) Turner Classic Movies showed part of their “31 Days of Oscar” annual tribute with a night of movies featuring women who either won or were at least nominated for Best Actress. The two I watched were Funny Girl (1968) and Mildred Pierce (1945). Funny Girl was based on a 1964 stage musical that, like the film made four years later, starred Barbra Streisand as real-life singer, actress and comedienne Fanny Brice. I remember reading an autobiography by Billy Rose, Fanny Brice’s second husband, who said that in the early 1960’s producer Ray Stark (Fanny Brice’s son-in-law) came to him with a proposal for a musical based on Brice’s career and in particular her relationship with her first husband, gambler Nick Arnstein (Omar Sharif), and Rose warned him, “You’ll never be able to cast it.” In fact, Ray Stark was able to cast it quite effectively and brilliantly, and I suspect one reason Streisand got the role is she’d already had a minor hit on a Fanny Brice cover, “Second-Hand Rose” by James F. Hanley and Grant Clarke. Ray Stark also retained the movie rights to Funny Girl, though he went with Columbia Pictures on a co-production deal (the way most movies have been made since the demise of the studio system), and because he owned the rights he was able to insist that Streisand repeat her stage role in the movie. According to TCM host Ben Mankiewicz, Columbia originally wanted Shirley MacLaine for the role, but Stark held firm for Streisand and she ultimately got the part. In fact, Streisand was so totally identified with this role that Funny Girl wasn’t revived on Broadway until 2022, with Beanie Feldstein as Brice. Stark also signed William Wyler to direct the film and Isobel Lennart to adapt her stage script for the screenplay. The cinematographer was Harry Stradling, who so impressed Streisand – apparently he was the only cameraman in Hollywood who didn’t think her nose was too big to allow her to be a star – that she insisted on him for her next three films and, when he died in the middle of The Owl and the Pussycat, she demanded that his son Harry Stradling, Jr. replace him.

Alas, instead of keeping the same songs as the original stage show, Ray Stark not only added genuine songs from Brice’s repertoire – “Second-Hand Rose,” “I’d Rather Be Blue Over You” by Fred Fisher and Billy Rose, and “My Man” (originally in French as “Mon Homme” by Maurice Yvain, later adapted to English by Channing Pollock) – but also hired the original composer and lyricist, Jule Styne and Bob Merrill, to write new songs, including a title ballad, so there’d be songs in the film eligible for the Academy Award for Best Original Song. My mother had the original Broadway cast album with Sydney Chaplin (Charlie Chaplin’s second son by his second wife, Lita Grey) as Arnstein, and I regretted the omissions of “Cornet Man” and “The Music That Makes Me Dance” and their replacement by “I’d Rather Be Blue Over You” and “My Man,” respectively. Also in 1939 20th Century-Fox had produced a film called Rose of Washington Square, and while it changed the characters’ names to “Rose Sargent” (Alice Faye) and “Barton DeWitt Clinton” (Tyrone Power), it was close enough to the Fanny Brice-Nick Arnstein story that Brice sued for $750,000. (The case was settled out of court, probably for considerably less than that.) I’d posted on Rose of Washington Square at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2015/08/rose-of-washington-square-20th-century.html, and though that was about 8 ½ years ago the competition between the two films strikes me as about even. As a vehicle for Barbra Streisand in an explosive movie debut that won her an Academy Award (and pissed off a lot of veteran Hollywood stars, including Lucille Ball, who envied Streisand for how quickly and easily major movie success had come to her), Funny Girl is a great success. As an overall movie, though, it’s pretty mediocre. The film’s worst element is the horrendous miscasting of Omar Sharif as Nick Arnstein; he’s certainly handsome enough, but he can’t sing, he can barely act and his character has “loser” stamped across him so totally from the get-go you practically want to walk into the screen and tell her, “Fanny! Don’t get involved with him! He’ll just burn through your money and ruin your life!” I remember the last time I watched Funny Girl it was with my husband Charles, and during the big duet “You Are Woman – I Am Man,” he joked, “You’re a singer … ,” obviously in contrast to Sharif himself. (I was reminded of that not long ago when Kansas City Chiefs tight end and Taylor Swift’s boyfriend Travis Kelce responded to his team’s victory in the Super Bowl by croaking his way through the opening bars of Elvis Presley’s hit “Viva Las Vegas.” I joked, “Well, at least one member of that couple can sing.”)

After I wrote the above I dug out the CD of the Funny Girl stage album and played the Streisand/Chaplin version of “You Are Woman,” and while Sydney Chaplin wasn’t exactly one of the great voices of the 20th century, he was a damned sight better than Sharif – and that wasn’t the first time Sydney Chaplin had been passed over for the film version of a role he’d created on stage. When MGM filmed the Judy Holliday musical Bells Are Ringing they hired Dean Martin to replace Chaplin in the male lead – and while Martin was also horrendously miscast, at least he could sing. The picture-postcard color doesn’t help, either; though I frequently complain about today’s color movies that they use only dirty greens and browns and ignore the rest of the spectrum, this one errs overboard in the other direction. I remember being amused when Charles and I watched William Wyler’s 1929 part-talkie The Love Trap and noticed that he’d copied an early scene from that film – an aspiring chorus girl loses her step in a rehearsal and gets fired – in Funny Girl 39 years later. But Omar Sharif isn’t the only supporting cast member in Funny Girl I had problems with; it was O.K. to cast Walter Pidgeon as Florenz Ziegfeld (and this wasn’t the first time Pidgeon had played a part originated on screen by William Powell: in 1939 Pidgeon starred in an MGM programmer called Society Lawyer, a remake of a film Powell had made in 1933 called Penthouse) except that he’d aged so visibly his face now looked like it was made of badly cured leather, and once again Hollywood was casting a tall and decidedly Anglo-looking actor to play a short, squat Jew. At least we had the delightful casting of Kay Medford as Brice’s mother and the hauntingly ill-used Anne Francis as Georgia James, Brice’s friend and confidante among the Ziegfeld cast members.

And best of all we had Barbra Streisand, singing beautifully in both comic numbers and straight songs, though the “traveling” staging of some of the songs got silly at times (notably the finale of “Don’t Rain on My Parade” as she stands at the front of a tugboat in New York Harbor; imdb.com credits Nelson Tyler as “helicopter photographer”) and I still think the final staging of “My Man” is a misfire. When Fanny Brice introduced this song to U.S. audiences in 1920 Ziegfeld gave it a quite simple staging – a replica of a Parisian street scene, with only a lamppost and a kiosk as decorations – and Irving Cummings, director of Rose of Washington Square, used exactly that staging. Streisand was obliged to sing it in close-up with a bank of red, white and blue theatre lights behind her, and she pulls the same trick she’d done earlier in the movie on “I’d Rather Be Blue Over You.” She begins the song nervously, as if so overcome by the collapse of her relationship with Nick that she can barely pull herself together to sing, but by the end of the song she’s not only singing strongly, she’s belting it out at full volume and intensity. Alice Faye’s foghorn contralto was far better at communicating the song’s self-pity than Streisand’s super-powerful belting, though to my mind Billie Holiday’s three studio versions (1937, 1948, 1952) remain the definitive readings – and for some reason Streisand isn’t allowed to do the song’s verse but goes straight to the refrain. Frankly, I still miss “The Music That Makes Me Dance” in its place – and we have at least two great recordings of that, by Streisand on the original-cast album and Carmen McRae on one of her 1960’s orchestral recordings for Mainstream. And though it may seem heretical, I saw Funny Lady, the 1975 sequel to Funny Girl, first and I actually liked it better. It helped that her co-star was James Caan (playing Billy Rose), who unlike Sharif actually held his own against her, and overall the film (directed by Herbert Ross, who’d staged the big dance numbers in Funny Girl as well) just seemed more comfortable and more entertaining.