Star!

UNHAPPY DAYS

In Roadshow: The Fall of the Musicals in the 1960s, author Matthew Kennedy quotes director Robert Wise’s half-assed intent for making Star!: “The great drive was not to do the Gertrude Lawrence story...we were interested in it only as a starring vehicle for Julie.” Andrews owed Fox one more picture after The Sound of Music and the father & son Zanucks needed another box office bonanza as they were already in trouble after Doctor Doolittle and a few other bombs. With Andrews continuing to be a powerful draw—Hawaii and Thoroughly Modern Millie were hits—the betting was yet another musical would fill the coffers. Having estimated about 1% of the audience would be knowledgeable about Lawrence, and the elements making her famous, Wise and scripter William Fairchild ignore that she was the clever, elusive, conniving harridan the theatre crowd considered her to be and instead turned box office Maria into a tantrummy Eloise as pretend assaultress. An incorrigible scene stealer (who once ate violets during Victor Mature’s big scene in the stage version of Lady in the Dark), mercurial Lawrence was nothing if not inconsistent, unpredictable; Andrews the diametric opposite—a well-maintained ditto machine. After the opening of Cole Porter’s Nymph Errant, Agnes de Mille wrote of Lawrence: “Gertie moves like a fish through shadows. When she walks, she streams; when she kicks, she flashes...She is funny, bright, touching, irresistible. Her speaking voice is a kind of song, quite unrealistic but lovely, and her pathos cuts under all, direct and sudden. Her eyes fill, her throat grows husky, she trembles with wonder. The audience weeps. She can’t sing, but who cares?” Her poignancy as singer and actress—sometimes antiquely shrill, trilly and/or grating—probably divided vogue audiences into at least two factions: those who wondered what unrehearsed antics she’d spring on stage and those having picked up vibes about her sexual preference. Andrews’ overused specialties are therefore ruinous: all those years of vocal outreach from the stage—the magnified diction, the piercingly antiseptic warbling, the asexuality—destroy Lawrence’s boutique of imperfect élan. The recognition of who could play her finally came in the 2007 British TV movie Daphne, about the likely lesbian leanings of author Daphne du Maurier: Janet McTeer.

With discernible anxiety running throughout, Wise keeps Andrews hopping from one set (a total of 185) to the next musical number (a total of 17!) during which she’s supposed to emit glamorous star radiance in 125 costume changes. Full-on glam is not her strong suit; with head-of-the-class posture and comportment, she’s a gumptious maiden playing a G-rated dressup bitch. The gross over-staged musical numbers by Michael Kidd are performed absent of consideration of Lawrence’s peculiar piss-elegant charms and surprises as mistress of vampish camp, attributes beyond Andrews’s capabilities. When Daniel Massey, going closety ethereal as Noël Coward, reads outloud a reviewer’s comment about Lawrence’s 1924 Broadway début in André Charlot’s Revue—that she’s “an incandescent star of the first magnitude”—we’re floored by the criminal falsehood because Andrews is nugatory in the Lawrence signature “Limehouse Blues.” The musical ends before Lawrence films the ill-fated Glass Menagerie (in which she’s miscast but occasionally decent) and it’s a huge reprieve: watching Andrews attempting to play a scene from Coward’s Private Lives during which she rushes through the dialogue is sufficient warning she won’t be able to “speak” Williams, either. Upon viewing Star!, Coward summed it up in his diary: Andrews as Lawrence is “as suitable as casting Princess Royal as Dubarry...She is as much like Gertie as I am Edna Ferber’s twin.” Running at 175 minutes, presented as a roadshow attraction in spite of the vast majority of sets looking less theatre & Home & Garden than mediocre television, the movie blew one of the biggest farts in 60s box office history. Though one hopes she’s since reevaluated her dumbass excuse, Andrews in the 80s told author Charles Higham this: “I think Star! failed because the public wasn’t very happy with seeing me in drunken scenes.” Desperate to recoup costs, Fox cut 55 minutes and re-released it to equally disinterested audiences as Those Were the Happy Times. Empty title, having created so few. With Richard Crenna, Beryl Reid, Robert Reed and Jenny Agutter as the daughter. Costumes by Donald Brooks; production design by Boris Leven; photography by Ernest Laszlo. Filmed in TODD AO. (Opening 11/06/1968 at Michael Todd, running 16 weeks.)

Oscar nominations: best supporting actor (Massey), best cinematography, best art/set decoration, best costumes, best sound, best song (“Star!”) and best score for a musical motion picture.

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ralphbenner@nowreviewing.com