It's instructive to compare this big-big-big musical vs. "Funny Girl," which was released a few months before it and completely trumped it at the box office. Both are bios of 1920s musical stars who can't have meant much to 1960s movie audiences. Both strive to re-create period musical numbers but allow contemporary scoring, costumes, and production design to creep in. Both are told in flashback. Both are LONG. Both even have similar sequences, such as the one where the young Gertie Lawrence/Fanny Brice, in vaudeville, messes up a production number and apologizes to her fellow chorines without really meaning it. But "Funny Girl" at least had the thrill of letting movie audiences "discover" Barbra Streisand; Julie Andrews was a known quantity. She tries hard here, not hiding Gertie's hard edge and letting the character's unsympathetic qualities hang out -- quite a lot, in fact. But she's very unlike Gertrude Lawrence (who could barely carry a tune, but did so with great aplomb), and she spends so much time suffering unsatisfying romantic entanglements with an uninteresting series of leading men that one's attention starts to wander. It's also unconvincing, as presented, that the very assertive Gertrude Lawrence would willingly turn into a submissive wifey for the sake of a Richard Crenna. (It rather parallels the plot line of "Lady in the Dark," which Lawrence was appearing in at the time, and you don't believe it there, either.) Daniel Massey is a wonderful Noel Coward, and the pair's reenactment of "Private Lives" is so good that you wish the movie would stop being "Star!" and just keep on being "Private Lives." There are eye-popping sets and costumes to distract you from the basic lack of drama, and it's not a painful movie to sit through. Not, that is, unless you start to dwell on how this one, and "Paint Your Wagon" and "Darling Lili" and "Doctor Dolittle" and "Half a Sixpence" and all their expensive cousins combined to kill the movie musical for a long, long while. Memo to movie executives, and it still holds in the day of "Rent" and "The Producers": We go to musicals to watch talented people sing and dance. Not for the sets.
