FUNNY LADY prompts the bromide “If you can’t say something nice…” A borderline excruciating revisit (thank you, YouTube–thank you?) jogged the memory banks withdrawal window to recall I originally sat thru this as part of a double bill with The Hindenburg. Speaking of gasbags, that was a lame movie, too, but looking again at this biopic-musical-comedy-drama-ego trip had me wish Fanny Brice & Co. could have been on the actual airship when it ‘touched down’ in New Jersey. Guess that just voided the lead-in sentence. Oy, such guilt I will be feeling. *

To her credit, Barbra Streisand (32 when this was filmed) adamantly did not want to make a sequel to her 1968 opening salvo hit Funny Girl, but she was contractually obligated to producer Ray Stark. He had to sue her to force her back into Briceland. Stark happened to be married to Brice’s daughter. Herbert Ross directed—he’d handled the musical numbers for Funny Girl, so William Wyler was freed from that chore to concentrate on minding the freshman star. Ross had later worked with/for Streisand on The Owl And The Pussycat. Seven years after Funny Girl was ’68’s #3 smash, Omar Sharif returns as Brice’s now-ex-husband Nicky Arnstein, but it’s a cameo role; the male lead is now James Caan, playing brash showman Billy Rose, who became Fanny’s second husband (his fifth marriage, it lasted ten years). A Brice quote: “With Nick Arnstein, I was miserably happy. With Billy Rose, I was happily miserable.”

During the Great Depression, like everyone else in the country, singer Fanny Brice has the blues, and hers include being divorced from Nicky Arnstein. When she meets club owner/songwriter/hustler Billy Rose, their give-it-a-try business partnership turns into a romantic relationship, but as often happens the sailing isn’t always smooth.

The tiresome script from the ordinarily impressive Jay Presson Allen (Cabaret, Prince Of The City) and Arnold Schulman (A Hole In The Head, Love With The Proper Stranger) is heavily fictionalized (start with Caan was a fit 5’9″ while Rose had been a chubby 4’11”), and is a laborious slog thru spats, makeups, more spats, introduced & abandoned secondary characters (notably Roddy McDowall and Ben Vereen), kvetching galore, synthetic sentiment and acres of close-up’d warbling/belting.

Babs fanatics went to/will be in butter heaven since she seizes thirteen songs (nothing like something titled “Let’s Hear It For Me” to give you a whisp of a hint of a clue); Caan manages (is allowed) two. ‘The show must go on’…and on, running 136 minutes, and that’s trimmed way down from a long cut—three hours of ain’t we cute? chutzpah would have me climb aboard a doomed dirigible, or a handy passenger liner plowing full speed thru iceberg latitudes. **

Caan, 34, was popular at the time, and Streisand legions marched in force: it was the 6th most popular movie of 1975, a gross of $58,500,000 battering down the production tab of $8,500,000. Dutiful Academy Award nominations went up for Cinematography (James Wong Howe’s last credit), Costume Design (“Bob Mackie on line 2”), Sound, Song (“How Lucky Can You Get?”), and Scoring Adaptation.

Clawing for purchase: Carole Wells, Larry Gates, Heidi O’Rourke, Cliff Norton, Colleen Camp, Alana Stewart.

* Putz, not with the dishwater, already—verily, we do acknowledge Streisand’s talents, and appreciate her work in What’s Up Doc?, The Way We Were, All Night Long and Meet The Fockers. She did a keen job directing The Prince Of Tides. But the whole beat-to-pieces diva thing does zip for me; hers and others so christened.

** People under—what, sixty?—will wonder what the big deal was with these bygone Broadway legends. Well, they’re not alone. Born in the mid 50’s, growing up in the 60’s and 70s’, many who Boom among us were besieged by blabby memorials about how ‘amazing’ Al Jolson, George M. Cohan, Brice, Ziegfield, Gertrude Lawrence, etc. were “back when” and —-hold the borscht—we were not always as enthralled as we were apparently supposed to be. The further away from it, the less charming much of it is. So sue me, already.