Cast your mind back to the late 1960's: the Beatles, space flight, Vietnam, flower children. Despite the prevailing culture - and counter-culture(s) - 20th Century-Fox executives decide the public will flock to see a remake of "The Jolson Story" featuring a female lead character who died over a decade earlier. So they reunite the star, director, and producer of a previous box-office smash and throw millions of dollars into it. It didn't work.
Some reviewers now think this film is ripe for rehabilitation, a lost masterpiece from a golden age. I'm afraid it still doesn't work.
True, there is great talent here, and spectacle. Unfortunately there is also an unsympathetic lead. Mercilessly ambitious from the outset, we are supposed to pity poor Gertie when success - of course - turns out to be a hollow sham.
The other characters are stock figures: the True Friend (whom she can't marry because he's gay); the Man She Should Have Married; the Spurned Suitors; the Neglected Child and, finally; the Good Man Who Redeems Her.
The musical numbers are spectacularly staged and well-performed, but (being taken from stage shows) they can't be integrated into the plot and drop into the film like a row of tombstones: "and then I appeared in...". Presumably Julie Andrews was supposed to re-create Gertrude Lawrence's charisma during these routines but she doesn't actually perform in Lawrence's style (especially her singing voice which was throaty and had a heavy vibrato) and the numbers seem to go on longer than necessary. Also, in an effort to develop a more adult image, Julie Andrews gets drunk and calls someone "a b**t***d".
I've heard recordings of Lawrence singing with Noel Coward and I've seen her act with Charles Laughton in "Rembrandt". I found her singing voice strained and her acting histrionic. Maybe she was more exciting 'live' on stage. (Incidentally "Rembrandt" is seen only briefly and tantalisingly here - I would have given any number of 'witty' Noel Coward lines for a few minutes of Lawrence and Laughton.)
An earlier reviewer mentioned the "original" device of using a newsreel as a framework. Is this intended as irony, or have they really not heard of "Citizen Kane"?
Some reviewers now think this film is ripe for rehabilitation, a lost masterpiece from a golden age. I'm afraid it still doesn't work.
True, there is great talent here, and spectacle. Unfortunately there is also an unsympathetic lead. Mercilessly ambitious from the outset, we are supposed to pity poor Gertie when success - of course - turns out to be a hollow sham.
The other characters are stock figures: the True Friend (whom she can't marry because he's gay); the Man She Should Have Married; the Spurned Suitors; the Neglected Child and, finally; the Good Man Who Redeems Her.
The musical numbers are spectacularly staged and well-performed, but (being taken from stage shows) they can't be integrated into the plot and drop into the film like a row of tombstones: "and then I appeared in...". Presumably Julie Andrews was supposed to re-create Gertrude Lawrence's charisma during these routines but she doesn't actually perform in Lawrence's style (especially her singing voice which was throaty and had a heavy vibrato) and the numbers seem to go on longer than necessary. Also, in an effort to develop a more adult image, Julie Andrews gets drunk and calls someone "a b**t***d".
I've heard recordings of Lawrence singing with Noel Coward and I've seen her act with Charles Laughton in "Rembrandt". I found her singing voice strained and her acting histrionic. Maybe she was more exciting 'live' on stage. (Incidentally "Rembrandt" is seen only briefly and tantalisingly here - I would have given any number of 'witty' Noel Coward lines for a few minutes of Lawrence and Laughton.)
An earlier reviewer mentioned the "original" device of using a newsreel as a framework. Is this intended as irony, or have they really not heard of "Citizen Kane"?