Funny Girl marked Barbra Streisand’s big-screen debut, but it was hardly the announcement of a new talent. By this point, Streisand had already registered raves as Fanny Brice in Broadway’s Funny Girl, which itself came on the heels of Tony and Grammy recognition for earlier work. This may account for the barreling confidence of her performance here, though you get the sense that Streisand—like Fanny—was born this way.
Set in the early 1900s and loosely based on the actual Fanny Brice, Funny Girl follows the aspiring young performer as she pursues her dream of joining the famed Ziegfeld Follies, despite being described as physically “average” and “off balance” by her mother’s friends. (At least her mother follows up by noting that she has other “golden talents.”) Undeterred, Fanny elbows her way onto the Follies stage, partly by undercutting the patriarchal underpinnings of its lavish musical numbers with a sly sense of humor. During “His Love Makes Me Beautiful,” a retrograde showstopper celebrating the subjugation of women by way of marriage, Fanny stuffs a pillow under her bridal costume so that she appears pregnant—at first enraging Walter Pidgeon’s Florenz Ziegfeld, until he realizes the audience is howling in appreciative laughter.
This is a significant part of Streisand’s appeal as a performer. Well aware that she didn’t meet starlet standards, she employed a powerhouse voice and sardonic self-deprecation to knock down the doors of the entertainment industry anyway. That admirable brashness can make for an overwhelming screen presence; Franny herself says she’s a “natural hollerer.” In Funny Girl, this tendency to holler is most endearing during a roller-skating chorus line where Fanny’s ineptitude on wheels so overtakes the number—Streisand shows remarkable skill being purposefully, comically clumsy—that she once again wins the audience’s enthusiasm. And she’s rewarded with an impromptu solo number, “I’d Rather Be Blue Over You (Than Be Happy With Somebody Else),” that showcases her elegance (while still wearing those wheels).
Streisand the straight romantic is something different and not always as successful. Besotted with her stage performances, debonair gambler Nick Arnstein (Omar Sharif) begins to woo her, a romance that begins in a sweetly comic register— “Gorgeous!” Fanny blurts out when she first looks into Nick’s eyes—but turns toward the turgid and tragic after they marry and Nick becomes increasingly insecure about the fact that Fanny is more successful than he is. (Sharif’s secret weapon in the film is his adoring smile, which means the performance fades as Nick’s adoration does.)
As for Streisand, Funny Girl earned her Hollywood award honors as well, with a Best Actress win at the Oscars. The film itself got a Best Picture nomination, though no such recognition was given to director William Wyler, despite his impressive track record (14 Best Director nominations, including wins for Mrs. Miniver, The Best Years of Our Lives, and Ben-Hur). As a Wyler picture, Funny Girl recalls less the relationship dramas of his early years than the epic filmmaking of 1959’s Ben-Hur. The production numbers here—especially “His Love Makes Me Beautiful”—get a wide, handsomely arranged canvas, while the camera sweeps over the stage, tilting at off-kilter angles, for “The Swan” and swoops over a tugboat passing the Statue of Liberty, with Streisand at the bow, at the climax of “Don’t Rain On My Parade.”
Even so, Wyler is smart enough to plant the camera fixed on Streisand, from the shoulders up, for her final number, “My Man.” Always willing to let his stars be the star, Wyler may have been the perfect choice to center her, for the first time, on the big screen.
(4/24/2024)
