William Wyler (56 page)

As late as the spring of 1967, no costar for Streisand had been found, and shooting was scheduled to begin in a few weeks. Some big names were bandied about to play Nicky Arnstein, including Sean Connery, Gregory Peck, and Tony Curtis. For a while, it seemed that David Janssen would play the role, but that deal fell through as well. Jule Styne wanted Frank Sinatra, who agreed to take the part only if he were paid $750,000 and received top billing; Stark said no.

Wyler had seen Omar Sharif regularly at the Columbia cafeteria when Sharif was under contract to that studio, and he finally recommended the actor. Sharif was an established male lead (
Doctor Zhivago
), looked great in a tuxedo, and, like Arnstein, was an accomplished gambler and card player. He could even sing well enough. Stark was convinced to sign him when he learned that, under the terms of his studio contract, Sharif could be had for only $20,000.

Funny Girl
is not a great American musical. Its book, which narrates the simple story of Fanny Brice and her meteoric rise as a vaudeville star and the leading light of the Ziegfeld Follies, is not dramatically notable. Fanny suffers no setbacks on the road to the top—she even comments at one point that everything has come too easy. She is a hit in her first performance, “Roller Skate Rag,” even though she cannot skate, and almost immediately thereafter, she is starring in the Ziegfeld Follies. The second half of her story charts the disintegration of her marriage to gambler Nicky Arnstein. As her career continues to blossom, his life spirals out of control, culminating in his imprisonment for embezzling. The score produced two theater standards—“People” and “Don't Rain on My Parade”—but otherwise is not memorable. Indeed,
Funny Girl's
main claim to musical theater immortality is that it made Barbra Streisand a star; its status as a Streisand vehicle rather than a substantive work in its own right is confirmed by Stark's conception of the play as no more than a dry run for the film version.

Nonetheless, despite the mediocre material,
Funny Girl
is a better film than the adapted versions of far superior Broadway musicals such as
West Side Story, Guys and Dolls, South Pacific, Kiss Me, Kate
, and
Gypsy
. Indeed, it is one of the best examples of musical adaptation to film in the history of the medium, and it is a testament both to Wyler's ability to present the story effectively and to the intelligent staging of the musical numbers (here, much of the credit goes to Herb Ross). By insisting that Streisand remain front and center, Stark also ensured that the Broadway show's major asset was in place for the film as well. In doing so, he rejected the prevailing wisdom that movie stars have to replace Broadway stars to make a successful film—even though Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando had not saved
Guys and Dolls
, Rosalind Russell merely undercut
Gypsy
, and Lucille Ball was miscast in
Mame
. Streisand was the raison d'être for
Funny Girl
, and Wyler knew that going in.

The dramatic arc of
Funny Girl
resembles that of
Carrie:
each charts the rise of a young, lower-class woman and the fall of a debonair, sophisticated man. Each film ends with a final meeting in a theater dressing room. In
Carrie
, Hurstwood, unemployed and sick, comes asking for a handout; in
Funny Girl
, Nick, just out of prison, wants a divorce. In each case, the heroine is successful but alone at the end.

Funny Girl
opens with a framing device—an enormous theater marquee on which Fanny Brice's name is prominently displayed above the show's title but below “Ziegfeld Follies.” As a woman in a leopard coat and hat walks into the camera's view, the lights go bright on the marquee, lighting the names of Fanny, Ziegfeld, and the show's title, “Glorifying the American Girl”—which could well serve as the film's subtitle. The opening is a stylized gesture, announcing that the film will be, in part, an homage to the vanished world of the theater. The well-dressed woman proceeds to walk through an alleyway toward the stage door, followed by the camera. At a certain point, the camera stops moving, and this woman is framed in a long shot by the walls on either side of the alley and a wooden staircase. This elaborate prologue announces that this film is about the theater, about Fanny Brice, and about the catastrophe of success. It is the first of many such compositions in which Wyler imprisons Fanny in the frame.

The alley functions as an important backdrop throughout the film, along with stage doors and Wyler's signature staircases. Fanny continues to walk through the alleyway and is again framed between two brick walls before turning left into a space dominated by props, including a large mirror. As she looks into the mirror and says, “Hello, Gorgeous,” her smile is replaced by a glum look—she is not convinced by her own bravado. Next, she walks into a dark, empty theater, Wyler's camera emphasizing both its size and its emptiness. She begins to play “People,” the show's signature song, on the piano but then slams down sharply on the keys. At this point, Wyler cuts abruptly to a high-angle shot of the empty theater from above, dwarfing Fanny. As he cuts back to her, she is facing stage right, listening to imagined applause; then she pretends to machine-gun the imaginary audience. Wyler cuts to another high-angle view of the side of the theater, watching as Fanny takes a seat by herself and looks at the stage. After a brief exchange with her assistant, who tells her that Mr. Ziegfeld would like to see her at her convenience, Fanny says, “Did you hear that Mrs. Strakosh, Mr. Ziegfeld is waiting for me.” The camera moves in for a medium profile shot of Streisand's face, emphasizing her un-star-like nose, then moves forward and into the past as a young Fanny is again seen looking into a mirror.
¹⁴

This cinematic tour de force is Wyler's acknowledgment of the opening of
Citizen Kane
, as he utilizes spatial framing, expressive editing, close-ups, and mirrors to herald his story of an “American Girl” who is not gorgeous, who achieves great acclaim but does not win the love of the man she so desperately wants. If “people who need people” are “the luckiest people,” she is not one of them. In
Sister Carrie
, Dreiser concludes with an image of his heroine in a rocking chair, where she sits successful but alone and muses, “shall you dream such happiness as you may never feel.” Wyler did not use this image in his film version of that novel, but in
Funny Girl
, he has Fanny sitting alone in the theater thinking much the same thing.
¹⁵

Wyler's visual strategy throughout the first half of the film, which deals with Fanny's rise, is intended to emphasize her entrapment. When the plot flashes back to the past, Wyler repeats the frame within a frame—Fanny looking into the mirror—seen in the film's opening. He repeats another visual strategy from the opening when Fanny sings her first song, “I'm the Greatest Star,” to an empty theater. Midway through the number, Wyler again pulls his camera back, isolating Fanny in space.

The number that pushes Fanny toward stardom, “I'd Rather Be Blue over You” (than be happy with somebody else), is also performed solo onstage, but this time, she is gliding on roller skates. The lyrics, which anticipate the substance of her marriage to Nicky, also prefigure the soaring stagecraft of the song that closes the first half of the film, “Don't Rain on My Parade”—only the second of Fanny's numbers not staged in a theater. Fanny's love for Nicky liberates her, and Wyler takes his cue from the line “Don't tell me not to fly,” showing her as she seems to fly from the train station to a train to a cab and then to a pier, where she boards a tugboat that takes her past the Statue of Liberty. Even Wyler's framing shots of Fanny in the windows of the train and the cab seem dwarfed by the momentum of the song. This moment is the emotional high point of the film for Fanny. As she concludes her song on the tugboat, she is (as in her first number) singing to no one in particular. She has, however, been liberated from the theater and thrust into the world, where the Statue of Liberty signifies that her dream of personal and professional success is finally within her grasp. The second half of the film charts her loss of the personal aspect of that success.

Nick Arnstein's first two appearances—after Fanny's “I'd Rather Be Blue” performance and after her triumph at the Follies—are also framed within frames, both times by doorways. In
Carrie
, Wyler's heroine sees Hurstwood for the first time through the door of Fitzgerald's, in a deep-focus shot across the room, where he is framed by a partition. The staging of “People” occurs outside in the alleyway behind the Brice saloon. Fanny and Nick are the only two people in the scene. She sings much of the song while standing on the steps of a nearby building and staring in front of her. Nick looks at her from the far left of the frame. Not once during the song do their eyes meet, and at the end of the song, the camera moves in on Fanny's face and then, in a reverse shot, catches Nick. At the end of what is arguably the film's most romantic song, Wyler thus separates them. Nick then announces that he has to go to Kentucky, foretelling that his business ventures and his need for freedom will pull them apart. Later, in his final appearance in Fanny's dressing room, when he decides to finalize their divorce, he is first seen framed in Fanny's mirror.

The second half of the film deals with Fanny's unraveling marriage. There is only one big production number, “The Swan,” as Wyler concentrates on narrative rather than musical theater. The first musical number in this section, “Sadie, Sadie,” is more typical of Wyler's approach to theatrical material at the start of his career. He keeps the action moving, turning “Sadie, Sadie” into a montage of time passing. The sequence begins with a close-up of Fanny's ring, moves to her first look at her new home (complete with a Wylerian multilevel winding staircase), to the decoration and refurbishment of the house, and to an outdoor champagne party, all culminating in the birth of a daughter. There is even a moment when Nick carries Fanny, in a white dress, up the staircase, reprising a similar moment from
The Collector
, albeit in a much different context.

After “The Swan,” Wyler cuts to Fanny, who sits smoking as she waits for Nick to come home from the card game that caused him to miss her premiere and the party that followed. Wyler films her from behind as Nick enters their apartment, the distance between them telling. Here, he repeats the staging of a scene from
The Little Foxes
, when Regina enters the house after Horace has discovered the theft of his bonds: Horace, like Fanny, is seated (though he is seen in profile) as Regina comes through the front door, the stark contrasts of space and movement emphasizing the gulf between them. Wyler repeats this framing when Nick finds out that Fanny has bankrolled his share of a potential business partnership. He turns the offer down and walks the businessman to the door. Wyler then films this movement again from behind Fanny, keeping her in the foreground while the two men stand at the door. The subsequent argument between the couple takes place as they stand in the same positions, far across the large room. Later, after Fanny finds out about Nick's arrest, Wyler reverses her movement from the film's prologue. Now facing the camera, she runs through the alley toward a waiting car; Wyler then cuts to the car driving off, with the Follies marquee lit up at the right side of the screen.

In a musical film, all the songs are usually prerecorded before the actual number is filmed, and
Funny Girl
was no different. Though he did not interfere with Herb Ross's handling of the big Ziegfeld production numbers, Wyler reserved the right to redo Streisand's character songs. Streisand remembers: “The last day of shooting was the song ‘My Man.' The next day in the projection room, after watching dailies, everyone started applauding and congratulating each other. Willy turned to me and asked what I thought. I said, ‘I think I could do it better.' The room became silent. I thought I really needed to do it live, to be in the moment. How could I feel the emotions if I was trying to lip-synch to a recording made three months before? I'm very bad at lip-synching. So I said, ‘Willy, can we do it over?' And he did.” Robert Swink recalls that Wyler “got Omar Sharif to stand behind those black curtains—the whole scene was black—and he told him to talk to Streisand between takes. He wanted him around to help build up her sadness. They must've done at least ten takes. Willy shot the thing live and recorded it live. It was pretty emotional for her.”
¹⁶
He also filmed it in one long take. Pauline Kael called it a “bravura stroke.”
¹⁷

The scene's presentation may have been dreamed up by Streisand, but the staging of the song closely resembles that of “Rose's Turn,” the finale of
Gypsy
, for which Jule Styne also wrote the music. Fanny's song (by Maurice Yvain) shares some superficial similarities to that musical tour de force, but it lacks the other song's power, dramatic arc, and incisive lyrics.
¹⁸
“Rose's Turn” is also performed on an empty stage with the character surrounded mostly by darkness, though it is usually staged with the word
ROSE
in lights. Her song is a testament to her own strength as she makes it clear that she is responsible for her daughter's success. Although she realizes her daughter no longer needs her, she declares her worth, proclaiming, “Everything's coming up roses, for me.” She repeats the word
me
four times.

At the end of Wyler's film, Fanny declares her love for her man with an increasing sense of desperation: “What's the difference if I say, I'll go away. When I know I'll come back on my knees some day. For whatever my man is, I am his.” Fanny refuses to admit that she cannot have the one love she always wanted. Angela Lansbury, who played Rose in an award-winning revival of
Gypsy
, described the show as “a tragedy of good intentions.”
¹⁹
The same can be said of
Funny Girl
, which presents two characters who want the best for each other but let their insecurities get in the way. Wyler's ending is, appropriately, both poignant and edgy. Fanny seems strong but also desperate, clutching at the happiness she has lost. The stage version, conversely, ends on a high note, with Fanny reprising “Don't Rain on My Parade.” Her final declaration—“I simply gotta march, My heart's a drummer. Nobody, no nobody is gonna rain on my parade”—ends the play with a celebration of her strength and endurance, whereas Wyler's ending emphasizes her vulnerability and her loss.