Delayed Reaction: Hello, Dolly!

Premise: A widowed matchmaker sets her sights on an unmarried half-millionaire, his employees, and his niece.

 

It's very possible that the ghost of Walt Disney masterminded the purchase of 20th Century Fox so his company could own Hello, Dolly! I started this movie on Disney+ assuming it was a Disney production and was shocked when I realized it was fully a Fox movie. Any fan of Disney parks recognizes the stylistic similarity between Main Street, U.S.A. and this movie. Walt Disney had a fetish for the turn of the century look of his childhood, and Hello, Dolly! is very much set around the same period. I had a hard time getting past this in my assessment of the film.

 

I get the criticisms, both at the time and currently, but I also don't really care. Yes, Barbara Streisand is miscast for the role. It would've been more fitting for her to trade places with herself in Yentl for those two movies. She needed to be older for Hello, Dolly! and much younger for Yentl. This is actually the most I've liked Barbara in a while. While she butted heads with a lot of people behind the scenes, in 1969, she wasn't quite powerful enough for that to show up on screen like it did in later work. She's too young but otherwise has all the charm and singing chops required for the role.

 

This was an enormously expensive film for the time. It's was in the ballpark of the legendarily expensive Cleopatra and not nearly as successful. Viewing it outside of the box office context though, I thought the movie looked great. The sets were big and expansive. The costumes looked great. They didn't scrimp on extras. Despite being based on a stage show, the movie doesn't feel limited in terms of locations the way some plays do. As a viewer, I don't care if a movie is overbudget if the money shows on the screen.

 

The movie took some heat when it was released for just throwing more bodies at a musical number rather than tightening up the choreography. I suppose that's true, but it's a criticism that reminds me of what I said about Must Love Dogs a couple weeks ago. Must Love Dogs was blasted by critics for being just another RomCom that followed the formula and did little else. After traditional RomComs disappeared though, it became a lot easier to appreciate that pulling off a rote RomCom in 2005 is better than the best RomCom efforts a decade later. Hello, Dolly! doesn't really stand out that much in the decade of The Sound of Music, West Side Story, Mary Poppins, and My Fair Lady. In 2020 though, when the best that we have is Rob Marshall's attempts to keep musicals alive, it's a treat to watch something as confident as Hello, Dolly!

 

So yeah, I was surprised how much I ended up enjoying this. I'm never quite ready for the length of a musical film (2.5 hours). The music isn't going to make me race to iTunes. Barbara's performance is the only one that really stood out. Everyone else was good enough. I did enjoy the superfluous Louis Armstrong appearance. Most of the issues I had with the movie were baked in though, so I mostly just got to appreciate what I did like about it.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend