STAR! (2oth Century-Fox, 1968) Fox Home Video
Sixteen years after the death of Broadway's beloved Gertrude Lawrence,
2oth Century-Fox afforded the ‘late great’ a lavish biopic from the
award-winning team responsible for catapulting Julie Andrews to super-stardom
in The Sound of Music (1965). Billed as “the love affair of the
century - between a woman, and the world”, Robert Wise’s Star!
(1968) is flashy, often engrossing, and impeccably crafted. It was never meant
to be a literal chronology of the life and times of Gertrude Lawrence. That it
came at the end of the sixties’ verve for big and bloated road shows, and,
failed to catch even the tail fires of this popular zeitgeist, is a
miscalculation in timing only, and yet one from which the film’s reputation
continues to suffer. Star! was a colossal flop for Fox at a particular
epoch when the studio could scarcely afford another. In a good many books
written about the history of the Hollywood musical, Star! is cruelly
cited as one of the reasons why musicals in general fell out of favor with
audiences; the other two being Doctor Doolittle and Hello Dolly!
(1969). Ironically, all three came from Fox, still riding high on the ether of The
Sound of Music. And yet, none of the
aforementioned is quite the disaster – artistically speaking. In fact, Dolly!,
Doolittle and Star! are built like tanks; given over to the sort
of unadulterated showmanship and razzamatazz all truly great musicals possess
in spades, and, with individual merits, long since searing their stature in the
public’s estimation as ‘classics’ from a bygone vintage we are unlikely to
experience again.
After it became quite clear box office was not forthcoming on Star!,
a panicked brain trust at Fox withdrew it from circulation, unceremoniously
hacking into Wise’s careful construction without his consent or input, leaving
nearly 26-minutes on the cutting room floor, and, reissuing the picture under a
different title; ‘Those Were The Happy Days’. Clearly, they were
not. Retrospectively speaking, one can
see the forest for the trees. Star! is a great musical – undoubtedly
ill-timed, but supremely satisfying as a free-flowing travelogue through the finer
points that effectively make up Gertrude Lawrence’s saucy backstage badinage.
Until Star!, the Teflon-coated persona of Gertie Lawrence had been
preserved in two positively gushing and highly sanitized accolades; the first,
penned by Lawrence herself in 1945; the other, a postmortem love-in, written by
her second husband, Max Lamb. In reading either, I suspect Robert Wise was
dumbstruck – and more than a little dismayed by the one-dimensional illusion of
Lawrence; a reminder, perhaps of Winston Churchill’s rather glib retort to a
reporter who once asked if the pugnacious diplomat worried how he would be
judged by history in years yet to follow. Churchill’s reply, “Fairly, for I
intend to write it.”
Gertrude Lawrence was and remains a formidable talent of the stage;
1941’s Lady in the Dark still regarded by many as the epitome of chic
sophistication for which Lawrence was hailed as “a goddess” in the New
York Times. But she was also a creation of flesh and blood, and, as such,
mortally flawed by certain inalienable human foibles that, far from debasing
her professional reputation, only add compelling back story to the intangible
appeal of her magical stage presence. “I talked with a lot of people who
knew her,” producer, Saul Chaplin reflected, “…and invariably they all
had the same thing to say about her. She couldn’t act, sing or dance…but she
was marvelous!” Wise, Chaplin and
their troop of researchers have certainly done their homework on Gertie
Lawrence. Star! is neither a hatchet job on the woman nor a gallivant through her musical career, though occasionally it veers toward this
later pursuit. There are no less than 18 musical numbers interpolated
throughout the road show of Star! Julie Andrews warbles all but two of
these songs, ably abetted by her co-star, the seemingly effortless and
undeniably brilliant, Daniel Massey – playing his godfather, Noel Coward.
Coward, then still very much alive, and, with a reputation as Teflon-coated as
Lawrence’s, thought Star! a splendid way to lionize her reputation with
a new generation – as well as resurrect the glories of many a show he had
personally co-written and costarred in with the grand dame. Without hesitation,
Coward granted producers the rights to his likeness and formidable back catalog.
One down. One to go. Saul Chaplin had also hoped to convince Beatrice Lillie,
arguably Lawrence’s best friend (with whom she is rumored to have had a lesbian
relationship) to partake of this exercise. Alas, Lillie became exacting and
impractical in her demands – idiotically desiring to play herself in the movie.
Unable to convince her otherwise, Chaplin’s decision was instead to write her
out of the movie entirely. Star! gets a lot of criticism for amending
Gertie’s personal history. Indeed, the picture all but avoids the last act of
her life. And yet, one can sincerely forgive screenwriter, William Fairchild
these artistic licenses; especially since, in a good many cases, only ‘names’
have been changed (to protect the…um… ‘innocent’); Fairchild also
telescoping Gertie’s many love affairs into an amalgam of four fictional
counterparts to satisfy the constraints of time. After all, real life is often
messy. Movies strive for a tidier account of ‘the truth’. In hindsight,
Fairchild’s achievement is both large-scale and all-encompassing. He gets the
big picture right, even if the details are occasionally muddled beyond
recognition.
The painstaking research performed by Robert Wise and his associates in
the preparation of Star! goes above and beyond this bottom line; culled
from information gleaned in numerous interviews with people who knew Gertie
Lawrence through her less than flattering moments. From these eyewitness
accounts it became rather apparent there were at least two sides to Lawrence,
for which literature – either out of genuine reverence or an even greater
anxiety to avoid a defamation of character lawsuit – had quietly swept under
the rug. Initially, Wise and producer, Saul Chaplin planned to shoot an
animated sequence to express the duality of Gertie’s life (public charade vs. private woman), counterbalanced by
a running commentary provided by Julie Andrews. Thankfully, this approach was
abandoned early on; Fairchild, substituting a black-and-white newsreel prologue
to serve as a bridge between ‘history’, ‘truth’ and fiction, but also to span
the passage of years. For concision, as well as for legal reasons, Fairchild's
screenplay rechristened, combined and/or excluded some of the real people who
had constituted Lawrence’s sphere of influences and close-knit circle of
friends. To fill in for Beatrice Lillie’s glaring omission, Fairchild concocted,
Billie Carleton (Lynley Laurence).
Fairchild also made Lawrence’s first husband, dance director, Francis
Gordon-Howley – renamed Jack Roper (John Collin) roughly the same age as
Gertie, when in reality he was a solid twenty years her senior. Lawrence’s
affair with Capt. Philip Astley was reworked too; the character now renamed Sir
Anthony Spencer (Michael Craig), while Gertie’s engagement to Wall Street
banker, Bert Taylor was entirely overlooked. In the movie, Gertie briefly
procures a burgeoning romance with the fictional Wall Street stockbroker, Ben
Mitchell (Anthony Eisley) before moving on to playhouse producer, Richard
Aldrich (Richard Crenna).
Even before a single frame had been exposed, Star! was shaping up
to be an extravaganza; what with Boris Leven’s meticulous recreations of
London’s West End and Donald Brooks’ ravishing array of vintage costumes; 3,040
in all, some 125 changes for Andrews alone. As these exquisite outfits were
subsidized by the Western Costume Company, they officially became their
property after production wrapped; loaned out for many years on a rental basis
before finally being auctioned off in the late 1970s. To choreograph, Wise and
Chaplin turned to veteran, Michael Kidd who elected to ‘push’ Julie Andrews
beyond her comfort zone. Their collaborative efforts produce two irrefutable
stand outs: ‘Burlington Bertie from Bow’ and the mammoth finale, built
around ‘The Saga of Jenny’; that oft resurrected and much-admired Kurt
Weill/Ira Gershwin song from Lady in the Dark. ‘Burlington Bertie’
marks Gertie’s breakout in a show for famed impresario, AndrĂ© Charlot (Alan
Oppenheimer); her nearly 3-month pregnancy camouflaged in hobo’s drag. Andrews
is caustically magnificent as the snobbish vagrant who, with noblesse oblige,
refuses to ‘have a banana with Lady Diana’ and has the effrontery to ‘swank
it’ using Rothchild’s ‘mail for a blanket’; all the while thinking
the hoi poloi damn fools. It is an enchanting bit of music hall nostalgia,
excised with Andrews’ inimitable aplomb and transparent affinity for those
early, yet even by 1968, all but forgotten golden years.
By contrast, ‘The Saga of Jenny’ is a flamboyantly mounted super-colossus,
perhaps owing a tad too much to vintage sixties’ glam-bam than the regal
decadence of the original Lawrence show; Andrews, descending from on high on a
whirling swing in her navy blue and silver sequined pants suit, thereafter
cavorting with an assortment of colorfully-attired circus performers; acrobats,
jugglers, midgets and clowns. Bounced from buttocks to pelvis, Andrews saucy
delivery of the lyrics evokes a deliciously stylized cynicism as she points to
the foibles of this fictional bon vivant who, among her other social misfires,
lit the candles, but tossed the taper away, only to become an orphan on
Christmas Day; got herself all dolled up in her satin and furs to land herself
a husband, but he wasn’t hers; whose searing white hot memoirs inspired wives
to shoot their husbands in some thirty-three states, and finally, succumbed to
too much gin and rum and destiny at the age of seventy-six. The Saga of Jenny is a phenomenon unto
itself, a kitschy musical sequence quite apart from everything else gone before
it in this movie, chiefly due to Wise’s decision to move his camera beyond the
proscenium; inviting his audience to partake of its spectacle in close-up.
Virtually all of the other numbers are deliberately photographed at a distance
to mark their distinction as filmed stagecraft. It is to Wise’s credit, and
moreover, a hallmark of his decades of expertise, none of these stage-bound
vignettes ever wind up becoming static or dull. Some, like ‘Someone to Watch
Over Me’ are expertly warbled by Andrews with a throbbing need to be loved,
and, effectively used as bridges to intercut and/or skip over whole passages of
time, while others, ‘Physician’ and ‘Dear Little Boy’ foreshadow
more of the plot, as yet to unfold.
Absurdly budgeted at six million, Star! likely seemed guaranteed box
office. How could it miss? In retrospect, far too easily. For starters, the
movie musical had already passed its prime by 1968; thanks, in part to a slew of
ill-conceived and heavy-handed, over-produced clunkers that had soured the
public on the genre as a whole. But audiences were also increasingly looking
for realism in their movies. What had sold tickets a scant four years earlier,
now drew jeers if, in fact, the audience was attending at all. Worse, critics
had become increasingly jaded by this era of high-priced fluff; the treacle,
too sticky, the staging, fairly weighty and failing to impress. Finally, unlike
some of the more profitable efforts put forth throughout the decade (West
Side Story, 1960; The Music Man, 1962, and, My Fair Lady,
1964, among them), Star! was not a Broadway-to-Hollywood hybrid. As
such, it had no pre-sold title that could be trumpeted by the marketing
department; no precedence either, except among the aging demographic, still
able to recall Gertie Lawrence in her prime. The trick in the exercise
therefore fell to Julie Andrews’ ability to do ‘this star’ justice.
Gertrude Lawrence had been a bona fide – if caustic – legend in her own time.
Perhaps owing to that daunting iconography, Andrews had, in fact, turned down
previous offers to portray Lawrence in the movies. But now, she too was ‘a
star’ - her pert and plucky, ‘practically perfect’ and squeaky-clean
nun/nanny in both The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins (1964)
diametrically at odds with Lawrence’s razor-backed ‘uber-wit’ and ultra-chic
sophistication.
Yet, in Robert Wise, Andrews felt secure. Moreover, a mutual admiration
had been built up between Wise, Chaplin and Andrews during their collaboration
on The Sound of Music, ensuring integrity, class and tact as the order
of the day on Star!; an ‘A-list’ production to adorn and compliment two
great ladies. Besides, Andrews still owed Fox a movie. While Richard Zanuck
remained mildly concerned about the declining popularity of big-budgeted
Hollywood musicals, he nevertheless felt certain that with Andrews at its helm,
Star! could be an even greater triumph for the studio. Tragically, it
proved the rule rather than the exception, a titanic misfire, eviscerated by
the critics and all but ignored by the audience. Removed from all its hype and
properly placed, Star! today, clearly has more virtues than vices to
recommend it. At 120 minutes Star!
is a forgivable hodgepodge. At 150 min. it begins to acquire a moody
magnificence with faint glimmers of becoming something far greater than the sum
of its parts, especially since Wise never allows the musical program to become
arbitrarily episodic. However, reinstated to its original 170 min. road show
length, Star! is unequivocally a masterpiece – perhaps, not on the same
level as Wise’s The Sound of Music, yet teeming with the director’s inimitable
ingenuity and copious amounts of richly satisfying music.
Julie Andrews and Daniel Massey are sublime casting, the Ying and Yang of
the piece as Gertie and Noel respectively. Andrews wisely interprets Gertrude
Lawrence on her own terms rather than attempting a caricature of the star’s
well-documented behaviors and mannerisms. And Andrews is undeniably in very
fine voice – much finer, in fact, than Lawrence ever was in life. Massey, on the other hand, is an exquisite
Noël Coward; uncannily comfortable in the effete playwright's skin, perhaps in
no small way because he was meticulously coached in his performance by his godfather
- NoĂ«l Coward. To listen to Massey warble the incandescent if slightly sordid, ‘Forbidden
Fruit’ (a ditty about man’s perilous desire to possess that which, quite
frankly, he should not, whether it be peaches atop the highest bow or the
adoration of the already married Mrs. Brown) is to give the erudite Coward his
considerable due. And the chemistry between Massey and Andrews during the
dramatic and comedy bits feathered into William Fairchild’s screenplay, are a
veritable feast, occasionally playing fast and loose with the specifics of
Gertie’s life and lovers. While no one could – or rather, should – confuse
Fairchild’s reflections as the definitive ‘last’ word on Gertrude Lawrence, his
narrative retains just enough verisimilitude to be believed on the terms and
conditions of a big and bouncy biopic. With all of its excised footage
reinstated Star! eloquently moves through its period recreations,
intelligently scripted and impeccably acted.
It is impossible not to find at least something to amuse, and quite
often more than a mere something to stand up and cheer about. Star!
sings its way into our hearts as only Julie Andrews in her prime could.
Perhaps, one of the reasons it so completely failed to be discovered in 1968
has to do with Wise’s deliberate studio-bound approach to the material. By
1968, most movie genres, including musicals, had left the confines of the back
lot; the ‘opening up’ of traditional stage works, lending an air of quaintness
and, perhaps, formaldehyde to musicals made only a decade earlier. In this
regard, Star! very much plays like a movie musical conceived for the
1940's; its sets obvious; its numbers staged almost exclusively as works taking
place on the stage – framed by walls, a painted backdrop and a curtain, thus
adhering to its nostalgic music hall revue tableau. Because of this, the truth of the piece and
invariably its own time period are exquisitely preserved. Still, Star!
is undeniably a throwback, and regrettably not what audiences wanted to see in
1968. A shame too, because the story as crafted by Fairchild is a very rich
tapestry, imbued with an almost lyrical fondness, and, more than able to poke
fun at the foibles of then contemporary society, both upper-class snobbery and
lowborn slum prudery, equally with a modicum of tongue-in-cheek waggishness and
spellbinding professionalism.
Wise’s film begins in earnest with a faux ‘main title’ sequence
shot in B&W, framed in the traditional Academy aspect ratio of 1:33:1. Wise
had to get permission from 2oth Century-Fox to use their pre-Cinemascope logo,
the ‘credits’ paying homage to Gertrude Lawrence with vintage photographs of
the star as a baby and little girl. These snapshots segue into a montage of
vintage newsreels cobbled together with new footage shot for the film but
appropriately distressed to provide the seamless connective tissue about
Gertie's childhood and early teenage years. When the newsreel introduces
Gertie’s father, Arthur (Bruce Forsyth) we hear a note of protest off-camera
and are startled by the suddenly glamorous appearance of Gertrude Lawrence
(Julie Andrews) rising from her chair in sumptuous color by DeLuxe, the screen
expanded to its large gauge aspect ratio. We are in a projection room; Gertie,
with movie shorts producer, Jerry Paul (Damian London), about to set the record
straight. It wasn’t all hearts and flowers, Gertie explains; her dad, a
bumbling old rapscallion and something of a lady’s man who left her mum when
Gertie was still a child, and whose portly paramour, Rose (Beryl Reid) is
costarring in their latest of many forgettable music halls engagements in
London.
Gertie, now a teen, salvages their busker’s routine with a brash
intervention, winning the audience’s respect after Arthur is pelted with
tomatoes. Backstage, Arthur is incensed – perhaps, more wounded pride than
anything else – even as he announces he and Rose are leaving for a tour of
South Africa in the morning. Once again, Gertrude is left to fend for herself.
Landing a minor part in an ensemble all-girl's act, Gertie attempts to
distinguish herself – at first quite by accident, but later by grandstanding –
her decision to upstage the act, infuriating the others. Gertie's next stab at
stardom is as flawed. She falls through a stage trap door, embedding a mattress
coil in her backside while crashing auditions for London impresario, Andre
Charlot. Her accidental 'entrance' reunites Gertie with childhood pal, Noel
Coward and also convinces Charlot to cast her in the chorus. Gertie, however,
fancies herself a star. So, during a performance by matinee idol, Jack Buchanan
(Garrett Lewis) she upstages the other chorines - a move that utterly
infuriates Charlot, who reiterates he “does not employ unprofessional
amateurs!”
Gertie, who never holds anything back, is about to reply in kind, but is
encouraged by stage manager, Jack Roper to hold her tongue. Over drinks at a
local pub, Roper promises Gertie her moment in the spotlight when all he really
wants is a way into her bed. Flattery can get him almost anywhere – and in
short order, these two are married. But Roper's plan to hasten Gertie's retirement
by getting her pregnant creates a rift in their marriage, along with Roper’s
alcoholic binges and the birth of their daughter, Pamela (Jenny Agutter). So,
Gertie and Jack divorce. Meanwhile, Noel initiates an awkward ‘cute meet’
between Gertie and dashing guardsman, Sir Anthony Spencer (Michael Craig).
While Tony is quite smitten with Gertie from the beginning, it takes some time
for her to warm to him. But Spencer is the patient sort, and arguably the right
man for our temperamental star. The two eventually become lovers. Regrettably, Tony’s debut of Gertie in polite
society is an ill fit. While she aspires
to these finer fashions and ideals, Gertie is undeniably a very rough diamond.
After learning she has skipped out on a performance for a date with Tony,
Charlot sacks Gertie from his new musical revue. To make ends meet during this
fallow period, Gertie becomes a fashion model, painfully bored by the work.
Once again, Noel - whose star has been steadily on the ascendance - comes to
Gertie's rescue, coaxing Charlot to take her back for his new show.
At this juncture, the movie’s narrative becomes slightly jumbled,
skipping through a series of vignettes covering six years in a mere four and a
half minutes. Charlot takes his revue to America where it is a big hit and
Gertie an even bigger one. In New York, she meets Wall Street banker, Ben
Mitchell (Anthony Eisley) and then Charles Fraser (Robert Reed), a somewhat
pretentious madcap. Both men relentlessly pursue her. Temporarily smitten,
Gertie has a tryst with each. But these passing fancies grow dim, especially
after Tony arrives at Gertie’s ultra-chic New York penthouse on the eve of a
lavish Roman toga party at which Gertie elects to stand out from the crowd by
going as Madame de Pompadour. Despite the fact she obviously prefers Tony to
either of the new men in her life, Gertie sends all of them away in the end.
Forlorn after everyone except Noel has gone home, Gertie is encouraged to send
for Tony. He will come back. She need only ask. But it’s no use. Gertie is
already married…as Noel pointed out earlier – to her career. The reason for
Gertie’s bittersweet rejection of Tony is never entirely explained. Herein,
Wise inserts an intermission instead, after which we move into the next phase of
Gertie’s life - her very strained mother/daughter relationship with Pamela, now
a teenager. Gertie has elected to take Pamela on a summer holiday off the coast
of France, along with her social secretary, Dorothy (Mathilda Calnan). Although
a mutual longing within persists for these two to become closer, neither Gertie
nor Pamela is capable of making the necessary move to reach out. Pamela instead
goes home to England to finish her schooling. Sensing how unfulfilled and
lonely Gertie is once again, Noel encourages her return to the stage in
Charlot's new revue. Nothing has changed. Gertie is an even bigger hit.
However, almost immediately, she is charged with tax evasion - a gross
mismanagement of her assets by Dorothy, leaving Gertie horrendously in debt. To
repay what she owes, Gertie plunges headstrong into a breakneck workload,
performing on the stage, appearing in nightclubs, newsreels, and, dance halls
until she suffers a complete physical breakdown.
Hospitalized and disheartened, Gertie takes Noel's suggestion to go to
America for an extended respite. While performing in Noel’s Private Lives,
Gertie meets producer, Richard Aldrich (Richard Crenna) who operates a small
playhouse on Long Island. The romance between them is tempestuous at best;
fueled by a mutual disdain that ironically grows into hot-blooded lust. Aldrich
produces 'Lady In The Dark' - Gertie's most enduring stage success up to
this point in her career. He also manages to win Gertie’s heart at long last.
Curiously, Star! never ventures beyond this moment – omitting what is
arguably Lawrence’s most celebrated stagecraft - as Anna Leonowens in Rodgers
and Hammerstein’s The King and I. Instead, after performing The Saga
of Jenny from Lady in the Dark, we end with another flashback – or
rather, flash-forward, to the projection room where our story began. Gertie
reminisces “Well, that’s the way it was,” the inference, of course,
being her relationship with Aldrich has not survived. Presumably, to satisfy
the conventions of the traditional ‘all’s well that ends well’ in
Hollywood musicals, Wise does not end his movie here. Instead, we regress to
the day of Gertie’s wedding to Aldrich, the couple inundated by well-wishers
pitching rice. Aldrich and Gertie hurry into the backseat of a waiting
chauffeur-driven car. She utters the identical – and prophetic - words once
said to Jack Roper, “I shouldn’t have married you.” However, unlike
Roper – who fluffed off this confession with laughter, Aldrich casually tells
Gertie if she would prefer, they can drive straight to the courthouse and have
their marriage annulled. This, of course, incurs Gertie’s ire. She flies into
one of her trademark tirades, leaving Aldrich mildly amused – the couple’s car
driving off into the countryside for a ‘life together’ that we already
know is doomed to fail.
In this penultimate moment of farewell, Star! defines itself as a
very elaborate undertaking; its imperfect subject matter brilliantly
reconstituted as the big and glossy Hollywood musical. Fairchild’s exposition
and Wise’s direction have conspired on a first-rate entertainment. For the most part, Star! is a genuine
treat, sustained by its delicate balance of intelligence, humor and sentiment,
slickly packaged and handsomely mounted. Julie Andrews achieves the stature of
another great lady without devolving into lampoon or rank mimicry. Her Gertie Lawrence is nothing short of a
revelation; the tartness of this diva, somehow reconciled with Andrews more
plucky onscreen personality. Star!
plays far better minus our expectations for Robert Wise to deliver another ‘Sound
of Music’. It really is an ‘apples to pomegranates’ comparison; Star!
a far more introspective and subtler critique of the garrulous Gertie. Right at
the start, Andrews’ mordant maven orders producer, Jerry Paul not to analyze
her too closely; perhaps, a bit of foreshadowing on Wise’s part as to where the
rest of his movie is headed. For Star! is as much a critique of the
intangibles that made Gertrude Lawrence uniquely as it typifies a certain
derivative of highly stylized movie-making in general – and, of course, making
movies musicals in particular.
Star! plays like a beloved snapshot of this bygone era; perhaps the only
‘living’ record to remind us of its’ musical hall vintage. Star! also
comes with an interesting footnote. In 1971, a fire inside the Fox’s film
vaults was thought to have destroyed the only surviving elements of the
complete roadshow. For decades, Star!
was thought to be a lost film; referenced only as a flop. Time, however, does
very strange things to art – both real and ‘reel’ – and in 1994, the full 175-minute
cut miraculously resurfaced in Britain – the elements virtually preserved by
having lain dormant in storage all these years. After considerable coaxing from
Saul Chaplin and Robert Wise, Fox agreed to a limited theatrical reissue of Star!
in North America where it suddenly garnered notoriety and much praise from the
critics – some of who had poo-pooed it as a disastrous misfire back in 1968.
Released to home video on LaserDisc later that same year, the roadshow edition
of Star! proved to be a very popular seller, one resurrected on DVD in
1999. Since then, it is a genuine pity Star! has not found its way to
Blu-ray. Star! originally contained an overture, intermission/entr'acte
and exit music. Regrettably, only the overture survives on Fox’s DVD. The
LaserDisc of Star! also properly framed the Panavision image in its
original 2:20 aspect ratio. The DVD exhibits a slightly cropped image; albeit,
one superior in its rendering of colors, with far better contrast levels.
One other bit of controversy dogs the DVD. The newsreel footage
interpolated throughout the movie was originally photographed in B&W and
framed in 1.33.1. While the DVD retains the proper aspect ratio for these
segments, it has inexplicably tinted these monochromatic inserts to sepia – an
oversight hopefully corrected if Fox ever gets around to remastering Star!
on Blu-ray. I should point out that overall, these are very minor complaints.
In fact, on the whole, I am quite impressed with how well this standard def
release holds up when up-converted. Colors on the DVD are impressively vibrant,
allowing Ernest Laszlo's cinematography to shine. Regrettably, age-related
artifacts are present and, at times contrast gets boosted, with intermittent
edge enhancement. Star!'s original six-track stereo has also been
distilled into a remastered 5.1 Dolby Digital. The main benefit is, of course,
we get to hear Julie Andrews' sing most of her songs in stereo for the first
time since the movie's debut. But Star! also deliberately incorporates
several mono recordings to appropriately date the supposed vintage flashbacks.
These have been faithfully reproduced in mono.
Back in 2000, Fox licensed the complete score to Star! on a
2-disc CD set – all of the tracks remastered in stereo as originally recorded,
though regrettably, due to a rights issue, some only existing in their
truncated ‘album cut’. That CD is, as begrudgingly, out of print today. The
hope is that if Star! does come to Blu-ray, its soundtrack will be
remastered to include as an isolated stereo score for everyone’s listening
enjoyment.
Star! on DVD is a flipper disc. Side A contains the 175-minute road show cut
with a very insightful audio commentary from Robert Wise. Side B, contains an
original 1968 featurette and a vintage short from 1994 entitled ‘Silver
Star’ shot for the reissue reunion party and featuring principles, Robert
Wise, Saul Chaplin, Julie Andrews and Richard Crenna. There is also a ‘stills’
galleries. But this is regrettably a hodgepodge of overlapping images – some so
unflattering, Julie Andrews ought to have insisted the originals be burned.
There are also extensive liner notes on the making of the film to toggle
through with your remote control. Personally, I would have preferred a
comprehensive documentary on the making of this great movie – but there it is.
Bottom line: Star! is a great musical – period! It may not be what
audiences expected to see in 1968, but today it can most assuredly take its
rightful place as a bona fide classic. While we wait for a Blu-ray, the DVD
comes highly recommended – for content, at least!
FILM RATING (out of 5 - 5 being the best)
4.5
VIDEO/AUDIO
3
EXTRAS
2.5
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