STAR! (2oth Century-Fox, 1968) Fox Home Video

In honor of the Walt Disney Corporation’s most recent - and much appreciated - public announcement that, after decades of sitting on their own goldmine of Uncle Walt’s live-action film legacy, as well as to have since annexed the asset management catalog of the now-defunct 2oth Century-Fox (inexplicably rechristened 2oth Century Studios by Disney Inc.), Walt’s successors have reached a distribution deal with Grover Crisp and Sony Home Entertainment (whose home video model is decidedly more progressive and aggressive), we at Nix Pix have decided to revisit several Fox catalog releases, decidedly, that require some immediate love and attention.

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 show musical entertainments, and, utterly failed to catch even the tail fires of this popular zeitgeist, is a miscalculation in timing only. And yet, it remains the one particular from which the film’s reputation continues to suffer. Star! was a colossal flop 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 singled out as one of three musicals to sound the death knell; 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 – that it’s latter-day reputation would suggest. In fact, Dolly!, Doolittle and Star! are all built like tanks from another bygone era; given over to unadulterated showmanship and razzamatazz with individual merits. While Dolly! and Doolittle have since endeared themselves to the public, Star!’s legacy as a bona fide classic remains in question.

After it became quite clear Star! had laid an egg, a panicked brain trust at Fox hastily withdrew it from circulation, unceremoniously hacking into Wise’s careful construction without his consent or input, leaving 26-minutes on the cutting room floor. Star! was then reissued under a different title; ‘Those Were The Happy Days’. Clearly - not.  And yet, retrospectively, one can clearly see this forest for its trees. Star! is a great musical – undoubtedly ill-timed, but supremely satisfying as a free-flowing travelogue through the finer points that effectively made-up Gertrude Lawrence’s saucy and luminescent backstage persona. Until Star! the Teflon-coated persona of Gertie Lawrence had been hermetically preserved in two gushing, if highly sanitized accolades. The first was penned by Lawrence herself in 1945. But the other became a postmortem love-in, written by her second husband, Max Lamb. In reading either, Robert Wise was likely dumbstruck to reconcile the grand dame with this flesh and blood creature. Lawrence’s bios are, in fact, very one-dimensional, a reminder, perhaps, of Winston Churchill’s rather glib retort to a reporter, who once asked if his pugnaciousness concerned how he would be judged by history. To this, Churchill replied, “Most fairly, for I intend to write it.”

And yet, ‘Gertie’ Lawrence’s reputation as a formidable lady of the theater had endured, if for nothing else, then 1941’s Lady in the Dark, regarded by many as the epitome of chic sophistication, and, for which Lawrence was hailed “a goddess” in the New York Times. Alas, Lawrence was also human, and, as such, mortally flawed by certain inalienable foibles that, far from debasing her professional standing, only added compelling back story to the intangible appeal of her incandescent 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 a small army of researchers endeavored to do their homework on Gertrude Lawrence. As such, Star! is neither a hatchet job, in the ‘Mommie Dearest’ vein, nor a fluffy and furtive obfuscation of the harsher realities that plagued Lawrence’s private life. While some episodes, like Lawrence’s mid-career discovery she had bankrupted herself on a hedonist lifestyle, are dealt short shrift with a modicum of good humor, other bits, like Gertie’s strained relationship with her daughter, Pamela Howley (Jenny Agutter, in the film) are lent more than a tarnished hint of sadness genuine to life, if hardly explorative of the complete picture gleaned from the totality of that life.

And since Star! is, above all else, a musical – there are numbers and songs, and songs and numbers aplenty to go around. Eighteen tracks adorn this road show; some, like ‘The Saga of Jenny’ given to lavish appointment, while others, ‘Dear Little Boy’ in particular, are performed with a simple, yet refined magnetic perseverance for reading something more into the lyric by Julie Andrews (who trills and thrills in all but three), serving as a musical bridge, carrying the audience from scene to scene or, in some cases, advancing the narrative timeline by several years. Virtually, none adhere to the esthetics of their original stage-bound performance. And this is, arguably, all to the good, as the precepts of a late-sixties’ musical road show compliment the theatrics in each number in unexpected ways. It is, in fact, remarkable how well the psychedelic sixties here seamlessly meld with melodies, in some cases, written a full forty years before it.  The three ditties left unsung by Andrews are expertly executed addendums to establish the musical milieu into which Lawrence’s rising star has been dropped. ‘In My Garden of Joy’ outlines Gertie’s desperation to break free of the chorus, playing the wide-eyed fool scattering rose petals amidst a pack of disgruntled chorines whom she has just upstaged in the devilishly daffy, ‘Oh, It’s A Lovely War.’ This was preceded by our introduction to Noel Coward (played with effortless and undeniably brilliance by, Coward’s godson, Daniel Massey), slyly warbling the Coward zinger, ‘Forbidden Fruit’. Finally, there is Garrett Lewis as Britain’s dashing and dapper, Jack Buchanan, emoting ‘N’ Everything’ – a glossily staged solo into which Andrew’s determined minx again finds that rare opportunity to distinguish herself from the backup dancers.

Noel Coward, then still very much alive, and, with his reputation as lionized as Gertie’s, thought Star! a splendid homage to endear her to a new generation. Without reservation, Coward granted producers access to his likeness and back catalog to dispose of at their artistic liberties. 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 the exercise. Alas, Lillie became exacting and impractical in her demands – aspiring to play herself in the movie. Unable to convince Lillie otherwise, Chaplin’s instead instructed screenwriter, William Fairchild to write her out entirely. Star! gets a lot of criticism today for such liberal amendments to Gertie’s personal history. The movie does, in fact, skirt past many finer points in Lawrence’s lore, as well as ignoring her greatest contribution to the stage – playing Anna Leonowens in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I. And yet, one can sincerely forgive William Fairchild such absences, especially since, in a good many cases, only ‘names’ have been changed (to protect the ‘innocent’). As real life is oft imperfect and messy, Fairchild also telescopes Gertie’s many love affairs into an amalgam of four fictional suitors to satisfy the constraints of time. Thus, Star! strives for a tidier account of ‘the truth’. Fairchild’s achievement here is both large-scale and all-encompassing. He gets the big picture right, even if the details are occasionally sketchy and/or muddled beyond recognition.

The painstaking research performed by Robert Wise and his associates goes beyond this bottom line, culling and condensing information gleaned from numerous first-hand interviews with the people who once knew Gertrude Lawrence – in some cases, through her least flattering moments. From these eyewitness accounts, it became rather apparent there were at least two sides to Lawrence, for which – biographically thus far – either out of genuine reverence or an even greater anxiety to avoid a defamation of character lawsuit – one had been quietly swept under the rug. Initially, Wise and Chaplin planned an animated sequence to express the duality in Gertie’s personality, a sort of public charade vs. private woman bit of camp, counterbalanced by a running farcical commentary by Julie Andrews. Thankfully, this approach was abandoned early on. Instead, Fairchild substitutes a black-and-white newsreel prologue, serving as our segue between ‘history’, ‘truth’ and fiction. Intermittently thereafter, more pseudo-news reel footage surfaces to bridge the passage of the years. For concision, as well as for legal reasons, Fairchild's screenplay rechristens, combines and/or excludes some of the real people constituting Lawrence’s sphere of influence. To fill in for Beatrice Lillie’s glaring omission, Fairchild concocted, Billie Carleton (Lynley Laurence).  Fairchild made Lawrence’s first husband - dance director, Francis Gordon-Howley (renamed Jack Roper and played effectively by John Collin) roughly the same age as Gertie, when in reality Howley was a solid twenty-years her senior. Lawrence’s affair with Capt. Philip Astley was also reworked; the character now renamed Sir Anthony Spencer (Michael Craig), while Gertie’s engagement to Wall Street banker, Bert Taylor was entirely overlooked. Instead, the movie’s Gertie briefly tolerates a jealous love affair with a fictional stockbroker, Charles Fraser (Robert Reed) 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. There are 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 and were loaned out for many years thereafter before finally being auctioned off in the late 1970’s. 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 melody from Lady in the Dark. ‘Burlington Bertie’ marks Lawrence’s breakout for famed impresario, André Charlot (Alan Oppenheimer) - her nearly 3-month pregnancy camouflaged in hobo’s garb. 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 nostalgia excised with Andrews’ inimitable affinity for those early, yet even by 1968, all but forgotten music hall 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 descends on a whirling swing in her navy blue and silver sequined pants suit, thereafter cavorting with an assortment of colorfully-attired circus acrobats, jugglers, midgets and clowns. Bounced from buttocks to pelvis, Andrews’ saucy delivery evokes a deliciously stylized cynicism as she points to the foibles of a fictional social climber who, among her other misfires, lit the candles but tossed the taper away, only to become an orphan on Christmas Day; later, to get herself all dolled up in her satin and furs, to land herself a husband, though he wasn’t hers; whose searing white hot memoirs inspired wives to shoot their husbands in some thirty-three states, and, finally, succumbing 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 sequence apart from virtually everything gone before it. For this sequence, Wise’s maneuvers his camera beyond the proscenium, inviting the cinematic audience to partake of its absurdly garish spectacle in close-up. Contrariwise, the rest of the songs were deliberately shot from a distance to mark the proscenium 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 winds up becoming static or dull. Some, like ‘Someone to Watch Over Me’ are expertly executed as transitional pieces of self-reflection, with Andrews, voice throbbing to be loved, emoting beyond the power of the lyrics.

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, over-produced stage-to-screen clunkers to have soured the public on the genre as a whole. The demise of the musical was also hastened by the collapse of the studios once carefully maintained star system, and, by the influx of newly arrived artisans fresh from film school, weaned on the golden era, though eager to replace its imprint with their own. So too, were audiences increasingly turning away from the artifice of fantasy, seeking realism in lieu of spectacle. 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 jaded by this era’s high-priced fluff, the treacle too sticky, the staging failing to impress. Finally, unlike some of the more profitable efforts to arrive at the outset of the decade leading into its core years, (West Side Story, 1960; The Music Man, 1962, and, My Fair Lady, 1964, among them), Star! was not a Broadway-to-Hollywood hybrid.

Indeed, it owed much to the old MGM glamor days of the mid-1940’s when homegrown product built upon an ensconced studio style sold the bill affair with confidence to an audience. As such, Star! had no pre-sold title to be trumpeted by the marketing department. No precedence either, except among an aging demographic still able to recall Gertie Lawrence in her prime. The trick in the exercise therefore rested with Julie Andrews’ marquee-drawing power. Gertrude Lawrence had been a legend in her own time. Perhaps owing to that daunting iconography, Andrews had initially turned down a previous offer to portray her in the movies. But now, Andrews was, herself, ‘a star’ - pert and plucky, ‘practically perfect’ and squeaky-clean, expertly fitted into novice nuns and nannies on the screen. In some ways, it is this persona inculcated in The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins (1964) that did much to damper her reception with the public in Star! Despite Andrews ability to illustrate she was more than a fresh-faced chanteuse (her non-singing/dramatic turn in 1964’s The Americanization of Emily is superb) audiences impressions of what it meant to be Julie Andrews on the screen were 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, the picture proved the exception rather than the rule. Star! was a titanic misfire, eviscerated by the critics and all but ignored by audiences. Removed from all its hype, Star! today, clearly has more virtues than vices to recommend it.  In its truncated 120-mins. rechristened cut, Star! is undeniably an unforgivable hodgepodge. At 150-mins., the picture acquires a moody magnificence, offering faintly distinct glimmers of being something greater than the sum of its parts, especially as Robert Wise never allows the show’s 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 of instantly identifiable iconography as Wise’s The Sound of Music, yet still teeming in the director’s inimitable ingenuity and copious amounts of richly satisfying score and drama.

Julie Andrews and Daniel Massey are sublimely cast as the Ying and Yang - 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 by Coward to also refrain from camp. To listen to Massey’s incandescent, if slightly sordid, ‘Forbidden Fruit’ (a ditty about man’s perilous desire to possess that which, quite frankly he should not, whether peaches atop the highest bow or an already married Mrs. Brown) is to give the erudite and as saucy Coward his considerable due. And the chemistry between Massey and Andrews in their dramatic and comedic sparing offers a veritable feast of delicious moments, some more fast and loose that others with the specifics of Gertie’s life and lovers. While no one could – or rather, should – confuse William Fairchild’s reflections as the definitive ‘last’ word on Gertrude Lawrence, his narrative does retain just enough verisimilitude to be believed on its own terms and conditions as a big and bouncy biopic. With all of its excised footage reinstated Star! eloquently moves through its period recreations, intelligently scripted and impeccably hand-crafted.

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, musicals included, had left the confines of the back lot, the ‘opening up’ of stagecraft lending an air of quaintness and, perhaps, formaldehyde to the reputation of musicals made only a decade earlier. In this regard, Star! very much plays like a musical conceived for the 1940's screen. Its stylized sets are obvious. Its numbers are staged almost exclusively as works of stagecraft – framed by walls, painted backdrops or curtains. This adheres to a certain carefully curated nostalgia for those music hall and Broadway revues.  But it also suggests an artificial world almost entirely left in the rearview of cinema history by the time Star! went before the cameras. So, Star! was undeniably not what audiences wanted to see in 1968. A shame too, because Fairchild’s screenplay is a very rich tapestry, gingerly imbued with an almost lyrical fondness for another time, and, more than a modicum of glib cynicism for ‘then’ contemporary society, exercised in the picture’s upper-class snobbery and lowborn slum prudery with tongue-in-cheek waggishness and spellbinding professionalism.

Star! begins in earnest with a faux ‘main title’ sequence shot in sepia, 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 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) is about to set the record straight. It wasn’t all hearts and flowers, Gertie explains. Her dad was a bumbling rapscallion who left her mum when Gertie was still a child, and whose portly paramour, Rose (Beryl Reid) was to costar in their latest of many forgettable music halls engagements in London.

We regress – this time, into a DeLuxe-colored/Panavision daydream. 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, deliberate 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 with matinee idol, Jack Buchanan (Garrett Lewis) she upstages the other chorines with a farewell bell kick - 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. She is instead 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, the 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. 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 to bond persists, 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 hastens 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 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, fueled by a mutual disdain that ironically grows into hot-blooded lust. Aldrich produces 'Lady In The Dark' - Gertie's most ambitious and celebrated show. He also manages to win Gertie’s heart. Curiously, Star! never ventures beyond this moment of bliss – omitting what is arguably Lawrence’s most celebrated stagecraft - The King and I. Instead, after performing The Saga of Jenny, we end on 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 on route to their countryside honeymoon 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, the incapacity of the real Gertrude Lawrence’s tortured need to be loved, is brilliantly reconstituted as a big and glossy Hollywood musical. Fairchild’s exposition and Wise’s direction conspire on a first-rate entertainment.  And for much of its runtime, Star! is a genuine treat to behold, sustained by this delicate balance between intelligent introspection, witty humor and wholly concocted sentiment; all of it, slickly packaged into one handsomely mounted super production with class. Julie Andrews achieves the stature of another great lady without devolving into lampoon or mimicry.  Her Gertie Lawrence is nothing short of a revelation. The tartness of the diva is somehow reconciled with Andrews’ pluckier onscreen persona.  Star! plays far better minus our expectations for Robert Wise to deliver another ‘Sound of Music’. It really is an ‘apples to pomegranates’ comparison as Star! is a far more introspective and subtler critique of the garrulous Gertie. Right at the outset, Andrews’ mordant maven orders producer, Jerry Paul not to analyze her too closely - 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 unique as it typifies a certain derivative in highly stylized movie-making since to have gone the way of the dodo.

Viewed today, Star! plays like the beloved snapshot gleaned from two bygone eras; perhaps, the only ‘living’ record to remind us of its’ musical hall vintage legend. 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 negatives of the complete roadshow.  For decades thereafter, Star! was thought to be a lost film, merely referenced 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 – from elements virtually preserved for having lain dormant in storage during the intervening decades. 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 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, later resurrected on DVD in 1999. Since then, it has remained 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 2:20.1 aspect ratio. The DVD exhibits a slightly cropped image, albeit, one superior in its color rendering, with improved contrast to boot.

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 we ever get a remastering of Star! on Blu-ray. The image harvest on Star! on DVD has decidedly dated. Colors are slightly faded, belying the meticulous efforts of cinematographer, Ernest Laszlo. Regrettably, no digital clean-up has been applied. Age-related artifacts are everywhere, and occasionally, quite distracting. Star!'s original six-track stereo soundtrack has also been distilled into a slightly strident 5.1 Dolby Digital. The main benefit here is, of course, to hear Julie Andrews' sing 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! ever does come to Blu-ray, its soundtrack will be remastered to include as an isolated stereo score for our listening enjoyment.

Finally, 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 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 that 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 remote access. Bottom line: Star!’s absence from public view since 1994 remains a genuine mystery. It is a great musical – one, expertly handled with finely wrought performances and an outstanding cavalcade of song integrated into its dramatic elements. It may not be what audiences expected to see in 1968, but viewed today, Star! most assuredly take its rightful place among the top-tiered efforts of the 1960’s. While we wait in hope of an eventual Blu-ray, the DVD comes recommended – for content, at least.

FILM RATING (out of 5 - 5 being the best)

4.5

VIDEO/AUDIO

3

EXTRAS

2.5