Cult of Criterion: Funny Girl

In Cult Of Criterion, The A.V. Club highlights a new release from The Criterion Collection each month, examining the films entering an increasingly accessible film canon.

Funny Girl might sound a bit conventional to focus on for a series that has “cult” in its title, but compared to the rest of the Criterion releases this month (which include Godzilla, Seven Samurai, Scarface, Paper Moon, and The Shape Of Water), Barbra Streisand’s 1968 screen debut might be the one deserving most of a little extra love. As Hollywood’s increasingly nervous attitude towards musicals keeps straying towards genre cowardice, Funny Girl’s unconventional approach to convention feels as fresh as ever. Its star-driven balancing act between tried-and-true traditionalism and youthful irony keeps you rapt, amazed that the do-it-all wunderkind at its center can truly make it all the way across the tightrope.

Though it can sometimes feel like Barbra Streisand’s electric charisma would jolt any film to life, Funny Girl director William Wyler was the perfect lightning rod. Two legends at the respective beginning and end of their careers, Streisand became the final member of Wyler’s personal Oscar troupe. The Ben-Hur filmmaker directed more performances to Oscar nominations (and wins) than anyone in history, and he’d given Audrey Hepburn a similarly starry springboard in Roman Holiday 15 years earlier. With Funny Girl, Streisand made his job easy.

The pair’s close working relationship is discussed at length in a new audio essay Streisand recorded for the Criterion release, and she makes it sound miraculous. Though Wyler and Streisand’s dueling particularities have long been a source of rumor, the pair spoke of each other with mutual admiration. “God, I loved him,” Streisand says in the special feature. For his part, Wyler recalled that, “I’d much rather work with someone like Barbra, a perfectionist insisting on giving her best at all times and expecting it of everyone else, than a star who doesn’t give a hoot.”

Streisand had already played Fanny Brice, a loose take on a real 1920s singer-comedian, thousands of times on Broadway. Her star had been born over and over, every night, for years. She’d endlessly fallen for the degenerate gambler Nick (in the film, Omar Sharif), then emasculated him so badly he had to go to prison. She knew Fanny, she knew the songs. She just didn’t know movies. But the same thundering voice, Borscht self-depreciation, and emotional flexibility that made her a nightclub, talk show, and Broadway smash translated perfectly to the screen.

As she leapfrogged from burlesque to the Ziegfeld Follies, Fanny’s have-your-cake-and-eat-it personality not only stole the show, it established a transitional kind of musical stardom for the screen. While some traditional musicals were still raking in cash at the box office (The Sound Of Music, which Wyler almost directed, broke records just a few years earlier), many felt increasingly stodgy as the ‘60s grew into the ‘70s. The big-hearted earnestness of “People” was harder to swallow in an increasingly cynical era, unless spiced with some prickly, almost hateful, reality. 

Self-loathing runs rampant throughout Funny Girl, but so too does an animosity towards the society that has instilled that loathing. Its men are fools, and the worst part of the film is when it slows down to seriously focus on Nick and Fanny’s marriage. The film needs patter. Its blood is acidic; when it stops burning, it stops feeling alive. Fanny greeting her reflection with “Hello, gorgeous” is memorable, but Fanny machine-gunning down an imagined audience moments later is relatable. She embodies the flickering, but not fully snuffed, hopes of her time, injected into a film just as interested in messing with the formula.

Whether Fanny is thoughtfully considering the weight of her life’s choices—wrapped head to toe in leopard print, her hard-lit profile powerfully framed by cinematographer Harry Stradling—or taking the piss out of Swan Lake with sarcastic asides as the camera drunkenly sways back and forth, Streisand goes big and Funny Girl’s style rises up to meet her. It’s easy to entirely credit the success of the rags-to-riches musical to its lead, both fulfilling the truth of the lyric “I’m the greatest star there is by far, but no one knows it,” and deflating it enough so that we don’t roll our eyes. But Wyler, the man Streisand would later call for advice when she turned to directing with Yentl, and his team knew how to add fuel to her fire.

That meant helicopter cameraman Nelson Tyler inventing a new aerial rig for the “Don’t Rain On My Parade” number, which rivals anything in a modern Mission: Impossible as the camera thrillingly spies Fanny belting on a speeding train and a tugboat. That meant singing “My Man” live, over and over, until the tears ran down Fanny’s face the right way, until Streisand all but evaporated into the blackness of the frame. It meant tiny freeze-frames, moments of wry voiceover, pieces of perfected parody all supporting a performance that was always going to outlive its movie.

Streisand was only on Broadway twice: The first with I Can Get It For You Wholesale, the second with Funny Girl. She earned Tony nominations for both. Her first album, The Barbra Streisand Album, won Album of the Year at the Grammys. Naturally, her first movie would net her an Oscar. It was the final feather in Wyler’s cap (Funny Girl was his penultimate movie) and the final piece of proof Streisand could provide to the world that she’d be a star anywhere.