Product: Funny Girl [VHS] (1968)
Rating: 5.0
Mrs. Arnstein, Mrs. Arnstein. What a Beautiful Beautiful Name...
When Barbra Streisand reprised her role as Fanny Brice in the movie version of Funny Girl, her stardom was cemented. Not only was it a huge hit, but it was loved by audiences, has gone on to be one of her most adored performances, and made her an Academy Award winning actress. Through it all, she deserved every bit of it.The movie tells a loosely-told story of famous vaudeville star Fanny Brice, and how she struggled for fame and finding the man she loves in the first half, and the second half goes more dramatic, telling how her true love, Nicky Arnstein, threatens to drag her down with him as he digs deeper and deeper into gambling debt and corrupt behavior. The story, if you really pay attention to it, is not terribly deep or original, and in the middle switches from a rags-to-riches/beating the odds in show business story to a more dramatic star-crossed lovers story. But even so , with likeable characters like Fanny, Nicky, Mr. Ziegfeld, and so on, you cannot help but feel involved in their ordeals.The performances here are all top notch. Omar Sharif brings a perfect amount of charm and shadiness to Nicky, and Walter Pidgeon is delightfully smug and caring as Florenz Ziegfeld. But the performance to watch, without a doubt, is Barbra Streisand as Fanny. She not only balances her comic and dramatic abilities beautifully, but makes us really like Fanny as a friend. She is confident, naive, happy-go-lucky, and vulnerable all at once. She deserved the Oscar more than anyone else that night, and she got it.Last, but not least, the songs are just magnificent. Almost exclusively sung by Barbra, she is perfectly at home singing all of them, and succeeds in most. She's fun in "I'm The Greatest Star," radiantly sexy in "I'd Rather Be Blue Over You," tearjerking in "People," and, of course, her bravura performance of "Don't Rain on My Parade" (the scene with the tugboat will give you shivers the same way Julie Andrews' scene on the hill does in Sound of Music). Some songs are good, and some songs are great, but no song is mediocre.I could go on and on, but I want those who haven't discovered the movie yet to find out on their own. Barbra's fans will worship it, fans of musicals will love it, and even those who don't care for either musicals or Barbra Streisand will smile at least a few times. If you haven't seen it yet, don't waste another second.