text: I remember when this piece of trash came out, all the newspapers were squawking about how it had taken Barbra Streisand years to get the film made. Well it couldn't have taken that many years; the play only opened in 1975, eight years previously. It made a Broadway star of the great actress Tovah Feldshuh, who probably should have been cast in the film, but NOOOOO...the Great STAR BARBRA HAD TO DO IT HER WAY. AND WITH MUSIC NO LESS! This film is a total disaster from start to finish. For one thing, Barbra was FORTY YEARS OLD when she made it and she looked every minute of it. There was no way anyone could possibly swallow her as a young girl yearning to study Torah. And then when she dresses up as a boy it gets campy. I get the impression that Streisand could not bear to be unattractive so she played around with the make-up; she is prettier as a boy than she is as a girl. And as if that is not bad enough, she gets involved with both her schoolmate Avigdor (Mandy Patinkin, whose best moment is the shot of his naked rear end) AND his fiancée (Amy Irving, who does her usual sleepwalker routine, a bit of schtick the poor woman always resorts to when the director ignores her and she does not know what she is doing). Yentl even goes so far as to marry the girl; I won't even bother to mention the "wedding night" scene.<br /><br />Then there is the music. Nine totally forgettable songs, all sung by Streisand via voice-over (presumably as a look inside her mind), and each one as intrusive and irritating as fingernails on a blackboard.<br /><br />I won't say that Streisand does not show a glimmer of promise as a director here; some of the visuals are lovely (Patinkin's backside especially), and she has a good eye for balance. The problem with this movie is that she won't get out of her own way. I did not believe her for one second in the title role; she should NEVER have added the songs, and on top of that the whole mess goes on for two hours and fifteen minutes. I was sick of the whole sorry mess after forty-five minutes.<br /><br />Awful, awful, awful.