SIMON HEFFER HINTERLAND

I always thought I loathed film musicals… and then along came ‘Funny Girl’

If we are all victims of our upbringing, I really ought to like Hollywood musicals. My late mother adored them. The proverbial wet Sunday afternoon seemed all too often to revolve around one of the classics on television: South Pacific, Oklahoma!, Carousel, Annie Get Your Gun, Calamity Jane and My Fair Lady came one after the other, and I loathed them so much I seldom lasted more than 10 minutes.

But about 35 years ago, laid up with something worse than man flu, I found myself stuck on a sofa, mindlessly staring at the television and estranged from the remote control, for which I lacked the energy to search. Just when I had thought things couldn’t get worse, a musical came on: Funny Girl. It rapidly dawned on me that I was completely gripped. Had I been mistaken about my antipathy to the genre? Or was I so enfeebled that what passed for my critical faculty had closed down? It was, it seems, neither. I still dislike musicals; but Funny Girl really is magnificent.

I have spent years trying to rationalise why it is so good. Obviously, there is a stunning performance – her first on film – by Barbra Streisand.

She had sung the role of Fanny Brice 700 times on Broadway, and the producers and director were right to agree she should have the role in the film version. It is impossible to think of anyone else playing it. And although she overshadows her leading man, Omar Sharif – indeed, men are in the shadows throughout this film – he is excellent as Fanny’s delinquent husband, Nicky Arnstein. (If Arnstein had anything like Sharif ’s abilities as a card player, he would never have had so much trouble.)

Being boringly literal-minded, my problem with musicals is that in real life people do not burst into song while going about their daily business. (I have also always struggled with opera. The exception is Wagner; but then what he wrote isn’t really opera.) That it seems entirely natural for Streisand to take a train trip, turn up at a ferry terminal in New York and head out into the harbour on a boat while singing Don’t Rain on My Parade leads us towards the real genius of Funny Girl: the director, William Wyler.

He had the most distinguished career in Hollywood of any director of his era, and I have written about two of his films before: The Big Country, from 1958, and (in my view the greatest American film of all time) The Best

Years of Our Lives, from 1946. Yet

Funny Girl – the penultimate film of a career lasting over 45 years – was the first time Wyler had directed a musical.

The plot, and not the music, predominates, as it inevitably would in a film whose director had spent his entire career in the service of storytelling. The narrative – about a powerful woman who, from nothing, triumphs in showbusiness, while

PERFECTBarbra Streisand made her film debut in Funny Girl and won an Oscar