OVP: Star! (1968)

Film: Star! (1968)

Stars: Julie Andrews, Richard Crenna, Michael Craig, Daniel Massey, Robert Reed

Director: Robert Wise

Oscar History: 7 nominations (Best Supporting Actor-Daniel Massey, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume Design, Scoring, Sound, Original Song-"Star!")

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2021 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different one Alfred Hitchcock's Leading Ladies.  This month, our focus is on Julie Andrews-click here to learn more about Ms. Andrews (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We are hitting the halfway point in our month devoted to Julie Andrews by discussing what is seen as one of the nadirs of her career (the actual nadir would happen decades later when doctors would destroy her flawless singing voice in a botched surgery).  In 1968, after a string of enviable hits including Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music, Hawaii, and Thoroughly Modern Millie, it felt like Andrews could do no wrong, but in Hollywood even the brightest of stars can fall, and that happened that year with, well, Star!.  The film was wildly expensive, the kind of musical that had stopped consistently being profitable as early as 1954, but Andrews had managed to keep in the black.  This wasn't the case after 1967, both Star! and Andrews' next picture Darling Lili would be two of the biggest bombs in Hollywood in their era, and just a few years after she saved Fox with The Sound of Music, Julie Andrews was putting it back on the brink.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie, nearly three hours long, is weirdly thin on plot, so this is going to be a short paragraph.  Essentially, we have Andrews as famed vaudeville singer Gertrude Lawrence, who with her friend Noel Coward (Massey) became massive stage successes.  We see a traditional story where Gertrude starts out poor, but her immense talent & pluck get her noticed, and she moves on to bigger-and-better things.  Along-the-way, though, she develops a taste for extravagance, and despite making boatloads of money throughout her career, she's consistently broke.  The movie regularly cuts from Lawrence's spiraling romantic & financial life (she has multiple suitors before ending on Richard Crenna's Richard Aldrich), and weirdly the film finishes before both Lawrence's greatest triumph (playing Anna in the original run of The King & I) and tragic death at the age of 54 from liver cancer.

Watching Star!, I was struck at once by the fact that its reputation as a gargantuan bomb is unwarranted, but also that it totally makes sense that the movie was not a success.  After Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, Star! is merely okay.  There's pleasantness here (the musical numbers are nice, the costumes are grand, Andrews sounds good), but the plot itself is ridiculously underwritten.  There's no sense of who Lawrence is, and her troubles feel watered down to keep the film feel-good.  Also, her romantic life, which I suspect in real life was a bit messier (i.e. romantic relationships overlapping frequently with other men) is too convoluted with interchangeable beaus for me to be able to keep track of who was supposed to be winning her heart.  These are not insurmountable problems, but they are the kind that I get why audiences didn't show up.

The film won seven Oscar nominations, though Andrews herself was not one of them.  Daniel Massey got his only nomination (making him part of one of the very few father-son nomination teams with the acting Oscars, as his father Raymond was cited for 1940's Abe Lincoln in Illinois), and I actually was fine with this even if it's not a "great" performance.  Massey steals most of the movie, and is charming as Noel Coward, and does enough to underline why Noel is not one of Gertrude's lovers (he prefers the company of men) while not offending the censors of the day.  

The rest of the nominations follow a similar boat-not egregious, but hardly warranted.  The song "Star!" plays over the opening credits but is weirdly not one of the numbers we see performed (though its musical bridge comes up later in the picture), and it's good-but-not-great (it's the kind of song that sounds good but I dare you to hum it a few hours later).  The sound is good, though like the scoring it's more a case of it not being memorable-there are no real numbers in this other than perhaps the tried-and-true "Someone to Watch Over Me" that Andrews totally nails, and when you have peak Julie Andrews, you should be trying harder.  The cinematography is also nondescript-the concept of doing all of these staged sequences feels a bit of a cheat in this era, like they're just moving from sound stage to sound stage rather than feeling properly interactive with a larger audience (it never feels "real").  The best nominations were for Art Direction (all of the sets have their own flare, and I loved some of the crazy mansions these people occupy) and Costume Design (Lawrence, a famed clothes horse, comes across well in her opulent & growing attire in ways that Andrews is never achieve with her acting).  All-in-all, this is fine but forgettable, and though I wanted to save it, its most interesting calling card is that it was such an infamous flop.  Next week, though, Andrews will be starting a comeback in a surprise hit that would mark a second chapter in her film career.