Lawrence/Tussaud

"Extraordinary how potent cheap music is," said Gertrude Lawrence in Noel Coward's Private Lives. Extraordinary, too, how cheap potentially potent movies like Star can be. Theoretically, this screen biography of Lawrence holds the most powerful combination of ingredients available without a doctor's prescription: the story of the brightest star of the musical theater; songs by Cole Porter, Gershwin, Coward; Julie Andrews in the title role; all under the direction of Robert Wise, who made such box-office hits as The Sound of Music and West Side Story. Actually, the production is a hollow, frantic caricature--The Character Assassination of Gertrude Lawrence as Performed by the Inmates of Madame Tussaud's.

There is oleaginous Alexander Woollcott, larding it over Broadway in the person of Jock Livingston--without any sense of what made Woollcott the most powerful critic of his time. There is Noel Coward, every precious diphthong faultlessly mimicked by Daniel Massey --with only the barest dash of the saline wit that has kept him quoted for almost 50 years. And there is Gertrude Lawrence, played by Julie Andrews. Visually, Julie has vanished into the part. The pert little nose has been thickened, the hairline lowered, the eyebrows thinned, the mouth made severe and straight. It is only the emotional makeup that is wrong. Lawrence was one of those rare anomalies, like Lotte Lenya or Marlene Dietrich, for whom pitch was not important. She could wander off key in every bar, yet the song's content remained pure and intense. Andrews is ten times the musician Lawrence was; her voice never varies a hemisemidemiquaver from the written notes. In the exuberant comic numbers, person and impersonator coincide. But when Julie attempts a bittersweet ballad, like Do, Do, Do or My Ship, the styles collide. Lawrence always suggested a melancholy sensuality; Andrews continually gives the feeling that beneath the lyrics, everything is just supercal-if r agilisticexpialidocious.

Like Funny Girl, which is also about an intense, driven actress, Star wastes its emotion on backstage bromides. Again there is the rags-to-bitches process, with the innocent little slum waif metamorphizing into a neurotic stranger to her husband, her child and, finally, herself. Again there are the hoofing and puffing resurrections of ricky-tick dance routines, which have long since been kidded to death in Thoroughly Modern Millie and on Laugh-In. The scrawny script merely vamps till the next number is ready; the shimmering show biz of the Twenties and Thirties, which once seemed spun of gossamer, is now only cobwebs; Wise's special effects are ruinously commonplace.

There still persists the notion that Hollywood's greatest art forms are the private-eye picture, the screwball comedy and the musical. Judging from the three latest melodic revivals, Funny Girl, Finian's Rainbow and Star, it may be time for the return of Topper and 5am Spade.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.