Star! (re-titled Those Were the Happy Times for its 1969 re-release) is a 1968 American biographical musical film directed by Robert Wise and starring Julie Andrews. The screenplay by William Fairchild is based on the life and career of British performer Gertrude Lawrence.
Star! | |
---|---|
Poster by Howard Terpning | |
Directed by | Robert Wise |
Produced by | Saul Chaplin |
Written by | William Fairchild |
Starring | Julie Andrews Richard Crenna Daniel Massey |
Music by | Lennie Hayton |
Cinematography | Ernest Laszlo |
Edited by | William H. Reynolds |
Distributed by | 20th Century Fox |
Release date | July 18, 1968(United Kingdom, premiere) October 22, 1968 (United States) |
Running time | 175 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $14.32 million |
Box office | $4 million (USA) $10 million (worldwide) $4.2 million (rentals) |
Screenplay
The film opens in 1940, with Lawrence in a screening room watching a documentary film chronicling her life, then flashes back to Clapham in 1915, when she leaves home to join her vaudevillian father in a dilapidated Brixton music hall. Eventually she joins the chorus in André Charlot's West End revue. She reunites with close childhood friend Noël Coward who provides witty commentary on Gertie's actions.
Charlot becomes annoyed with Gertie's efforts to stand out, literally, from the chorus. He threatens to fire her, but stage manager Jack Roper intercedes and gets her hired as a general understudy to the leads. She marries Jack, but it becomes clear she is more inclined to perform onstage than stay home and play wife. While pregnant, she insists on going on for an absent star, and captivates the audience with her own star-making performance of "Burlington Bertie". Charlot and Roper witness the audience's warm approval, and both realize, Charlot grudgingly and Roper wistfully, that Gertie belongs on the stage.
After their daughter Pamela is born, Gertrude is angered when Roper takes the baby on a pub crawl, and leaves him. A subsequent courtship with Sir Anthony Spencer, an English nobleman, polishes Gertie's rough edges and transforms her into a lady. Caught at a chic supper club when she is supposed to be on a sick day, she is fired from the Charlot Revue. Squired by Spencer, she becomes a 'society darling'. Coward then convinces Charlot to feature her in his new production, and she is finally recognized as a star. When the revue opens in New York City, she dallies with an actor and a banker, bringing the number of her suitors to three.
Gertrude faces financial ruin after spending all her considerable earnings, but ultimately manages to pay back her creditors and retain her glamour. As her career soars, her long-distance relationship with her daughter deteriorates. When Pamela cancels an anticipated holiday with Gertie, she gets extremely drunk and insults a roomful of people at a surprise birthday party thrown by Coward. Among the people insulted at the party is American theatre producer Richard Aldrich. When he returns to escort the hungover star home, he gives an honest appraisal of her. She is insulted, then intrigued by him, making an unannounced visit to his Cape Playhouse where she proposes to play the lead. They argue at rehearsal. He proposes marriage; she throws him out.
Back on Broadway, she has trouble getting a handle on a crucial "The Saga of Jenny" number in Lady in the Dark. Aldrich turns up at a daunting rehearsal where he observes her frustration and takes her, with Coward, out to a nightclub. She protests, then realizes the kind of performance they are watching is the key to her dilemma in the show. Coward pronounces him "a very clever man". After a rousing performance of "Jenny", the film ends with her marriage to Aldrich, eight years before her triumph in The King and I and untimely death from liver cancer at the age of 54.
- Julie Andrews as Gertrude Lawrence
- Richard Crenna as Richard Aldrich
- Michael Craig as Sir Anthony Spencer
- Daniel Massey as Noël Coward
- Robert Reed as Charles Fraser
- Bruce Forsyth as Arthur Lawrence
- Beryl Reid as Rose
- John Collin as Jack Roper
- Alan Oppenheimer as André Charlot
- Richard Karlan as David Holtzmann, Gertrude's attorney
- Lynley Laurence as Billie Carleton
- Garrett Lewis as Jack Buchanan
- Anthony Eisley as Ben Mitchell
- Jock Livingston as Alexander Woollcott
- J. Pat O'Malley as Dan
- Harvey Jason as Bert
- Matilda Calnan as Dorothy
- Peter Church as Narrator (voice only)
- Jenny Agutter as Pamela Roper (uncredited)
- Don Crichton as 'Limehouse Blues' dance partner (uncredited)
- Bernard Fox as Assistant to Lord Chamberlain (uncredited)
- Paul Harris as Soldier (uncredited)
- Anna Lee as Hostess (uncredited)
- Tony Lo Bianco as New York reporter (uncredited)
- Damian London as Jerry Paul (uncredited)
- Lester Matthews as Lord Chamberlain (uncredited)
- Star! – Extended Version – (originally released as a 45rpm single; added to the end of the CD; used with director/producer's approval to underscore cast of characters roll for the VHS/Laserdisc release)
According to extensive production details provided in the DVD release of the film, when Julie Andrews signed on to star in The Sound of Music, her contract with Twentieth Century-Fox was a two-picture deal. As Music neared completion, director Robert Wise and producer Saul Chaplin had grown so fond of Julie, that they wanted to make sure that their team would be the one to pick up the studio's option for the other picture "before anybody else got to her first". (Source: Saul Chaplin, From Fact to Phenomenon documentary). Wise's story editor Max Lamb suggested a biopic of Gertrude Lawrence and, although Andrews previously had rejected offers to portray the entertainer, she was equally keen to work with Wise and Chaplin again as they were to work with her, and subsequently warmed to their approach to the story. She signed for $1 million against 10 percent of the gross plus 35 cents for each soundtrack album sold.
Once Andrews was on board, Wise bought the rights to both Lawrence's 1945 autobiography A Star Danced and her second husband's 1954 memoir Gertrude Lawrence as Mrs. A. Max Lamb did extensive research, including numerous interviews with people who actually had known Lawrence. It became clear that the interviews provided a more accurate account than the obviously rosy picture in the books, so they became the basis for the screenplay. Wise felt it was important to hire a British screenwriter, and decided on William Fairchild. The contrast of the rosy impression of her life in the books against the less glamorous real story from the interviews found its way into the script, which initially had an animated Gertie telling the story while the live version played out what (more or less) really happened. Eventually, Fairchild suggested Lawrence's story be told in (color) flashback while she watched a (black-and-white) documentary about her life, thus allowing the "real" Gertie in a screening room set to comment on the veracity of the "reel" Gertie in the film within the film.
Fairchild's screenplay renamed, replaced or combined some real people, for dramatic and legal reasons. Two of Lawrence's closest friends, Noël Coward and Beatrice Lillie, were approached regarding the rights to portray them in the film. While Coward was generally supportive, suggesting only small alterations to his character's dialogue, Miss Lillie had a "manager" who demanded that she play herself, in addition to numerous script changes that enlarged her role. Wise then asked Fairchild to find the name of another female performer Gertie had worked with, who was already deceased. Billie Carleton became the composite character that replaced Miss Lillie in the film. When Lawrence reconnects with her wayward father in the film, he is performing in music halls with a mature woman who joins him when he departs for a job in South Africa. In reality Rose was a chorus girl not much older than Lawrence, and she remained in the UK. On screen, Lawrence's first husband Jack Roper is roughly her age, whereas in real life his name was Francis Gordon-Howley and he was twenty years her senior. Her upper-class Guardsman boyfriend, actually Capt. Philip Astley, is identified as Sir Tony Spencer on screen, and the Wall Street financier named Ben Mitchell in the film was really Bert Taylor.
Daniel Massey, who portrayed Noël Coward, was Coward's godson in real life. His performance earned one of the seven Academy Award nominations for the film. In his commentary for the laserdisc and DVD release of the film, Massey reveals he was unhappy with the sound of his voice when he saw the film for the first time. As production wrapped in late 1967, he—at his own request—re-dubbed all of his dialogue before returning home to London. Massey's commentary also recounts a conversation in which Coward addressed his own sexual orientation, which is barely hinted at in the film. Massey quotes Coward saying "I've tried it all, from soup to nuts..." confirming his preference for the latter.
Michael Kidd choreographed the musical sequences. Both he and Andrews have talked about his pushing her beyond what she thought her limits were, particularly for "Burlington Bertie" and "Jenny"—which turned out to be among her best moments on film. Andrews has said that her lasting friendship with Kidd and his dance assistant/wife Shelah is one of the things she valued most from the experience. Boris Leven was responsible for the outstanding production design and his realistic sets took over nine different stages on the Fox lot. Famous fashion designer Donald Brooks designed 3,040 individual costumes for the film, including a record 125 outfits for Andrews alone. The $750,000 cost of Andrews' extravagant wardrobe was subsidized by Western Costume company, which took ownership after filming. Western rented them out to many subsequent TV and movie productions, (including Funny Lady) for over 20 years, then auctioned most of them, along with hundreds of other famous costumes, at Butterfield & Butterfield's in West Hollywood.
At a time when the popularity of roadshow theatrical releases in general, and musicals in particular, were on the wane, the United States was one of the last countries in which the film was released. When the film was in production, 15,000 people responded to promotional ads placed by 20th Century Fox for advance ticket sales in New York City, but a year later, when the studio followed up by mailing them order forms, only a very small percentage actually bought tickets. Sales were higher for Wednesday matinees than for Saturday nights, which indicated that a crucial component—young adults—would not be a large part of the picture's audience. The film opened in the US with little advance sale, and good-to-mediocre reviews.
Star! was a commercial disappointment in its initial run, suffering about 20 minutes of studio-requested and director-approved cuts, while still in its roadshow engagements. Hoping to recoup some of its estimated $14 million cost, 20th Century Fox executive Richard Zanuck decided to do some primitive "market research" (testing three titles: "Music for the Lady", "Those Were the Happy Days" and "Star!"), before withdrawing the film in the spring of 1969. The studio then proceeded to substantially cut and re-market the film under a new title, Those Were the Happy Times. Wise, who did not believe cutting the film would work, declined to be involved in the editing, and asked that the credit "A Robert Wise Film" be removed. Following instructions from Zanuck, William H. Reynolds, the film's original editor, reluctantly but very competently removed scenes and whole sequences, including many of the musical numbers, paring the film's running time from 175 to 120 minutes, (which involved overlapping sound and adding a new shot to bridge some cuts). A very simple new title card was created as well. However, when the short retitled version was released in the fall of 1969, the changes left some holes in the plot, and did little to improve box office receipts. The fact that the reissue was to be shown only in 35mm coincidentally saved the original camera negative of the film from being altered.
Renata Adler of The New York Times (who reportedly left the screening at intermission) observed, "A lot of the sets are lovely, Daniel Massey acts beautifully as a kind of warmed Nöel Coward, and the film, which gets richer and better as it goes along, has a nice scene from Private Lives. People who like old-style musicals should get their money's worth. So should people who like Julie Andrews. But people who liked Gertrude Lawrence had better stick with their record collections and memories."
Variety said, "Julie Andrews' portrayal . . . occasionally sags between musical numbers but the cast and team of redoubtable technical contributors have helped to turn out a pleasing tribute to one of the theatre's most admired stars. It gives a fascinating coverage of Lawrence's spectacular rise to showbiz fame, and also a neatly observed background of an epoch now gone."
Time Out London says, "Wise's biopic hardly deserved the rough treatment it received from most critics and audiences, who had been led by the studio's advertising to expect another Sound of Music. This was a far more ambitious project; it backfired, but it backfired with a certain amount of honour. Daniel Massey's mincing portrayal of his godfather Noël Coward wins hands down over all the other impersonations."
TV Guide thought "it deserved a better fate for its enormous score, top-flight production, excellent choreography, and
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