DVDs: Love with All the Trimmings
Alan Jay Lerner's life-long fascination with reincarnation and extrasensory perception resulted in the 1965 Broadway musical On a Clear Day You Can See Forever. Originally titled, after its heroine, I Picked a Daisy, the show was first announced as a collaboration between Lerner and Richard Rodgers. It was to star Barbara Harris as young New Yorker Daisy Gamble, who can make flowers grow, knows when a phone is going to ring, and seems to have had a previous life as Melinda, a nineteenth-century English aristocrat. Harris's co-star was to have been Robert Horton, playing the doctor who treats Daisy but winds up falling for Melinda.
Rodgers couldn't tolerate Lerner's procrastination, however, and the project instead became a collaboration between Lerner and composer Burton Lane, with whom Lerner had written the songs for two films, Royal Wedding and an unproduced Huckleberry Finn. After numerous delays and the withdrawal of Bob Fosse as director, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever finally happened, with Robert Lewis Lerner's Brigadoon directing and Louis Jourdan Lerner's Gigi starring opposite Harris, for whom the role of Daisy was written. During the show's tryout, it became evident that Jourdan was not up to the demands of the songs, and he was replaced by John Cullum.
The New York critics loved Harris and the Lerner-Lane score, which included the title number, "She Wasn't You," "Come Back to Me," and "Melinda." But they were for the most part unhappy with the book, finding the scenes involving Daisy more enjoyable than those concerning Melinda.
Barbra Streisand began her film career in the '60s with three movies adapted from Broadway musicals. First, of course, was the screen version of her own Broadway hit, Funny Girl, followed by Hello, Dolly! and then Clear Day, the latter originally conceived as a screen vehicle for Audrey Hepburn. Although Streisand lacked Harris's warmth and lovability, she was an apt choice for Daisy/Melinda, as her own persona veered sharply between glamorous, sophisticated diva and gawky contemporary New Yorker.
The Clear Day film dropped several of the shows songs, including "Tosy and Cosh," "On the S.S. Bernard Cohn," "Don't Tamper with My Sister," and "When I'm Being Born Again." Three new songs were added: "Love with All the Trimmings" and "Go to Sleep" for Streisand, and "Who Is There Among Us Who Knows?," a duet for Streisand and Jack Nicholson, playing the new and mostly extraneous character of Daisy's hippie ex-stepbrother, Tad. Bob Newhart played another new character, Dr. Mason Hume, chairman of the board of a New York college.
With a screenplay by Lerner that differed markedly from his stage script, the Clear Day film was directed by Vincente Minnelli, celebrated for such movie musicals as Meet Me in St. Louis, The Bandwagon, and Lerner's An American in Paris, Brigadoon, and Gigi. Streisand got the best in costume designers, with My Fair Lady's Cecil Beaton designing Melinda's gowns and Arnold Scassi creating Daisy's outfits.
Clear Day was filmed on Paramount Studios' sound stages, with some location shooting in New York and at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton, England. The latter would be the location for what many thought was the film's best scene, Melinda's seduction of a future husband through the song "Love with All the Trimmings."
Richard Harris was first announced as Streisand's co-star in the film, and when he withdrew, Gregory Peck and Frank Sinatra were approached. Chosen instead was French actor-singer Yves Montand, with the character's name changed from Dr. Bruckner to Dr. Chabot. Montand's performance would become the most maligned aspect of the finished picture, and it is true that audiences chuckled when Dr. Chabot began to warble in star singer Montand's customary smooth style.
Minnelli asked Streisand to visit a psychiatrist to explore the notion of a split personality, but she refused. Nonetheless, the star and her director got on well, and there were apparently none of the on-set blow-ups that had occurred on Hello, Dolly! During the filming of Clear Day, Streisand won her first Oscar, for Funny Girl.
The finished film cost $10 million and was to have been released as a three-hour, reserved-seat "road show." But the studio decided to trim the film to 129 minutes, eliminating the musical numbers "Wait Till We're Sixty-Five" and "Who Is There Among Us Who Knows?" Montand complained that much of his material had been cut, although Minnelli disputed the charge. Released by Paramount in June 1970, the Clear Day film returned its cost but was not a big money-maker.
With Funny Girl and Hello, Dolly! already on DVD, we now have the DVD premiere of Clear Day, and it's disappointing to note that none of the cut songs or scenes have found their way onto the disc as bonus material. In fact, the DVD offers only the film itself, with no bonus features whatsoever. Still, it's a good-looking, widescreen transfer with fine surround sound, and Streisand fans will be glad that Clear Day is now on DVD.
MY SISTER EILEEN Sony/Columbia
Ruth McKenney's autobiographical short stories, collected in a book called My Sister Eileen, were the basis for the 1940 Broadway comedy hit of the same title, written by Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov and starring Shirley Booth as writer Ruth Sherwood. Two years later, Columbia Pictures filmed the play, with Rosalind Russell taking Booth's role.
The next step for the property was a Broadway musical, with Russell again playing Ruth, in the 1953 smash Wonderful Town, featuring a score by Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green. Retaining the rights to the property, Columbia planned a film version of the stage musical. But when negotiations with the authors broke down, Columbia decided instead to produce its own musical version of the property, one that would revert to the original title. The result was a 1955 Technicolor and CinemaScope musical film remake called My Sister Eileen, and it's this movie that Sony has just issued on DVD. The '42 Russell non-musical film was released on laserdisc, but is not yet on DVD.
To write the songs for the '55 My Sister Eileen, Columbia hired the team of Jule Styne and Leo Robin, responsible for the Broadway hit Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The film was directed and co-written by Richard Quine, who knew his way around the property from having played Wreck in the Broadway play and '42 film.
Columbia was interested in starring Judy Holliday in its My Sister Eileen musical. But when Holliday realized that this would not be the musical written by her friends Comden, Green, and Bernstein, she passed on the project. So the musical role of Ruth went to Betty Garrett, who had appeared in MGM's On the Town, based on another Bernstein-Comden-Green stage musical. Janet Leigh played Ruth's sister, aspiring actress Eileen; Jack Lemmon was magazine editor Robert Baker; and Dick York "Bewitched" was Wreck.
An attorney from Columbia was on the set of My Sister Eileen, making sure that the musical film did not resemble Wonderful Town, even though both musicals were based on the Chodorov-Fields play. And the viewer will note that there are substantial differences between the two musicals. For one thing, the roles of drugstore manager Frank Lippencott and lecherous reporter Chick Clark were built up in the film for dancers Bob billed as "Robert" Fosse and Tommy Rall, with Fosse also contributing the film's most distinguished element, its choreography. The movie is also less of a vehicle for the actress playing Ruth than was Wonderful Town.
Then too, Quine and Blake Edwards' screenplay supplies a new plot element that has Ruth pretending to Baker that she has no sister, and that she's actually the man-trap model for the Eileen of her stories. This leads Baker to believe that Ruth is far more experienced with men than she actually is.
The nine musical numbers of My Sister Eileen almost never overlap with the songs of Wonderful Town. True, the '55 musical film has a conga sequence, but it's just a dance and not a song, and the cadets and the conga were, after all, in the original play. The catchiest of the film's songs is "We're Great But No One Knows It," in which Wreck and landlord Appopolous attempt to instill confidence in Ruth and Eileen as the girls go off for their first day in the city.
For obvious reasons, this Sister Eileen is worth a look. Not only does it involve Broadway talents like Styne, Fosse, and Garrett. But it's inevitably intriguing to compare two musical versions of the same property, particularly when they share some of the same dialogue.
One is likely to conclude, though, that Wonderful Town is superior in all respects to the screen musical, which possesses not a single song to equal any in the Comden-Green-Bernstein score. There's a blandness about this My Sister Eileen that's not to be found in the '42 film or '53 stage musical. And probably because it needed to be different from Wonderful Town, this Eileen veers sharply away from the source play in ways that are not advantageous.
It may be worth noting that while Wonderful Town did not make it to the big screen, it did get to the smaller one. Denied the chance to preserve her Broadway musical role on film, Russell saw to it that a two-hour TV production of Wonderful Town was telecast in 1958, just three years after the release of the Sister Eileen musical film.
Like Clear Day, the Eileen DVD has no significant bonuses, but it offers a fine widescreen transfer of a film that one didn't necessarily expect to see on DVD.