DVDs: MacLaine Double Feature
As you are no doubt aware, the credits for the smash-hit musical Hello, Dolly! state that the show was based on Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker. But it's worth noting that Wilder's play had an extensive history of its own.
The Matchmaker's notion of young men out on a spree had its roots in an 1835 English play by John Oxenford, A Day Well Spent. More specifically, Wilder's source was a Viennese play based on Oxenford's, the 1842 comedy Einen Jux Will Er Sich Machen" "He Wants to Frolic", the work of Johann Nestroy. Nestroy's play would also become the source of Tom Stoppard's 1981 London hit On the Razzle.
Adding the character of meddling matchmaker Dolly Levi, Wilder's first attempt at an adaptation of Nestroy was called The Merchant of Yonkers, and it ran only thirty-nine performances on Broadway in 1938. Heavily revised as The Matchmaker, Wilder's play became a hit in London then on Broadway, where it played 488 performances at the Royale Theatre beginning in late 1956. Starring in the Broadway Matchmaker were the irrepressible Ruth Gordon as Dolly; Loring Smith as merchant Horace Vandergelder; Arthur Hill and Robert Morse as the clerks who go off on that spree; and Eileen Herlie and Prunella Scales as the young women they encounter.
Like most Broadway hits of the era, The Matchmaker was made into a film, in 1958. Gordon, who would later triumph in film's like Rosemary's Baby, was not a movie name at the time. So the role of Dolly went instead to the always appealing Shirley Booth, an Oscar winner for Come Back, Little Sheba. Robert Morse got to repeat his stage role of Barnaby Tucker, and other leading roles were ideally cast in the hands of Paul Ford Vandergelder, Shirley MacLaine Mrs. Molloy, and Anthony Perkins Cornelius Hackl.
Only six years after the Matchmaker film, The Matchmaker was back on Broadway as Hello, Dolly!. In the international company of the musical that starred Mary Martin, Vandergelder was played by none other than Loring Smith, who had played the same role in Broadway's The Matchmaker. Because of the huge success of Hello, Dolly!, Wilder's The Matchmaker isn't frequently revived, although Roundabout did it off-Broadway with Dorothy Loudon in the early '90s, and Andrea Martin recently starred in another production.
Directed by Joseph Anthony, the film of The Matchmaker is now on DVD for the first time, and it remains a black-and-white delight. Booth is perfect for Dolly, funny, warm, and suitably gaudy. You'll notice quite a few lines that found their way into Hello, Dolly!, not to mention the source of such Jerry Herman song titles as "I Put My Hand In," "Put on Your Sunday Clothes," and "Ribbons Down My Back."
It's a stagey film, unapologetically repeating the play's device of having characters address monologues directly to the audience. The film follows the settings of the play's first three acts Vandergelder's store; Mrs. Molloy's hat shop; the Harmonia Gardens Restaurant. But John Michael Hayes' screenplay eliminates the characters of Vandergelder's niece, Ermengarde, and her suitor, Ambrose Kemper both would be restored in the musical. So where The Matchmaker's fourth act visited a new location -the home of Ermengarde's aunt, Flora Van Huysen-the film returned to Vandergelder's store, just as Michael Stewart would do in his Dolly! libretto.
WHAT A WAY TO GO! 20th Century-Fox
If MacLaine is merely one of the leads in The Matchmaker, she's in virtually every frame of What a Way to Go!, a 1964 CinemaScope, color comedy extravaganza with a starry male line-up that includes Paul Newman, Dean Martin, Robert Mitchum, Gene Kelly, Dick Van Dyke, and Bob Cummings.
Sporting half a million dollars worth of Edith Head clothes, MacLaine plays Louisa Foster, who, as the picture opens, attempts to donate to the I.R.S. a check for $200 million. Considered insane, she's sent to a psychiatrist Cummings, to whom she relates her singular saga. It begins in a small town in Ohio, where Louisa rejects the local rich boy Martin in favor of marriage to a Thoreau-spouting pauper Van Dyke.
Van Dyke is but the first of Louisa's husbands; he's followed by a struggling artist in Paris Newman; a New York tycoon Mitchum; and a small-time Jersey City cabaret song-and-dance man Kelly. Louisa has come to consider herself a jinx. Although she marries for love each time and wants only the simple life, each of her husbands becomes enormously rich and successful, then dies prematurely.
As the mother who encouraged Louisa to marry for money, Margaret Dumont, beloved for her appearances as foil to the Marx Brothers, makes her final screen appearance. Also briefly glimpsed: a pre-Follies Fifi D'Orsay.
What a Way to Go! is notable here because it features a screenplay by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and it's full of the team's satiric touches. For example, each of Louisa's marriages is recalled in a parody of a different film genre; we go from a silent movie Van Dyke to a French art film Newman; a lavish, "Lush Budgett" Hollywood production Mitchum; and a movie-musical extravaganza Kelly. Kelly choreographed the latter sequence, which allows MacLaine the chance to show off her dancing prowess, and which includes songs with lyrics by Comden and Green and music by Jule Styne.
Originally conceived as a vehicle for Marilyn Monroe, What a Way to Go! is a comedy with few if any laughs. But it holds a certain fascination as a prime example of overblown '60s movie-making. Directed by J. Lee Thompson, the $20 million film is a study in excess. The DVD bonuses include an amusing short about the film's world premiere at the New York World's Fair, and screen tests for a chimp who plays an abstract painter in the Paris sequence.