Star! (1968)
Julie Andrews attacks the role of Gertrude Lawrence, scandalous star of Broadway and the London stage, in this moneypit of a musical.
Jazzage legend Gertrude Lawrence collected composers and playwrites like baubles: Noël Coward, Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, Oscar and Hammerstein…. She pimped her well-heeled husbands and society lovers for publicity, and wrote hilarious, self-depricating, but completely fake humble-beginning yarns for the gossip rags. For twenty years ‘Gerty’ was the undisputed First Lady of song and stage. Today her talent seems a bit tarnished. Her voice isn’t terribly strong, and her few film roles don’t exactly impress. Noël Coward called her “far from pretty, but tremendously alive”, and once on stage, breathtaking.
She pioneered rolls that explore women as sexually determining. In Cole Porter’s Nymph Errant Gerty was an innocent boarding school grad on a tour of Europe desperate to lose her virginity, and in Noel Coward’s Private Lives she’s a divorcé on honeymoon who starts an affair with her Ex-husband in the suite next door…. Coward called her his greatest muse and wrote his first revue for her. Limehouse Blues and the Gershwins’ Someone to Watch over Me were both her signature songs….
Off stage she embodied the libertine fantasies of a generation of prohibition flappers. Savvy party girls who had sexual adventures, kept the wittiest inner-circle of playwrites and homosexuals, and probaby sipped champaign from a shoe or something equally fabulous…. Nothing inhibited Gerty and nothing was sacred. She was thoroughly modern, and lived in the moment. She wittily embellished every story from her Cinderella beginnings to her celebrity encounters, once publishing an account of a name-droppers affair as having been locked in the bathroom…. It was a common rumor, at age 14 she met a teenage Noël Coward and took him into a bedroom and turned him homosexual…. Her own daughter called her a nymphomaniac.
She had tempestuous public romances with Douglass Fairbanks Jr and the Prince of Wales — the future Edward VIII and Duke of Windsor. At the height of her fame she went bankrupt and her cars, furs, jewelry, and apartment were seized. Her lawyer remarked that she spent more money than a fleet of drunken sailors. Later she shamelessly married a millionaire theater owner for his money…. Gerty generated so much gossip that as stage roles became scarce during World War II she penned an autobiography A Star Danced, and went on the world’s first celebrity book tour. Coward later said it was “less than wholly factual”.
There’s so much to Lawrence’s life, yet Star! the ill-conceived vehicle for Julie Andrews ends short of Lawrence’s greatest triumph: her Broadway comeback in The King and I playing a 50-something romantic lead who is seduced by the King of Siam…., a role she convinced Rogers and Hammerstein to create for her, then brought along her 17-years younger lover Yul Brenner.
Julie Andrews, ever sunny and sexless, sings each note with perfection. She’s flawless in athletic dance numbers and circus tricks, but Star! presents Gerty a cold social climber who breaks a rival’s nose to steal her part on stage. Inbetween actressy tantrums, boyfriends wander about and occaisionally crosspaths at overproduced costume parties (she goes to a Roman toga party dressed as Marie Antionette — ooooh, scandal). Andrews seems delighted to be in the role, but is somehow thoroughly miscast as the moderne Lawrence. She never can shake her own wholesome persona, but not for lack of trying.
The unflinching biography of a sexual, ambitious material girl would be risky boxoffice in any decade, but Star! is such an unsympathetic random scrapbook of moments it never rises to the decadence it’s portraying, or finds the heart of the character. Director Robert Wise switches gears from bogus archive newsreels to stage-y music numbers to melodrama, while the designers ran up the budget with gorgeous art deco sets and stunning costume parades. The wardrobe by Donald Brooks set a record for the largest number of costume changes for an actress in a film.
With few exceptions each musical number is performed “straight” on a lackluster whitebox stage with sketched-in sets and ugly choreography,. Without an audience most of the numbers are freakishly bad — like, brown acid bad — culminating in a psychoanalysis-themed finale involving a bullwhip, trapeze, flaming hoops, and bizarre circus costumes. It should be deliciously decadent — Andrews even performs a few circus stunts — but like the rest of the film it somehow falls short of the mark, and is more strange than compelling.
At $14 million the budget was almost double that of Wise’s unprecedented hit Sound of Music. Fox kept throwing money at this confusing unmusical, and later blamed the genre’s big budget spectacles for the studio’s bankruptcy. more than 180 sets were built. Shooting went on for 149 days…. Wise lost director’s cut as the studio edited and re-marketted, even changed the name, trying desperately to recapture America’s love for that sweet singing nun, Julie Andrews.
