On those skates, she's like a balletic ostrich on wheels, albeit one embellished with extra feathers and finery she's almost graceful in a knock-kneed, pigeon-toed kind of way. Her early scenes, particularly one in which she wows an audience as a roller-skating chorus girl who, naturally, can't skate, are a marvel of physical comedy, the natural counterpart to her wickedly on-the-money verbal timing. Her Fanny Brice starts out as a funny, schoolgirlish mouse who gets a gig on a chorus line as unintentional comic relief - she's great at funny awkwardness, but she's not a straightforward dish, like the other girls.
"Funny Girl" is a rags-to-riches story that's almost comfortingly traditional, but its very conventionality serves as a blank canvas for Streisand to work on. That is nonsense the 'message' of Barbra Streisand in 'Funny Girl' is that talent is beauty." Gay men, straight men, Jewish mothers and their daughters, gentile mothers and their daughters: People felt protective of her ("Poor little meskite from Brooklyn!" Mike Myers' Linda Richman and Madonna cooed over her on "Saturday Night Live" a few seasons back), they were dazzled by her and they simply loved to watch her.Īs Pauline Kael said in her review of the movie: "It has been commonly said that the musical 'Funny Girl' was a comfort to people because it carried the message that you do not need to be pretty to succeed. But the people who fell hard for her in "Funny Girl" - either the movie, or the earlier Broadway play that made her a star - are legion. There are many who have always found her too abrasive. Streisand is probably the main reason William Wyler's 1968 "Funny Girl," beautifully made in its own right and now just beginning to make its way to theaters around the country in a crisply restored version, is so well-loved. She was gorgeous, she could sing and, perhaps rarest of all, she was funny. In 1968 Streisand was the face of a new era and an old one: She was a modern beauty whose bold features could reinvent the past before our eyes.
Even her eyes, outlined in the kohl-thick eyeliner style of 1968, speak of an era even further back: They're the eyes of a Nile princess, a brainy pinup girl from Tutankhamen's tomb, that ancient monument disturbed and opened in 1922, sparking a rage for all things Egyptian. It's a face of Cubist beauty, a landscape of shapes and planes combined in a way that shouldn't add up, and yet somehow make the best kind of visual sense.
When we say that someone has the right look for a period picture, we usually mean that there's something about him or her that captures the essence of a long-lost time: Lillian Gish, say, as a Revolutionary War innocent in "Orphans of the Storm," or Liza Minnelli in "Cabaret." But Barbra Streisand was the perfect choice to play the Florenz Ziegfeld-era comedienne Fanny Brice in "Funny Girl" for another reason: She has an art deco face.