He behaves himself like a gentleman, however, as do some other decent performers, including Bob Newhart, Larry Blyden and Jack Nicholson ("Easy Rider"), whose role, I understand, has been abbreviated.Nothing is allowed to get in the way of Miss Streisand, but Minnelli, unlike William Wyler (the director of "Funny Girl") and Gene Kelly (the director of "Hello, Dolly!"), has not been completely inhibited by her.
Because the music is rather infrequent, it becomes all the more precious.It's apparently Montand's fate to be emasculated by big Hollywood actresses, and his role is largely that of a line-carrier for Streisand.
She is so fine, in fact, that if I didn't know she was not terribly good at lip-sync, I would suspect someone else was reading her.The high-point of the film for me, and one of the most graceful Streisand moments ever put on film, is a royal dinner at which Minnelli's camera explores Miss Streisand in loving circling close-up while her voice is heard on the soundtrack singing "Love With All the Trimmings." It's lush lyricism from Minnelli's "Yolanda and the Thief period.The film has four other excellent songs, the title number, "Go to Sleep" (a duet featuring Miss Streisand and Miss Streisand), "What Did I Have That I Don't Have Now?" and "Come Back to Me," which Montand sings mostly on the soundtrack as a helicopter swoops around New York.
One clear day movie#
Minnelli's love of décor transforms the movie into very real fantasy, and the star into a stunning looking and funny character who mouths her arch, pseudo-Terence Rattigan lines as if she were parodying Margaret Leighton. Miss Streisand, as a 22-year-old New Yorker whose Yiddish intonations are so thick they sound like a speech defect, defines innocence by sitting with her knees knocked together and her feet spread far apart, a mannerism she may have picked up from Mary Pickford.Minnelli's camera also is hard-pressed to find interesting things to look at in the humdrum settings (doctor's office, apartment, classrooms), and a lot of the time it just records exits and entrances, as if it all were taking place on a stage.However, the movie, Minnelli and Miss Streisand burst into life in the regression sequences, filmed at the Royal Pavilion at Brighton. "On a Clear Day" may be the only comedy to end on the happy note that its lovers will be reunited in 2038 in, of all strange sites for reincarnation, Virginia.The movie is quite ordinary and Broadway-bland in most of its contemporary sequences. However, it also dramatizes some attractively romantic ideas about love and the mystery of the life force. In a variation on the recurring Hitchcock theme of transferral of guilt, Daisy so enchants the doctor that she manages to transfer her fantasies to him, with the result that, from time to time, he finds himself transported into her earlier incarnation.Lerner's screenplay places great emphasis on its gags: (He: "Do you like painting?" She: "I don't know-I've gotten so used to wallpaper.") It seems often shaped to meet some very awkward song cues.
In the course of treatment by hypnosis, she regresses to the early 19th century when she was one of England's most successful hangers-on at the Prince Regent's court.
Marc Chabot (Yves Montand), a professor of psychiatry, about a quick cure for her smoking problems.
One clear day full#
"On a Clear Day" is the first conventional musical film to open this year, the first Minnelli musical since "The Bells Are Ringing" in 1960, and the first Barbra Streisand movie to suggest-even briefly-that she is capable of playing someone other than Fannie Brice in the seven stages of woman.The film, which opened yesterday at the Loew's State I and Loew's Cine Theaters, is solidly grounded in a casting coincidence: Barbra Streisand, a performer who sometimes seems too big for movies as well as for life, portrays a girl who is so full of life that she leads a succession of lives.Daisy Gamble (Miss Streisand), a normal, average, five-pack-a-day nicotine addict, who is also gifted with E.S.P., goes to see Dr. Vincente Minnelli's "On a Clear Day You Can See Forever," the screen adaptation of the Alan Jay Lerner-Burton Lane musical play, is a movie of fits and starts, but because the fits are occasionally so lovely, and the starts somewhat more frequent than Fifth Avenue buses, I was eventually hypnotized into a state of benign though not-quite-abject permissiveness.The reasons have to do with nostalgia, and with expectation.
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