With the one-two double whammy punches of "Mary Poppins" (1964) and "The Sound Of Music"(1965), Julie Andrews achieved official status as a genuine gold-plated movie superstar.....
Which, unfortunately for Andrews, whose primary talent was as a musical performer, coincided with the upheavals in 1960's cinema, popular culture and the rise of youth as the driving force in audience demographics.
Desperate for blockbusters and unsure of their audience, the studios, to their everlasting dismay, tried duplicating "The Sound Of Music" with a catastrophic series of bloated, elephantine musicals. Overlong, over-budgeted and sometimes populated with actors who could neither sing or dance, these mostly unwatchable dinosaurs lumbered into the tarpits of box office failure........sending the studios into dire financial straits, which ultimately led to conglomerates swallowing them up whole.
Julie Andrews, then the number one movie musical star, managed, through sheer charm and versatility of her talent, to make a success out of 1967's "Thoroughly Modern Millie", an overly precious, twee confection that reveled with winking self-congratulation at its gentle satire of 1920's fashion, attitudes and cornball music and dances.
Stretched out to 2 and a half hours, including an endless overture, the film quickly wears out its studied, elaborate cuteness no matter how strenuously Andrews works to keep it light and fluffy. And unlike the usual expansiveness of those other 60's musical behemoths, "Millie" looked like a shot-on-the-cheap, strictly Universal backlot TV show, lit and staged like it was never meant for anything but the tube.
Watching it in 2021, we could only cringe at its supposedly humorous plotline ,which involved girls drugged and sold into white slavery, with the help of cartoonish, stereotypical Chinese minions (played by veteran Japanese-American actors Jack Soo and Pat Morita)
Coasting on its aggressive, campy flourishes, such as the pop-eyed screeching appearances of stage star Carol Channing,, Andrews wrung a box office success out of 'Millie' but a year later, she and her 'Sound Of Music; director met their musical Armageddon in the 20th Century Fox mega-flop, "Star!".........
\ "Star!" (1968), purportedly showing the life and times of English stage musical star Gertrude Lawrence, clocked in at a punishing 3 hours, stuffed with no less than 18 long, long completely stagebound musical numbers, all of them shot from a front-and-center fixed position.
To put it mildly, only immediate members of Julie Andrews and Gertrude Lawrence's family could stand to sit through the film and it landed in theaters as an instant legendary 50 megaton bomb.
The studio then went to previously unheard of lengths to salvage 'Star! including, we kid you not, slicing an hour out of its running time and titling it "Those Were The Happy Times". (Your guess is as good as ours as to whom they thought would hold the slightest interest is seeing the film in that butchered condition. )
And watching it in this day and age? Well, we didn't shake our heads in disbelief as we did when viewing "Millie". The full 180 minute cut of the film remains tiresome and bland. It never once gets a handle on how to portray Gertrude Lawrence other than a spendthrift diva with a host of wealthy suitors, played by Michael Craig, Anthony Eilsely, Robert Reed and Richard Crenna.
(Surprisingly, Reed, the future 'Brady Bunch' dad, is the only one of these stiffs who seems to have a pulse and enjoys a bit of un with this limited screen time....)
A few years after 'Star!', Andrews and her husband Black Edwards' ambitious World War I musical "Darling Lili" would help hammer one of the last nails in the bloat-musical genre..... you could say the very last nail was driven in by Ross Hunter, 'Thoroughly Modern Millie's producer, with his embarrassing, stillborn 1972 remake of 'Lost Horizon'.
Of course, we still do and always did love us some Julie Andrews......but for these two back-to-back efforts that damaged her career as cinema's movie-musical sweetheart, we can only sing out 1 & 1/2 stars (*1/2 for each.
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