Not a musical but an extended personal appearance by Barbra Streisand, grinding away at her aren't-I-cute routine so relentlessly that it seems only natural one of her comedy skits has her playing a four-year-old. Omar Sharif has no more charm--or activity--than a store dummy, with his prissy little features and his simpering that's supposed to represent understated class. There's no texture in this movie, no ambiance, no sense of period of even much of a sense that there are any other people around besides Fanny and Nick, and much laundered versions of both (they lived together for six years before getting married, while he was married to someone else, and before the bond robbery he had already done two years in Sing Sing for illegal wiretapping). The script is leaden and clumsy, without a single laugh. The tone matches Streisand's phony self-deprecation--the movie presents her to us as if she's a favourite grandchild, smugly saying, oh, look, isn't she marvelous.
While all this is tedious, what is really offensive is the hammering on the point that beauty is all, and that Fanny is quite right to crawl to a man who does her the big favour of sleeping with her and marrying her. Streisand may not win any Liz Taylor look-alike contest, but she's a good-looking, vivacious woman, so the constant put-downs are as phony as they are distasteful, especially given what a bum Nick is. Though he is greatly cleaned up(in real life, unlike the movie, he had no compunction about spending as much of his wife's money as he could get his hands on), he is still portrayed as a man who gambles for a living. He even complains in one scene that his wife's fame is interfering with his "work"! And yet he is someone we're supposed to sympathise with, and sympathise with Fanny for loving him. At a time when women were starting to take up real careers of their own? Please! I always thought People was a ridiculous song--you're lucky if you need people? Who doesn't need other people? It's not luck, it's necessity. This peculiar sentiment ties in with Fanny needing Nick so much that she overlooks his aversion to real work and his involvement with gangsters. In other words, the more needy you are, the better, because that means you'll ignore what is wrong with your man. It's an all too appropriate song for a movie that says a woman should be a doormat.
While all this is tedious, what is really offensive is the hammering on the point that beauty is all, and that Fanny is quite right to crawl to a man who does her the big favour of sleeping with her and marrying her. Streisand may not win any Liz Taylor look-alike contest, but she's a good-looking, vivacious woman, so the constant put-downs are as phony as they are distasteful, especially given what a bum Nick is. Though he is greatly cleaned up(in real life, unlike the movie, he had no compunction about spending as much of his wife's money as he could get his hands on), he is still portrayed as a man who gambles for a living. He even complains in one scene that his wife's fame is interfering with his "work"! And yet he is someone we're supposed to sympathise with, and sympathise with Fanny for loving him. At a time when women were starting to take up real careers of their own? Please! I always thought People was a ridiculous song--you're lucky if you need people? Who doesn't need other people? It's not luck, it's necessity. This peculiar sentiment ties in with Fanny needing Nick so much that she overlooks his aversion to real work and his involvement with gangsters. In other words, the more needy you are, the better, because that means you'll ignore what is wrong with your man. It's an all too appropriate song for a movie that says a woman should be a doormat.