Hello, Dolly! (1969) – DVD

*/**** Image A- Sound A
starring Barbra Streisand, Walter Matthau, Michael Crawford, Louis Armstrong
screenplay by Ernest Lehman, based on the stage play by Michael Stewart and The Matchmaker by Thornton Wilder
directed by Gene Kelly

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Hunter S. Thompson once remarked that the Circus Circus casino would be "what the whole hep world would be doing on a Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war." The family audience, meanwhile, would be taking in something like Hello, Dolly!, a film so totalitarian in its crushing good cheer that anyone without a predisposition towards its phoney "togetherness" will find themselves beaten down in their seats. Equal parts Lawrence Welk and Albert Speer, it's a grotesque epic pageant designed to show off all the money spent on production while being as condescendingly "cute" and innocuous as possible–a brew of wastefulness and sentimentality so strong that it's hard to breathe in its aroma, let alone drink it to its dregs.

One wonders how Gene Kelly and Ernest Lehman, who had previously given the world so much genuine pleasure, could have perpetrated this monument to the spurious and oppressive–especially strange since the material (a Broadway musical based on a Thornton Wilder play) should have nudged them in the right direction. It's the tale of middle-aged matchmaker Dolly Levi (a twenty-something Barbra Streisand) wreaking good-natured havoc on "half-a-millionaire" feed-and-hay king Horace Vandergelder (Walter Matthau), who seeks a husband for his niece Ermengarde (Joyce Ames) while on his way to find a domestic slave of his own. As Dolly attempts to free Ermengarde to marry her artist lover Ambrose (Tommy Tune) and give underlings Cornelius Hackl (Michael Crawford) and Barnaby Tucker (Danny Lockin) the day of freedom they so crave, it becomes obvious that in the right hands, this could have been a (slightly) subversive what-for in the face of a misogynist capitalist.

But nobody's really paying attention to plot in this thing: the spectacle of frivolous expenditure is the name of the game, as is the reduction of all human beings to the level of grinning automatons. It doesn't really matter what the actors are singing or doing, because they're really just there to offset the enormous production values–shot after deep focus shot features a puny human in front of a gigantic set, dwarfing the (admittedly thin) human drama with the sheer mass of the carpentry and costuming. Look, it says–we got a vintage locomotive! And built a whole set that looks like 1800s Yonkers! And organized a massive friggin' Fourth of July parade! Meanwhile, the assorted extras, dancers, and supporting players are basically used as human furniture in cliché bits featuring townspeople who naturally love whatever station they're at and live in harmony in the best of all possible worlds.

It's not that it's unsuccessful, it's that it is successful–at treating you and its participants like children and morons. After a while, you just feel sorry for all those demeaned for the sake of this ghastly white elephant, many of whom are talented people who surely had better things to do. (I was especially embarrassed for the waiters/dancers in the restaurant-set title number as they jump through laboured hoops in the hopes of impressing the fascistically implacable Dolly.) It's here that the film becomes sinister, cramming all stripes of human existence into the same expensive meat grinder, expecting them to come out in the same shape so that they can glorify some Hollywood star and make the world seem happy and bright. If you don't see the world that way, too bad–we'll write you out of the equation. Thus light entertainment becomes heavy intimidation, the sort of thing to give Guy Debord the nightmare of his life.

Given the time and place of its creation, the film seems doubly depressing. It's a typically conservative deployment of money as if it were military–the sound of bombs over Cambodia can be heard behind Hello, Dolly!, borne as they are of the same American industrial arrogance. Thankfully, cinematic guerrillas would eventually depose this sort of filmmaking; 1969 was the year that marked the end of the studio system and the blissful beginning of the movie brats. If you want to see what they were up against, this is the movie to see–though it's impossible to recommend on any other level.

THE DVD
Typically, they've pulled out most of the stops for the anamorphic DVD transfer of this movie, and for the most part, it gleams. Colours are bright and saturated, and detail is extremely fine–especially notable considering it has to survive the reduction of its 2:35:1 aspect ratio. Alas, we can't have everything, and there are some compression artifacts in scenes of extreme darkness. The soundmix is largely flawless; despite reduction to stereo from its six-track origins, there is superb clarity and detail, with all elements well-defined and seamless between the two channels.

The only extra of note is a 1969 featurette that underlines everything wrong with the movie. It begins with a montage of extras and technicians wandering around the set of the centrepiece parade sequence, building to Gene Kelly and Ernest Lehman setting the scene and a segue into snippets of the bloated New York Nuremberg of the scene itself. The power of filmmakers to reduce people to specks on a screen: Heil Kelly! Heil Lehman! Also included are the film's English and Spanish trailers, as well as trailers for The Rose, All that Jazz, The Commitments, and the film that kicked off the trend of mega-musicals like this, The Sound of Music. Robert Wise, your room in Hell is waiting.

148 minutes; G; 2.35:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 2.0 (Stereo), French DD 2.0 (Mono), Spanish DD 2.0 (Mono); CC; English, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Fox