Star! (1968)

director Robert Wise
music Noel Coward, George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Kurt Weill
starring Julie Andrews, Daniel Massey
costumes Donald Brooks

Julie Andrews plays Gertrude Lawrence beloved star of Broadway and the London stage, but seems to have missed the point in this disaster moneypit of a musical.

Throughout the 1930s, Jazzage legend Gertrude Lawrence collected composers and playwrites like jewelry, pimped her connected husbands and society lovers for publicity, and wrote humorous, self-depricating, but completely false humble-beginning stories for the gossips. For twenty years ‘Gerty’ was the undisputed first lady of song and stage.

She fascinated audiences playing the harlot or aristocrat: in Cole Porter’s Nymph Errant Gerty was a boarding school grad on tour of Europe desperate to lose her virginity, and in Noel Coward’s Private Lives she defined the moderne divorc� of 1930s romantic comedy. Coward called her his greatest muse…, the Gershwins’ Someone to Watch over Me was her song…, but Star! the illconceived vehicle for Julie Andrews ends short of Lawrence’s greatest triumph: her broadway comeback in The King and I playing a 50-something romantic lead who is seduced by, and tames, the exotic Yule Brenner…., a role she convinced Rogers and Hammerstein to create for her.

Julie Andrews, ever sunny and sexless, sings each note with perfection. She’s flawless in athletic dance numbers and circus tricks, but Star! has Gerty as a cold social climber who breaks a rival’s nose to steal her part on stage. Inbetween actressy tantrums, she allows boyfriends to wander about and occaisionally crosspaths at overproduced costume parties (she goes to a Roman toga party dressed as Marie Antionette � ooooh, scandal). Andrews seems delighted in the role, but is thouroughly miscast as the moderne Lawrence.

The unflinching biography of a sexual, ambitious material girl would be risky boxoffice in any decade, but Star! is such a random scrapbook of clich�s it barely holds your attention. Director Robert Wise (West Side Story, Sound of Music) switches from bogus archive newsreels to melodramatic treacle, while the designers run up the budget with costumed parades and gorgeous art deco sets. Money was obviously saved reproducing Gerty’s stage roles, as each musical number is performed in a lackluster whitebox with sketched-in sets and ugly choreography. Most numbers are freakishly bad � I’m feeling the acid bad � culminating in a psychoanalitic finale involving a bullwhip, trapeze, flaming hoops, and bizarre costumes.

At $14 million the budget was almost double that of Wise’s unprecedented hit Sound of Music. MGM kept throwing money at this confusing unmusical, and later blamed the genre’s big budget spectacles for the studio’s bankruptcy.