Funny Girl: A Feeling Deep in Your Soul

The original stage property of Funny Girl was developed over the course of several years by producer Ray Stark, who was married to Brice’s daughter, Frances. Stark intended a tribute to his late mother-in-law, celebrating her strength following the dissolution of her troubled marriage to her second husband, Julius “Nicky” Arnstein, Frances’s father, who would mostly be remembered for his gambling addiction and the prison time he served for embezzlement. Streisand didn’t know much about Brice when she was approached to audition for Funny Girl, but she would later write: “Once I read Fanny’s own words, I realized that she and I were so alike it was almost scary.” The same self-assurance she noted in Brice had carried Streisand along at a brisk clip through the early 1960s, when she became a phenomenon in New York. She mesmerized crowds at the Bon Soir, a Greenwich Village nightclub, with shattering ballads like “Cry Me a River” and off-kilter novelties like “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” She made her Broadway debut in 1962 with a featured role in I Can Get It for You Wholesale, stopping the show nightly as frumpy secretary Miss Marmelstein. When the opportunity came for her to star in Funny Girl, Streisand had cultural cred: she had been nominated for a Tony and recorded her first album, and her TV performances on The Garry Moore Show and The Ed Sullivan Show were the stuff of “Did you see her?” watercooler legend.

It is Streisand’s unparalleled mix of brazen stardom and proletarian relatability that has always thrilled us. Her talent is nearly superhuman, but she’s somehow the Brooklyn girl next door. Fueled by this charisma, Funny Girl became a sensation, a chance to see the country’s biggest new recording star in concert. Its signature ballad, “People”—which expresses Fanny’s burgeoning love for Nicky while doubling as a philosophical plea for the listener to embrace need and vulnerability—even hit number five on the Billboard chart, a rare achievement for a show tune. Running with its original cast from March 1964 to December 1965, Funny Girl delighted its endless stream of ticket buyers as much as it tired out its star. Her stage breakthrough was also her swan song; never again would Streisand do Broadway.

Hollywood beckoned—and a Funny Girl movie was the natural way to get there. Wanting a director of serious drama more than one of musical spectacle, Streisand and Stark chose Sidney Lumet, impressed with his 1964 film The Pawnbroker, a gritty portrait of a Holocaust survivor. But after he radically reconceived Funny Girl’s narrative, without the consultation of playwright Isobel Lennart, they turned to Wyler. At sixty-five, he was the conspicuous opposite of the Young Turks who’d soon be taking over Hollywood. It was precisely his decades-honed expertise that excited Streisand, and from which she would learn so much. In another director’s hands, Funny Girl might have been a mere coming-out party for the twenty-five-year-old performer. But Wyler engaged her as a true collaborator, allowing and encouraging her to improvise new ideas to keep herself fresh. “She’s not easy,” Wyler said, “but she’s difficult in the best sense of the word—the same way I’m difficult.” He captured the fact that Streisand’s magnetism as an actor matched her artistry as a singer; a human Stradivarius, she is capable of glissandi that move effortlessly not just across the scale but also between tonal registers, from humor to drama, earnestness to sarcasm, classicism to borscht-circuit irony.

Few could match Streisand in charisma, but the savvy casting of Omar Sharif as Nicky gave her an on-screen accomplice already exploited by Hollywood for his exotic beauty, thus putting hers into sharper relief. Chivalrous in manner and unreasonable in handsomeness, the Egyptian actor had lent his charm and silver-dollar peepers to Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965), but Funny Girl solidified his ­leading-man status. He gets almost as dramatic an intro as Streisand: he appears at Fanny’s dressing-room door, startling her and us with his beauty, as a breathless, entirely redundant “gorgeous” escapes her lips. “To tell the truth, it hurt my pride / The groom was prettier than the bride,” she later sings.

How could their love ever survive? Fanny’s successes emasculate Nicky; his failures crush her. Funny Girl’s emotional arc is just a slice of Brice’s tale—there is no one before Nicky (though, in reality, she had previously been married to a barber named Frank White for three years) or after him (her later marriage to impresario Billy Rose is outlined in 1975’s Funny Lady, directed by Herbert Ross, who choreographed and directed Funny Girl’s musical numbers). Funny Girl is more powerful for these circumscriptions—it’s less an all-encompassing biopic than a sketch of heartbreak. The couple’s faltering marriage is devastating in the smallest moments, such as when, behind Nicky’s back, Fanny puts up the money for him to enter a nightclub partnership that would help get his career on track after a string of poor decisions and gambling debts. Her actions lead to more resentment: trying to help, she spotlights his deficiencies.

Funny Girl’s emotional grip remains tight throughout—from the first half, which chronicles Brice’s rise, to the second, which slows down to become a tender portrait of a marriage swelling with bitterness and disillusion. Whether Fanny is loudly proclaiming her individuality to Ziegfeld or trying to rightsize her self-confidence for the sake of her relationship, Streisand never lets the viewer forget the limits of her character’s apparent impregnability. As shot by veteran cinematographer Harry Stradling (whom she would hire for three more movies), Streisand is so ravishingly mortal you forget she’s an icon. Streisand wrote that when she saw her image on the big screen while watching dailies, she thought she “looked beautiful . . . It was the first time in my life I had ever seen myself that way.”

Wyler’s film may be most thrilling when Fanny declares that nothing can rain on her parade, in a sequence that culminates with her standing on a tugboat, clutching flowers like a torch as she passes Lady Liberty—a moment achieved by having the cameraman hang out of a helicopter door. But this show of invincibility only makes her more vulnerable to storm clouds on the horizon. The feeling we’re left with after the film ends—and after the duo of Fanny and Nicky has dissolved, inevitably, to just Fanny—is a sense of individual triumph at the cost of emotional growth. In a change from the play, Streisand closes on a surging, soul-bleeding rendition of Brice’s signature number, “My Man.” The song may be a wail of anguished devotion for Fanny, but we know Streisand will be just fine on her own. The minimalism of the scene is magnificent and an entirely fitting farewell for the film—a spectacle of the solitary. The classical movie musical may have been fading forever into the shadows, but an eternal star was emerging to blot out the darkness.