Star!

Director Robert Wise and producer Saul Chaplin were keen to work again with Julie Andrews particularly after the huge success of The Sound Of Music (1965). The result was this biopic of Gertrude Lawrence. “Who?” you may ask. Well that is one of the problems with the film but only a lesser one.

Lawrence was a British music hall entertainer who began her career as part of her father’s lowbrow comedy song and dance act and went on to become one of the most popular theatrical stars of her day on both sides of the Atlantic and the toast of high society.

The film opens in 1940 with Lawrence in a screening room watching a documentary chronicling her life, then flashes back to Clapham on the eve of WWI when she leaves home to join her vaudevillian father on the stage. Thereafter it lays down the story of her rise to stardom ending with her marriage to an American theatre producer (but, especially oddly given the film’s length it does not mention her success in ‘The King And I’ or her death eight years later aged only fifty-four)

Whilst it was a lavish production (Andrews' wardrobe alone cost $750,000) the screenplay by English writer William Fairchild is long-winded, and typical of traditional Hollywood biopics, evidently only loosely grounded in reality. The fact that it has the same running time (174 minutes) as The Sound of Music suggests that Wise and Chaplin assumed that audiences were not able to get enough of Andrews.  But not only was Andrews not playing a squeaky-clean governess (or a magical nanny as she had in 1964's in Mary Poppins), socio-culturally a lot had changed in the three intervening years and audiences were not interested in this kind of anodyne eye-wash particularly as it is given generic treatment by Wise.

On the upside Andrews proves herself a spirited performer, particularly in the film’s two best numbers 'Burlington Bertie' and 'Jenny' (the sometimes awkward choreography is by Michael Kidd) and Daniel Massey, at least vocally, is effective as Noël Coward whose relationship with Lawrence is probably the only reason that she is remembered today.

FYI: Twentieth Century Fox withdrew the film from its initial  theatrical run, cut out about fifty-five minutes and re-released it in late 1969 as 'Those Were the Happy Days' to no better effect  By September 1970 Fox estimated the film had lost the studio $15,091,000.

Massey, who was Coward's godson, won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar.

 

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