Waste of Money.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Barbara Streisand makes this movie! She is elegant, romantic, and often funny . The movie highlights the ups and downs in the romance of Fanny Brice and Nick Arnstein. Further it includes some mature thematic material, such as dishonesty and marital trials. The romance includes Nick's smooth seduction of the innocent and naive Fanny Brice and hints of his promiscuity. I absolutely love how the producers told the story of the most important and influential producer in the history of the Broadway musical Florenz Ziegfeld.

Film has unfortunately dated since its first release. Production for most part is uninspired and pedestrian. But Streisand is magnificent and Sharif charming. When the songs virtually disappear after the intermission and the marriage story takes centre stage, as a musical the film drops away. Worth seeing for Babs' tour de force.

"Show me an actress who isn't a personality and you'll show me a woman who isn't a star," declared Katharine Hepburn when asked about her smashing screen persona. Humble, no. Correct, yes. Take any legendary performer — Humphrey Bogart, Joan Crawford, Cary Grant, Marilyn Monroe — and you will not only find a terrific actor but also a presence that could interrupt the breathing patterns of an entire room just by walking through a door. And if you don't inspire that same breathless room to immediately bow down in a we're-not-worthy Wayne's World dramatization, then you probably aren't a star.Fortunately for us, fortunately for Funny Girl, but unfortunately for the self-proclaimed icon herself, Katharine Hepburn, Barbra Streisand just so happens to be a star — a star that, incidentally, matched Hepburn's explosive performance in The Lion in Winter so well that the two ended up tying for the Oscar win. Now that Funny Girl and The Lion in Winter are nearly a half-century old, it's probably safe to say that Hepburn and Streisand are unofficial gods of the entertainment industry; but Funny Girl is the more important film, introducing the world to a new voice, a new actress, and yes, a new personality.In the years since Funny Girl, Streisand hasn't lost her bewitching zeal, but only a few of her following films have captured the same sort of youthful gusto of her debut. The early days of Babs, with roles in What's Up, Doc? and The Owl and the Pussycat, bring lasting joy. Like many actresses that appeal to the Broadway inclined crowd, she is more fun to watch in quickly-paced adventures in comedy than sappy behemoths like The Mirror Has Two Faces. Funny Girl is a snapshot of everything we've come to admire about Streisand — that immediate likability, that one-million- miles-an-hour comedic timing, those dramatic chops, and that voice. You can bet that the film itself is given the standard Hollywood musical treatment — but what isn't standard is the girl from New Yawk with charisma the size of Alaska and Texas put together.Funny Girl is technically a true story: its leading character, Fanny Brice was, in fact, a famed Ziegfeld girl, and she was, in fact, married to Nicky Arnstein. But Streisand is such a ball-of-fire that we aren't paying much attention to Brice's accomplished (and melodramatic) life. Streisand demolishes every confine a characterization can bring. She's not so much playing Fanny Brice as she much as she is Fanny Brice. She doesn't act out a scene; she is the scene.I suppose for the sake of a plot summary I should cover the basics so you know what you're getting into. The film travels across the life of Brice from the early 1900s to the beginnings of the 1920s, detailing her whirlwind (and lasting) relationship with show business and stormy marriage to gambler Nicky Arnstein (Omar Sharif). There's comedy and music and tear-jerking and romance and overtures and more hoohas that come along with the big-budgeted movie musical genre; Funny Girl has all the makings to become an epic production of the Sound of Music class. But Streisand keeps the film from getting whisked away into unremarkable giganticness. The film is about her, not its supporting characters, photography, or set design. Roger Ebert noted that everything other than Streisand is mostly flat. While this is partially true, I think, on the other hand, that if Streisand wasn't the star, suddenly the supporting characters, photography, and set design would seem bigger-than-life, extraordinary even. But she's like a blinding light from outer space running around a soundstage; you can only wonder why the items surrounding her don't spontaneously combust.I'm not a part of the devoted fan base that refers to Streisand exclusively as "Babs" and lists "Evergreen" as their theme song, but I am a part of the fan base that recognizes her as one of cinema's most unique and versatile actresses. Funny Girl is a loud and proud musical, and Streisand is the microphone. Read more reviews at petersonreviews.com

As the screen musical has evolved, so too has the screen musical star. Back in the 30s and 40s we got singers and dancers whose ability to act was only coincidental, if they could act at all. In the 50s, as musicals became more dramatic the roles would mostly be filled by established lead players who would then be dubbed by a professional singer. This practice came to be frowned upon (probably the main reason Audrey Hepburn was not acclaimed for her excellent performance in My Fair Lady), and by the mid-1960s a new generation of musical stars had arrived, a rare breed whose acting talents matched their ability to sing. Julie Andrews became an overnight success with Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, and was followed in the late-60s by Liza Minnelli and of course Barbra Streisand who makes her screen debut here with Funny Girl.The advantage you have with someone like Streisand is that they can carry a dramatic performance over into the musical numbers. When Streisand sings, she is very much still acting. There is of course the force she puts into her movements and the emotion in her face, but she also exhibits breathtaking control over the dynamics of the music, her voice swelling mid-line to bring out the power in a song. It's one of the finest musical performances ever, up there with Judy Garland in A Star is Born and Liza Minnelli in Cabaret. Streisand is ably supported by Omar Shariff, here establishing himself as a kind of Arabic Sean Connery. Like Connery he has played people of a lot of different nationalities, and rarely with any authenticity, but this doesn't matter too much because he was such an everyman of desirable masculinity. He is also a somewhat better actor than Connery, and this is one of his better roles.Funny Girl was the penultimate movie directed by classic-era veteran William Wyler. Although he had taken on some ostentatious projects in the preceding fifteen years, he was still known as a director who focused on bringing out the best in his cast. This was the only musical he ever made. He does not direct the songs with a rhythmic touch as most directors would, but instead seems to view them as an extension of the ordinary narrative. He simply selects the angle and the distance that shows off the necessary facet of the musical performance, long shots for dancing, mid shots for the standing still stuff, and close-ups for those emotive money shots. It doesn't make this the most lyrical or aesthetic of musical pictures, especially when compared to the work of Vincente Minnelli or Robert Wise, but it does show off Ms Streisand at her best.The songs themselves are by Jules Styne, an old-time composer who had been doing stuff for Broadway since the 1920s. As such he's able to give the music an authentic early-twentieth century feel, especially on songs "I'm the Greatest Star", "You Are Woman, I Am Man" and "Sadie Sadie" which remind me a little of the work of Jerome Kern. The score is also augmented by such genuine period numbers as "I'd Rather Be Blue over You" and "My Man", which are actually better than Styne's own work, but still segue nicely into his score. The main arc of the storyline is Fanny Brice's heady but tumultuous relationship with first husband Nicky Arnstein, to which her showbiz career is only the backdrop. This focus gives an accessibility that many similar musicals (such as Star! with Julie Andrews) lack. And at the heart of it all is the performance of Streisand, which does the songs justice and gives the picture its stature as a musical romantic drama.