This week sees the release of one of the most anticipated movies of the summer, Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I’ve avoided reading about the film, as I want to be surprised by what Tarantino has been cooking up, but I know that it takes place in the title location during the late 1960s. This sounds like fertile ground for a movie narrative, as Hollywood was undergoing great change at this time. The late 60s found the American movie industry at a crossroads. The old studio system was in its death throes, though it was still producing the sort of superproductions that had been big hits earlier in the decade, albeit to diminishing returns. The masters of the studio system had either retired (John Ford, Raoul Walsh), were on their way out (Howard Hawks, William Wyler), or were trying their best to accommodate the zeitgeist with films that acknowledged topical issues, the formal innovations of new European cinema, or both (Alfred Hitchcock, George Cukor, Wyler). The breakout success of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider signaled the rise of a new, youth-oriented cinema, which would give way to the so-called New Hollywood movies of the 1970s.
Funny Girl Barbra Streisand in her 1968 film debut; she plays the Ziegfeld comedienne Fanny Brice, who also happened to be the mother-in-law of producer Ray Stark. Streisand is stunning, but the film is a trial, particularly when the music disappears somewhere around the 90-minute mark and all that’s left is leaden melodrama. William Wyler directed (it was his next-to-last film); the musical numbers were staged by Herbert Ross. With Omar Sharif, Walter Pidgeon, Kay Medford, and Anne Francis. —Dave Kehr
