1969 - HELLO DOLLY is complete blandness on a very large budget.

There is something about seeing a studio spend a huge bundle of cash on a train wreck of a film and watch it go  completely wrong. In the case of Hello Dolly, it's not so much a disaster as an example of utter lack of imagination or inspiration being pushed on moviegoers as entertainment.
 

20th Century Fox had made so much money with The Sound of Music they thought they had found a potential gold mine with big budget musicals. Having purchased the screen rights to Hello Dolly they proceeded to hire some of the top musical talent in Hollywood. The director was Gene Kelly, the choreographer Michael Kidd, the cinematographer Harry Stradling, and the associate producer was Roger Edens, all top artists and technicians from the golden MGM musical tradition.

Barbara Streisand was only 27 years old and apparently neurotic as hell. This was only her second film and she was forced to carry the entire film. Miscast from the start and teamed with Walther Matthau an actor who hated her guts and couldn't stand to be on the set with her unless absolutely necessary, you could hardly blame her for driving everyone on the production crazy.

Gene Kelly should have seemed the logical choice to adapt this film, but a closer examination of Kelly's career showed that he was actually a co-director on his two greatest successes On The Town  and  Singing in the Rain.  Kelly clearly didn't care for the mediocre material he was dealing with. Michael Kidd had worked with Kelly at MGM and was a noted choreographer. He had the dancers leaping and almost flying around the sets but its all overkill to watch the musical numbers. The production group also had the mysterious Roger Edens, whose name turns up on a lot of MGM's great musicals as the associate producer. It should have been a can't miss reunion of the famous Freed Unit from MGM. The problem may have been that this group was probably a little past their prime.

Gene Kelly directs Hello Dolly

Fox spent lots and lots of money on sets and costumes and it's all on the screen. Probably the gigantic production would have sapped the energy and talent out of any production team.  The film's remembered today because a piece of it appears in the film Wall-E.

 

The only interesting thing on the DVD is the special feature showing Kelly directing the gigantic 4th of July parade number. Here you get an idea of the massive nature of the movie with hundreds and hundreds of extras performing on a huge set built on the Fox backlot.

This feature is only 7 minutes long but in some ways, a lot more entertaining than the actual film.

 148 minutes, Ernest Lehman produced and wrote this thing.