Hello, Dolly! (1969)

Hello, Dolly! movie storyline. 27 years-old Barbra Streisand seemed an inappropriate choice for middle-aged, match-making widow Dolly Levi, but her energy carries her right through the role and dominates the lackluster movie around her. The plot, drawn from Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker (itself based on a 19th-century British farce), is set in motion when Yonkers feed store clerk Cornelius Hackl (Michael Crawford) celebrates his promotion by taking his pal Barnaby Tucker (Danny Lockin) to New York City for a “corking good time.”

But Cornelius and Barnaby can’t avoid crossing paths with their boss Horace Vandergelder (Walter Matthau), who’d give them Holy Ned if he saw them in a fancy restaurant with two fancy girls instead of tending the store. Mr. Vandergelder himself is the object of Dolly’s affections, though she pretends to have only a professional interest in the widowed merchant, going through the motions of finding him a new wife when in fact she’d like to be the lucky bride herself. The film’s musical set pieces include a show-stopping rendition of the title number, with Louis Armstrong more or less playing himself.

The biggest number is “Before the Parade Passes By,” in which thousands of costumed marchers and atmosphere extras cavort before a huge replica of a New York City thoroughfare in the 1890s (actually the main entrance of the 20th Century-Fox studio, with period facades adorning the office buildings). An artifact of an era in which Broadway musicals were a significant part of popular culture, Hello Dolly seemed bizarrely irrelevant in the social turmoil of the late 1960s, and it became one of the late-1960s big-budget failures that led Hollywood studios toward a different kind of filmmaking in the 1970s.

Hello, Dolly! is a 1969 American romantic comedy musical film based on the 1964 Broadway production of the same name. Directed by Gene Kelly and written and produced by Ernest Lehman, the film stars Barbra Streisand, Walter Matthau, Michael Crawford, Danny Lockin, Tommy Tune, Fritz Feld, Marianne McAndrew, E. J. Peaker and Louis Armstrong (whose recording of the title tune had become a number-one single in May 1964). The film follows the story of Dolly Levi, a strong-willed matchmaker who travels to Yonkers, New York in order to find a match for the miserly “well-known unmarried half-a-millionaire” Horace Vandergelder. In doing so, she convinces his niece, his niece’s intended and Horace’s two clerks to travel to New York.

Released on December 16, 1969, by 20th Century Fox, the film won three Academy Awards for Best Art Direction, Best Score of a Musical Picture and Best Sound and was nominated for a further four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Although the film eventually broke even, it was not a commercial success.

The film opened strongly and initially grossed more than The Sound of Music, but lost momentum and became a disappointment at the box office. It grossed $33.2 million at the box office in the United States, earning a theatrical rental (the distributor’s share of the box office after deducting the exhibitor’s cut) of $15.2 million, ranking it in the top five highest-grossing films of the 1969–1970 season. In total, it earned $26 million in theatrical rentals for Fox, against its $25.335 million production budget. Despite performing well at the box office, it still lost its backers an estimated $10 million.

Directed by: Gene Kelly
Starring: Barbra Streisand, Walter Matthau, Michael Crawford, Marianne McAndrew, E. J. Peaker, Louis Armstrong, Joyce Ames, Tommy Tune, Judy Knaiz, David Hurst, Richard Collier, J. Pat O’Malley, Allegra Clegg
Screenplay by: Ernest Lehman
Production Design by: John DeCuir
Cinematography by: Harry Stradling
Film Editing by: William Reynolds
Costume Design by: Irene Sharaff
Art Direction by: Herman A. Blumenthal, Jack Martin Smith
Music by: Lennie Hayton, Lionel Newman
MPAA Rating: G fon general audience.
Distributed by: 20th Century Fox
Release Date: December 16, 1969