Sometimes when things are crazy, you want to go back to a simpler time when movies were family friendly, feel-good musicals that just made you smile. Well, those comforts can be found out there, but not so much in 1967's THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE.
Julie Andrews had followed up her huge success in "Mary Poppins" and "The Sound of Music" with two serious dramatic roles in "Hawaii" and Hitchcock's "Torn Curtain".
She paired up again with her 'Hawaii" director George Roy Hill (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid", "The Sting") for this old fashioned broad comedy musical.
Julie is Millie Dilmount, arriving in the big city in the roaring 20's as a brash, modern woman ready to carve out her own path. Of course, this being a 60's film, that path is built around seducing her wealthy boss Trevor Graydon (John Gavin from "Psycho" having a great time).
In one of the strangest subplots ever, Millie stays in a women's boarding house thats the epicenter of a slave trading operations. Any girl that arrives without family connections seems to disappear at the hands of Mrs. Mears (Beatrice Lillie) and her henchmen Jack Soo and Pat Morita, who are both hilarious. The subplot hasn't aged well for today's audiences, with Soo & Morita being billed as "Oriental 1 & 2" as our first clue.
Carol Channing brings a ton of bizarre energy as super wealthy Muzzy Van Hossmere, but I never really understood what the hell her character was doing flitting in and out of a very long running time.
In early development, the movie was meant to be a huge, big-screen vehicle for TV star Mary Tyler Moore, hot off the DIck Van Dyke show, but when Andrews was attached, Moore found her role shrinking and her only song cut. Moore wouldn't have a big screen hit until 1980's "Ordinary People".
For a musical, there are very few songs and only one of them really any good. It's called "Jimmy" and was also featured in the long running Broadway musical that kicked off in 2002 with Sutton Foster in the title role. Tamara and I saw it in New York with the original cast and it was fantastic. With an entirely new score (save "Jimmy") it was a three hour blast.
Which is probably why the original film version pales so badly in comparison. Producer Ross Hunter (Airport) and Hill play it very broad, with Millie often looking directly into the camera and her thoughts popping up on silent movie style cards.
Andrews keep everything moving and is her likable self as Millie, but its all thoroughly old fashioned and for its huge budget, feels pretty stagebound.
Roy Hill would go on to make some of the greatest films of the late sixties and seventies, including Newman & Redford's classic Butch & Sundance and The Sting, along with "Slap Shot".
Andrews followed this with 1968's "Star!" that killed the studio musical for many years. in 1982, she and husband Blake Edwards would brilliantly reinvent the musical for modern tastes with "Victor/Victoria".
Millie feels like a dying gasp of the traditional big screen musical, but found success in theatres, one of the last musicals to do so before "Star!" and "Hello Dolly" nearly bankrupted their studios just one year later in 1968.
Enough with the flapping, I'll give it a C-.
(Search for the original cast in the completely different Broadway version on You Tube. Foster became a star and its a lot of fun.)
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