Hello Dolly (part 2)

Continued from part 1

We come back a few hours later: in Elegance the boys come to pick up the ladies, but they're poor as shit and attempt to convince the women that aperitifs and cabs are tacky, and that true elegance is established not by drinking expensive cocktails, but instead by walking for hours in high-heels.

Their subterfuge is paper-thin and the girls just go along with it cheerfully: but there's an eventual and kind of obvious reveal teed up: Irene is not at all fooled by these boys, and, in fact, just likes hanging out with them, even though they're visibly and obviously poor.

So they gradually stroll to the restaurant pretending that the height of elegance is whatever the boys can afford or steal which is not much.

This is actually a pretty solid comedy song, although it goes on for a while.

Snubbing folks - is chic to us Sometimes we don't even speak to us If you ain't got elegance You can never ever carry it off

Oh boy, now it's time for Love is Only Love, a song where Dolly expresses some loneliness and vulnerability again, although this time she tones the belt down about 10% so it's marginally softer.

Look, we get it, lady.

She establishes the small additional detail that she's reluctant to fall in love again without some kind of sign from her dear departed first husband, which is a plot point as stupid as it is easily resolved later on. Her whole goal throughout the film is to marry Horace by any means necessary but what if she doesn't get a sign from her dead husband?

Yes, this woman with crystal clear motivation and enormous amounts of drive might not even want the thing she's spent the last 90 minutes pursuing with such ferocity that you'd be wholly unsurprised to find literal blood on her hands. such conflict. 🙄

finally, the big restaurant!

the head waiter and Dolly’s fake heiress argue a bit to establish that they both exist:

he’s stuffy, she’s pretending to be the worst person alive.

Everyone’s seated, which takes another 5 minutes, at which point the kitchen discovers that Dolly is incoming.

apparently, from her first marriage, Dolly has made for herself a real reputation at this restaurant: she's beloved for her enormous appetite.

This sounds like I'm joking. I am not joking.

Everyone on staff is so enormously fired up by the prospect of serving Dolly, the hungriest woman on the planet, that they need to do a big choreographed dance number about it.

christ, how much can Dolly eat?!?

Cornelius reluctantly reveals that he's poor as shit and won't be able to pay for dinner.

Irene reveals her own terrible secret:

She obviously knew the whole time, and was planning to pay for the night herself.

But - oh, whoops - she forgot to bring her wallet, so now they're all in a minor pickle.

Fake heiress gives Horace the brush-off as rudely as possible.

Dolly strides into the restaurant with Hello, Dolly, the second major musical number devoted to the concept that this restaurant is very excited by a hungry woman.

She used to be rich and there is money to be made.

this lady put our kids through college

boy can she put down a ham dinner

she's friends with the band, too, including Real Actual Louis Armstrong.

"I hear one time you shotgunned an entire turkey."

The restaurant repeats "hello, Dolly" at her in singsong for 12 entire minutes.

That's right, you could fill an entire 22 minute sitcom block with just musical numbers where the restaurant is excited by how much of a heavyweight customer Dolly is.

This also helps to establish why Dolly needs Horace so much: someone needs to pay for these extravagant meals and her ex-husband is clearly too dead to foot the bill any longer. Such romance!

Ok, Horace, after two completely botched dates, are you ready to finally marry me, Dolly, the woman who's very clearly been chasing you this entire time?

"fuck no!"

"oh, good, my entire goddamned turkey has arrived. here, you eat my beets."

"i don't like beets!"

I bet you thought I was joking about how much of the last half of this movie is about how much food Dolly can pack away, but lo, proof: she ordered an entire goddamned turkey.

I'm not sure if it's romantic that these two people deserve each other just because it's funny to watch Dolly torment Horace.

Anyways, the kitchen is so excited by this woman who can eat an entire turkey to herself that they make her the honorary judge for tonight's dance competition.

leave me be with my turkey, you vultures

It just so happens that the prize for tonight's dance competition is $50 - exactly enough so that Cornelius and Irene can pay for dinner!

So, uh, earlier, Dolly invited Ermengarde and her beau to also eat dinner here, at this same restaurant, and I cannot for a single second imagine how that factored into her scheme. In fact, she seems to have invited everyone to this restaurant simply because the plot requires that it happen.

This whole evening start to unravel, as Horace notices both his daughter Ermagerd and his two shop clerks on the dance floor.

He throws a hissy-fit and also some pies, creates a scene, and fires everyone he can.

everyone wants to marry this man he's such a dreamboat

The distraction afforded by the scuffle is enough for most of the freeloaders to escape the restaurant without paying their tabs.

Cornelius takes this opportunity to sing It Only Takes a Moment to Irene, establishing that he fell in love with her immediately and without even a single thought troubling his empty head.

Irene remains inexplicably in to it. Life as a milliner must be rough, that this dweeb is the height of excitement.

There's no close-up of them holding hands in this scene. That's notable because a sharp-eyed redditor noted that a close-up shot of them holding hands in this scene was a major plot point in Wall-E, which means that the Wall-E team must have added it to Hello Dolly. (Which would be necessary: hand-holding is plot important in Wall-E.)

This is the other song that's used in Wall-E, just the very last bit.

Honestly, mostly watching this movie just reminds me that "Wall-E was very good".

Storming out of the restaurant, Dolly sings So Long, Dearie to Horace, emphasizing that he's a miserable, shitty old crank and that she's better off without him.

many minutes of scenery chewing from Barbra Streisand ensue

to be entirely honest this would be my preferred ending to the movie. Realizing that Horace sucks and telling him off with a big song then leaving with a grand fuck-you after setting up Cornelius with Irene and helping Ermagerd escape with her boy? Good ending.

But no, there's one last scene, the next morning.

"Aw shit, nobody's left for me to verbally abuse."

"We're all here to tell you that you suck, and you can't fire us because we quit."

"Also Dolly's here. Apparently that goodbye-and-fuck-you was nothing but smoke."

I mean, he's awful, but there's just something about him that keeps Dolly coming back -

Horace, warn down and exhausted by Dolly's brutal campaign, finally relents.

But she's not sure if she wants to marry him - she needs a sign from her dead-husband, remember? Anyways, he, offhandedly, says something that dead husband used to say, and that's resolved! Wows! That was such an ill-conceived and easily resolved plot point!

Story over!

Now, to close out the show, there's a reprise of each of the show's major songs as we cruise up to Horace and Dolly's elaborate wedding.

Dolly's back in restaurant money! Turkeys for everyone!

Thoughts, Feelings?

... I guess it's a big fun musical? Not a lot happens.

I honestly think there's a pretty great 90 minute film in here. Cut out most of the entire middle hour, trim a few minutes out of each of the songs, and leave Horace lonely and alone in New York, and call it a day.

I don't like that Horace gets "redeemed" despite being nothing but an irritated, chintzy sourpuss for the movie's entire runtime. I know it's supposed to be endearing but it's not.

Cornelius and Barnaby's "deer in the headlights" approach to romance and high, squeaky voices are... just the worst.

And maybe the restaurant dance number could have been, like, 2 minutes long, rather than six full minutes long.

That might just be me applying modern standards to ancient films, but it doesn't seem like this did so well in 1969, either.

It's not terrible. It's not great, either. The Rotten Tomatoes score of 45% is a solid spot for it, with one's opinion of the movie apparently largely hinging on whether or not one is excited by the prospect of Barbra Streisand chewing the scenery or an absurdly opulent dance number.

One thing I do kind of notice in these Music Man / Hello Dolly era musicals is this kind of weird reverence for the late 1800s as an era.

I think there's something distinctly conservative about portraying the past as a kind of rosy, idealized place where the women are virtuous and the men always wore suits and were so chaste as to be terrified to even kiss a woman.

Where the biggest problems are children playing pool and sassing their parents and good, god-fearing citizens are easily taken by local hucksters.

I don't know why musicals of the 1960s so badly wanted to live in this pat, cartoonish idealized past. I guess it was a real contrast with all of the dangerous, scary stuff that The Teens were up to in the 60's.

Anyways.

Hello Dolly.

Is a movie. I watched.