On a Clear Day You Can See Forever

ON A CLEAR DAY opens with two extraordinary sequences. Firstly, with Babs singing the title song, there is a montage of flowers growing at speed in front of our very eyes, a decisively Minnellian melange of colour and artifice to create a real eye-dazzlingly emotional explosion which reaches an ecstatic crescendo as Babs skips through a maze of floral abundance. This is followed by a chilling, antithetical credits sequence, a VERTIGOesque assembly-line of diminishing rectangles in cool, gorgeous colours, in which the familiar Broadway music feels distorted and distant.

These two sequences encapsulate the film's conflict - between heart and mind; emotion and intellect; freedom and order; dream and reality; self-expression and conformity. In 1970, the age of BONNIE AND CLYDE, M*A*S*H and WOODSTOCK, a Minnelli/Lerner/Streisand musical must have seemed amusingly quaint, but today, we can marvel at its audacity and flair, while many of its more acclaimed contemporaries seem tinny and shrill.

The narrative proper seems initially mundane after such abstract excess. Daisy Gamble (perfect name!) interrupts a lecture by famed psychologist, Marc Chabot, being accidentally hypnotised as he demonstrates on a pupil. She is a scatty, ditzy loudmouth who has come to Chabot in the hope that he will manipulate her out of a 5-packs a day smoking habit to please her ultra-conformist fiance, Warren, who has a career-crucial business dinner.

Chabot has little interest in this clumsy pest until he discovers that she has some psychic powers. Intrigued, he explores her through hypnosis and discovers her past-life as a supremely resourceful, sexually magnetic, orphaned Cockey golddigger of the Regency, who is standing trial for espionage and treason, her caddish husband having deserted her. Chabot begins to fall in love with this remarkable woman, and believing, against all his rationalist principles, in reincarnation.

Even by Minnelli's standards, this is a bravely open-ended picture, not only in its unexpected denouenment, but in refusing to simplify the bewildering, complicated emotions his characters become prey to. On a simple structural level, he contrasts conformity with the life of emotion and imagination. Chabot is a doctor whose devotion to science and facts is almost monkish in its celibate form. His office is the embodiment of conformity, a bland brown pervading walls, chairs, fittings, barred windows, books, even his own clothes. Despite being Yves Montand, he is no French lover.

Into his life comes this impossible woman whose striving for fiance-pleasing order results in further chaos. In her second incarnation, as Melinda, she brings bawdiness, vulgarity, romance, humour, daring, but, most of all, colour, sumptuous, ravishing, blinding colour. The effect she has on Chabot is reflected in the film's form, which moves from steady, mid-level, classical compositions, to outrageous fancy, dizzying camera movements, mercurial editing cutting across time and space. Chabot soon begins to have Daisy's dreams, while she becomes divided from herself in a remarkable visualisation of the split between duty and desire.

But it's not enough to suggest simplistic dichotomies - even the 'normal' Daisy has a rooftop garden which is simply magical (isn't that such a lovely idea, a woman who makes flowers grow quickly by talking to them?), while her fiance, like Darrin from BEWITCHED, is so desperate to conform that he becomes mad. 'Sciences', such as psychoanalysis are invoked in the spirit of the times, but the Pandora's Box they open in no way 'explain', but sets free, as Chabot ruefully recognises.

This is all significantly gendered as men try to control and explain a woman who darts gleefully through history, place, morality, while barely taking a break. As ever with Minnelli, the celebration of artifice only reveals how repressive real-life is, and his satire is cutting if you care to look. This is an undervalued, joyous, sad coda to one of Hollywood's greatest careers (Minnelli would go on to make only one more movie), as full of invention and love as his first film, CABIN IN THE SKY.

The music is fine, with little of the heartache as GIGI or fun of MY FAIR LADY. Montand is charming in a thankless role, but Barbara Streisand - and, God help me, I never thought I'd say this - is an absolute joy in a double (treble?) role, especially convincing in saucy period dress, yet, moving when she needs to be.

Based on the marginally successful 1965 Broadway musical with book and lyrics by Alan Jay Learner and a solid score by Burton Lane, the 1970 ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE FOREVER was no box office disaster--but it was a disappointment, failing to draw a broad audience and performing much more poorly than any one had imagined. This is a pity, for although it cannot be classed among the truly great musical musicals it is nonetheless a very good one, imaginatively filmed and beautifully performed.

The story concerns a scatter-brained young woman named Daisy Gamble (Barbra Streisand) who is desperate to quit smoking and who lays siege to a noted hypnotist Dr. Charbot (Yves Montand.) But it happens that Daisy, for all her goofiness, is unexpectedly gifted: she can find lost items, she knows when the telephone will ring--and once under hypnosis she stuns Charbot by transforming into Melinda, a woman who lived, loved, and died more than a century before.

The cast is superior. Streisand is memorably fresh in the role of Daisy and performs her numbers with remarkable youthful zeal and a flawless artistry; she is a tremendous amount of fun to watch and an endless pleasure to hear. Although it seems many Americans fail to see the appeal of the great French singer and actor Yves Montand, he handles his songs with the same world-weary style that first brought him to the attention of the legendary Edith Piaf--and it proves a remarkably effective foil for Streisand, setting off her expansive performance to perfection. The remaining cast, which includes a very young Jack Nicholson and Bob Newhart, is equally fine.

This was the last musical for Vincent Minnelli, perhaps the greatest director of golden age musicals and creator of such films as MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, and he endows the film with his very elegant eye; the "past life" sequences, in which designer Cecil Beaton had a hand, are particularly beautiful. Add in such beautifully orchestrated and performed songs as "It's Lovely Up Here," "Come Back To Me," and the title piece--and when all is said and done ON A CLEAR DAY is a very enjoyable film indeed.

The film was originally intended to be released in a three hour version--but in the wake of several box office disasters for large scale musicals both Minnelli and the studio thought better of it and cut the film significantly. It would seem these scenes are gone forever, and more's the pity. Still, this no-frills DVD release offers a best-possible print in terms of both sound and picture, and both long-time fans and newcomers will adore it. Recommended.

Gary F. Taylor, aka GFT, Amazon Reviewer

This is one of those films that one would like to praise without reservation, but, alas!, some elements are not quite up to the high level of some of its attributes.

Streisand, after that stunning title montage (Love those blooming flowers and the clever lyrics that coax them into the sunshine!) is a bit grating in her opening scenes as Daisy Gamble, though she mellows somewhat as the modern-day plot progresses. However she more than rises to the occasion when Melinda is exhumed and she gets to parade about in Cecil Beaton's absolutely stunning accoutrements. Montand, who seems to have learned his lines phonetically (A foreign accent can be charming but he seems to be exaggerating his!), is serviceable, sings on key, and manfully wades through the machinations of the scriptwriters, what with the absurd brouhaha over reincarnation among the university's powers-that-be and Dr. Chabot's stubborn reluctance to admit that Daisy has psychic powers, et cetera. John de Cuir does his usual eye-filling wonders with the production design, beautifully aided by Harry Stradling, Sr.'s use of the Panavision/Technicolor cameras. And, of course, Burton Lane's score has a few liltingly listenable songs that propel the story quite felicitously. And there's the bonus of two of my favorite actresses, Mabel Albertson and Irene Handl, to add some sly support. (And, one must reluctantly mention Jack Nicholson, youthfully handsome in his brief appearance here, now a gothic ruin of his former self...Must be all those ill-tempered characters he's since played, as well as the reported off-screen dissipation in the decades since.)

But Nelson Riddle, undeniably one of the all-time great arrangers for singers like Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, seems the wrong choice to orchestrate and conduct the musical elements. His work seems a little thin and not equal to the lush visual panoply. And, I suspect, Vincente Minnelli was hampered by the producer, Howard Koch, whose credits suggest a level of taste and achievement more oriented to audiences that preferred something less refined than what might have best suited this enterprise. The direction seems a bit diffuse, and even dispirited, and certainly not up to the standard of Minnelli's best in his halcyon days at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Nevertheless, I'll admit I enjoyed it when I saw it during its theatrical release, but beware of non-letterboxed video transfers. "Formatting" will reduce this one to considerably less than its makers intentions. If a DVD release comes along and you're a Streisand (or Minnelli) fan, it'll be worth the wait.

Okay, granted you have to like Barbra Streisand to love this movie. But for those of you who don't, it's worth a catch just to see Bob Newhart and Jack Nicholson as "young" men. Jack is especially funny in his short scenes with Barbra and her fiancée...

But the main reason to see this flick is the acting and musical talent of Barbra. She has to STRETCH to play a mousy crowd follower, and then switch it up to play a haughty wealthy socialite in a past time period. The costumes are out of this world, and the film should have won an academy award for costume design, although Barbra's figure did her costumes justice. The periods in history represented by the film are stunningly presented. All in all, this is my favorite movie of all time. There is laughter, sorrow, drama, singing, dancing, lots of Barbra skin showing, sexuality, scorn, mocking, a panorama of events and celebrations and Barbra's eventual awakening as her own person. I salute Vicente Minnelli, post mortem.

On A Clear Day came at the end of the Movie Musical Cycle that started strong from MY FAIR LADY. Once the market became supersaturated with musicals (Half A Sixpence, Dr. Doolittle), the beauty of the movie musical wore off.

On A Clear Day started life as the next go-round for Richard Rodgers. After he retired working with Oscar Hammerstein, he partnered with Alan Lerner and they started to write this musical. Rodgers backed out of the project but the show made it to Broadway with Barbara Harris in the lead. It was respectfully received but never did blockbuster business. In fact, if it weren't for the song "What Did I Have?" it would almost be forgotten.

Enter Vincente Minelli and Ms. Streisand. Together, they took the idea and ran with it until it became a big, bright, lovely movie. The old songs (the title song and "What Did I Have") are rendered priceless by Barbra who sings them as emotional tour-de-forces. The new songs (a cute duet "Go To Sleep" and "Love With All The Trimmings") are wonderful. In fact, the latter was filmed a la Tom Jones. In short, everything about the film worked.

Originally it was three hours long and intended as a road show production (tickets ordered in advance; two shows a day). Paramount went for the fast buck and they trimmed it to under two hours. Yes, what is left is priceless and wonderful but I wish they would release the Director's Cut of this musical. If what we see today is still excellent, I can't help but wonder about what they took out.