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So much average

Simply Perfect

Absolutely Brilliant!

For having a relatively low budget, the film's style and overall art direction are immensely impressive.

What a cute movie, especially from a sentimental skeptic like Thornton Wilder. And, okay, maybe sometimes it's a little TOO cute but it's still an awful lot of family fun, filled to bursting with innocence and apothegms.Anthony Perkins and Robert Morse are two young clerks in the Yonkers store that belongs to Paul Ford in 1884. What a skinflint. He asks for some special treatment from his barber then actually gives him a tip. The barber turns to the camera, holds up a single coin, and says bitterly, "A nickel -- after twenty years." Ford is interested in marrying someone "who will be a housekeeper while thinking she's a home owner." Something like that. The young woman he has in mind is Shirley MacLaine, who manages a millinery store in sophisticated New York City. But everyone's heart remains in the suburbs. "London, Paris, Yonkers," boasts Ford. This was before Son of Sam.He's a skinflint alright but, like Scrooge, he's completely undone and made to see the error of his ways in a kind of epiphany, by three agents: MacLaine, Perkins, and Shirley Booth as the matchmaker whom he winds up marrying. And after many tribulations and adventures, everybody lives happily -- joyously -- ever after, as long as MacLaine doesn't let Perkins catch her in the shower.Perkins, Morse, and MacLaine are funny but in a direct way. They're giddy with youth. The other characters are one dimensional. The two most interesting characters are Paul Ford as Horace Vandergelder, who would be a Master of the Universe if the universe were limited to Yonkers in 1884, and Booth as the manipulative and sneaky, but very wise, middle-aged woman who holds the play together. "Mister Vandegelder is always saying that everyone is a fool," she muses to the camera, "but he's a fool too, so the choice becomes -- a fool with others or a fool alone." One of the many aphorisms. The movie ends with the principals reciting the lessons they've learned from the day's adventure.Wilder was a writer of considerable range and often his comedy, like this farce, towed along in its wake a genuine moral, though more shadowy than the ones shouted out by the actors. This is a criticism of the Protestant Ethic and an endorsement of what used to be called existentialism. The Calvinist version of the Protestant Ethic was abroad in the land during the age of the robber barons, of whom Vandegelder is a minor example. An historic example is the father of Lizzie Borden. You know him -- "Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her father forty whacks"? The last public act Andrew Borden is known to have performed, while strolling through his factory and heading home, was to stoop down and pick up a padlock lying on the floor. There was no key for it. He examined it for a minute, turning it over in his hands, wondering if he might some day find a use for it, then slipped it into his pocket. Waste not, want not. That's what Horace Vandegelder would have done.Now I'm about to run out of space so I won't have room to tell you all about how "The Matchmaker" is an endorsement of existentialism or how it links up with Arthur Schopenhauer's argument that we need to shed our inhibitions and follow our instincts. I was going to shoe horn Joseph Campbell in there too -- "Follow your bliss" and all that. I apologize for using so much space on the movie. I apologize abjectly. I grovel in mortification. I notice that all these apologies are taking up a lot of space too, and I'm sorry for that. I'll just have to conclude by recommending my forthcoming book: "Donald Duck and Schopenhauer: Laughter As Suicide."

I am astounded at many to most of these imbecilic comments. The Matchmaker is an excellent play by a serious playwright; Hello, Dolly is a cheesy schtick, an excuse for a musical perpetrated by the felon also responsible for MAIM (oops, Mame). Shirley Booth is a multiple Tony-winning stage actress and star who is marvelous as always; Barbra Streisand, years too young for this part, plays herself as she always does, speaking of unbearable schticks. Walter Matthau is UTTERLY miscast as Horace; Paul Ford is dazzling in his usual style (which has nothing to do with 'bluster'). Shirley MacLaine is charm personified as Irene Malloy; Marianne McAndrew is synthetic and fake. I could go on, but there's no point. for anyone to compare these terrific performances with the overblown, hideous, bloviated mugging of the musical film version, much less to compare them unfavorably, is too ludicrous.

I just love this movie, and especially Shirley Booth in the lead roll of Dolly Levi. I had seen the Barbara Streisand version first and didn't know this one even existed until many years later. Once I saw "The Matchmaker", "Hello Dolly" took the backseat to the movie and has stayed there since. "Hello Dolly" is creative and innovative in its dance numbers and stagings etc, but Barbara Streisand is more of a nuisance and pest, and Walter Matthau is downright bitter (and tone deaf if his croaking out on "It Takes a Woman" is any indication). The enmity between Matthau and Streisand is palpable -- supposedly Matthau hated Streisand and refused to be on set with her unless they were specifically shooting a scene together. The hatred shows. Streisand was TOO YOUNG for the role of Dolly Levi. The whole idea of her seducing a bitter pill like Matthau is laughable. But in "The Matchmaker" -- Shirley Booth is incredible as the constantly meddling, good hearted, slightly nosy, overbearing at times, loving widowed woman, trying to find a living for herself in an age where middle aged women really didn't have many options. She is always cheerful, scheming and conniving but with only the best intentions for everyone involved. and here's my potential spoiler when I first saw the movie, and Dolly Levi was at the Harmonia Gardens with Horace Van Der Gelder, and she had ordered dinner and was serving his food like a mother hen and he was getting flustered and flabbergasted, but Dolly was center stage for the moment. THEN when Horace spies Irene Malloy in the next dining room and they get back together and leave, the crushed, disappointed look on Dolly's face, and when she reached over and helped herself to Horace's abandoned desert, made me start crying for this woman who wanted nothing more really than to marry Horace.

This has, through no fault of its own, become a bit of a curiosity. Long ago eclipsed by it's musical version "Hello, Dolly!", the film seems like an introduction to the songs (particularly in the earlier part) which never come. This is largely due to the fact that the musical picked up many of the song titles from lines in the play. ("Put On Your Sunday Clothes", "Ribbons Down My Back" etc.) There are many more differences from, at least, the film version of "Dolly". In the Harmonia Gardens scene, Dolly is hardly the celebrated personage of the musical but just another guest. As played by Shirley Booth, she is hardly the miscast young diva Barbra Streisand was.The character of Malachi Stack, perhaps a sort of cousin of Alfred P. Doolittle of Shaw's "Pygmalion" or the musical "My Fair Lady", played by Wallace Ford, doesn't exist in the musical. There is no one posing as Ernestina Simple here; she "Simply" doesn't show at the Harmonia Gardens! And Ambrose and Ermengarde are also nowhere to be found.The play by Thornton Wilder is itself based on his own "The Merchant of Yonkers" which itself was based on earlier (early to mid-19th century) plays by the Austrian Johann Nestroy and the, even earlier, British John Oxenford.The film, I think unwisely, has many of the characters directly addressing the audience and no doubt this worked better in the theater. And I think the story and settings cried out for color but, of course, Paramount was clearly too cheap.How would these stars have done in the musical? Perkins, here a considerable improvement over Michael Crawford as Cornelius, could have done the songs not much worse (He did sing on the Broadway stage in the short-running 1960 musical "Greenwillow", but none too well.). Robert Morse would have been more than passable as Barnaby (He sang in "How to Succeed" of course.) and Shirley MacLaine could obviously sing well enough but Miss Booth was not known as a vocalist, at least to my recollection. But Babs' acting ability at the time "Dolly" was made was pretty non-existent and she couldn't sing a single note without milking it for all it was worth. I think Marianne McAndrew and Danny Lockin were fine as Irene and Barnaby.I think this film, for all its problems, is a considerable improvement over that of "Hello, Dolly!" but it is hoped that a decent version of the musical becomes available in the not-too-distant future.