Cinema
Hello, Dolly!
Gene Kelly · 1969
Synopsis
New York, 1890. Dolly Levi, a widow and matchmaker, offers a thousand services, from marriages to dance lessons. Horace Vandergelder, a wealthy grain merchant from Yonkers, miserly and widowed, hires her to find him a wife, and refuses to let his niece Ermengarde marry Ambrose, a penniless young painter. Dolly sets her mind on marrying him herself. His two clerks, Cornelius and Barnaby, close the shop in his absence and head off to New York, where they pose as rich men to the milliner Irene Molloy and her assistant Minnie.
Context
Twentieth Century Fox bought the rights in 1965, for two million dollars and a quarter of the takings, with a clause forbidding the film's release before 20 June 1971 or the end of the Broadway run, whichever came first, the first deadline being reached. The finished film waited about a year, until the studio paid the producer of the play to release it earlier; the premiere took place on 16 December 1969. Its cost, about twenty-two and a half million dollars, was not recouped, and together with two other musicals from the studio it wiped out the profits of an earlier great success; the studio was on the verge of bankruptcy at the end of the decade.
Who it is for
A musical of nearly two and a half hours, shot in 70 mm, in a reconstruction of New York at the end of the nineteenth century.
Prizes and reception
Three Oscars in 1970, for art direction, music and sound; among the biggest box-office earners of the year, it nevertheless lost money.