The Matchmaker (1958)

This movie was shown on TCM last week or so. It's the first time for me, and while watching it, I saw that it is almost the same script as Hello Dolly! It's a charming story and enjoyable movie overall. But Hello Dolly! is a favorite movie with me, and I think they did more with it. Even without the musical element, it developed a lot of scenes further, to the benefit of the story and viewer. Maybe it's also an appreciation for Barbra Streisand, though I do not like her in everything. Her over the top brass as an outrageous Dolly was so much fun. I don't like every musical either, but Hello Dolly! is a very lively and entertaining one to me. There is a lot of fun in it. It's certainly an attractive movie. The two are just different movies, each enjoyable for its own type and handling.

The history of THE MATCHMAKER is quite interesting from an academic point of view. In 1835 English playwright and drama critic created a one-act play titled A DAY WELL SPENT, a lightweight comedy of mismatched lovers, mistaken identities, and foolish misbehavior. In 1842 Austrian playwright and actor Johann Nestroy developed Oxenford's work into a full-length comedy titled EINEN JUX WILL ER SICH MACHEN, which was (and remains) very popular in German-language theatre. American writer and scholar Thornton Wilder came to the material in the 1930s--and in 1938 returned the story to the English language under the title THE MERCHANT OF YONKERS. It was an instant disaster, receiving incredibly dire reviews and running all of 39 performances in its New York debut.It was quite a setback for Wilder, who had previously won Pulitzers for the novel THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY and the play OUR TOWN. Even so, actress Ruth Gordon and Tyrone Guthrie strongly felt the play was sound, and in the 1950s both began to pressure Wilder to rework his script. With Gordon starring and Guthrie directing, and with the title changed to THE MATCHMAKER, it opened on Broadway in 1955--and was a smash hit. It attracted the attention of Hollywood, and in 1958 it became a vehicle for Tony and Academy Award-winning actress Shirley Booth.The film version alters Wilder's script quite a bit, and not always for the better, occasionally over-reaching itself in a grab for broad farce; all the same, it does manage to capture the innate charm of the original. Much of this is due to Shirley Booth. Although she is not well recalled today, she was easily among the finest actresses of her era, and her performance here is a warm and glowing jewel, clever, witty, and very gently sly. The remaining cast follows suit--and what a cast it is! Memorable character actors Paul Ford, Perry Wilson, and Wallace Ford; rising stars Anthony Perkins and Shirley MacLaine; and even a very young Robert Morse. Few films can lay claim to an equally gifted line up. The production values are also quite fine, capturing the charm of the 1880s without recourse to the gaudy edge one so often sees in films set in that period.The story itself is equally beguiling. Miserly businessman Horace Vandergelder (Paul Ford) is eager to marry and employs professional busy-body Dolly Levi (Shirley Booth) to fix him up--but when he takes the day off to visit prospective bride Irene Malloy (MacLaine) his two clerks (Perkins and Morse) follow suit. A series of chance encounters bring all concerned together--and with a little not-so-gentle nudging from Dolly, Vandergelder makes the discovery that the matchmaker herself is his own perfect match. If all this sounds a bit familiar, it should, for THE MATCHMAKER had yet another, slightly later incarnation: with music by Jerry Herman and book by Michael Stewart, it became HELLO, DOLLY!, one of Broadway's most celebrated musicals, which itself reached the screen in 1969.There is nothing in the way of bonus materials--a tremendous pity given the astonishing cast--but the DVD does offer the film in near-pristine transfer, and while THE MATCHMAKER doesn't quite rise to the level of the stage play's spark, it is nonetheless a gentle, amusing, and extremely well performed film, an overlooked gem from late-1950s Hollywood.GFT, Amazon Reviewer

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.

I have always loved the "straight play" version of the Dolly story. Actually Thornton Wilder's play had a previous incarnation set in Austria, in the German language. He had written it for Broadway in the fifties, it was filmed in 58 in this version, and Jerry Herman must have seen it and fallen in love with it for the musical "Hello, Dolly!". Parts of this are superior to the original stage version of the musical. The film version of the musical is dreadfully over danced and Streisand was way too young for the lead role. Shirley Booth, here in this "Matchmaker", is much closer, in a way to Channing's Dolly of Broadway. I have often wished that SOMEONE would re-do the musical for either video or film. I saw the 1964 Channing production and it was magical. Hollywood so often trashes these brilliant stage works. Anyway, rent this film when you can and compare it to the Streisand "Dolly".