It Was 50 Years Ago Today: Julie Andrews Returns to the ’20s for Her Last Hit of the ’60s
May 2, 1967
Thoroughly Modern Millie
#1 film at the US box office, April 2-8 & April 16 – May 6, 1967
There was no bigger box office draw in the mid-’60s than Julie Andrews. While all her first half-dozen movies were successes, including the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Torn Curtain and the epic Hawaii (both 1966), she truly shined in musicals. Her film debut, 1964’s Mary Poppins, was Disney’s most successful movie to that point and earned her the Academy Award for Best Actress. Her next musical, 1965’s The Sound of Music, beat out Gone With the Wind to become the highest-grossing movie ever.
For Andrews’s third film musical, producer Ross Hunter sought the rights to adapt the stage show The Boy Friend, a pastiche of ’20s musicals. It was a fitting choice, as Andrews had made her Broadway debut in the show in 1954. When negotiations for The Boy Friend proved unsuccessful, however, Hunter, along with writer Richard Morris and director George Roy Hill, created a similar retro musical comedy, blending period songs with original material. Adapting the obscure musical Chrysanthemum, for which it borrowed a “white slavery” plot line and little else, Thoroughly Modern Millie starred Andrews as a “stenog” (typist) and would-be flapper who moves to New York City with dreams of marrying a rich boss.
Hill (who would go on to direct the similarly old-timey Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting) had envisioned Thoroughly Modern Millie as a lightweight send-up of silent movies. At especially dramatic moments, Andrews mugs into the camera, Millie’s inner thoughts flashing on the screen in a silent movie-style intertitle.
A couple of the supporting characters draw on recognizable character types from the era: Miss Dorothy Brown, played by Mary Tyler Moore, is a curly-haired poor little rich girl in the vein of a Mary Pickford character, while James Fox’s Jimmy Smith, with his round glasses and eager, can-do spirit, is clearly modeled on Harold Lloyd. Jimmy even gets a scene where he climbs the face of Andrews’ office building, in the style of Lloyd’s most famous stunt.
“I wanted it to be a soufflé,” Hill said of the film. “I knew it had to stay afloat by its own mindless nonsense.” Hunter, on the other hand, wanted a world-beating musical roadshow in the vein of The Sound of Music.
Under his watch, Thoroughly Modern Millie ballooned from a slight farce into a sprawling, two-and-a-half-hour behemoth, complete with an overture and intermission. Hunter even had the purposely tinny score, which composer Elmer Bernstein had designed to sound like one of the trebly records of the era, reorchestrated to a more conventional arrangement.
The plot is simultaneously overstuffed and irrelevant. In addition to Millie’s marriage quest, there’s a melodrama-style storyline about orphan girls who disappear from Millie and Dorothy’s boarding house, kidnapped by the landlady’s Asian henchmen to be trafficked into China. There’s also a will-they-won’t-they romance between Millie and paper clip salesman Jimmy, threatened by Jimmy’s apparent secret fling with Dorothy.
Then there’s the exploits of rich eccentric Muzzy van Hossmere, played by Carol Channing, which seem to have little connection with the rest of the goings-on. Toss in a Jewish wedding, an aerial dogfight, the invention of a new dance craze called the Tapioca, a pointless cross-dressing sequence, a recurring gag involving tranquilizer darts, another recurring gag involving Andrews’ chest, and an explosion at a Chinatown fireworks factory, and the soufflé is more of an overstuffed pie that’s almost all filling.
In fact, Channing’s scenes are Thoroughly Modern Millie in miniature: they do nothing to advance the plot and go on way too long, yet they succeed on spectacle and force of personality. In her defining film role, the theater legend steals the show with two of the movie’s most memorable scenes.
In one, she rasps out the 1919 hit “Jazz Baby,” commandeers all the instruments in a Dixieland band and tap dances on a xylophone. In another, clad in gold lame trousers, she shoots out of a cannon and joins a performance by a crew of acrobats. Channing’s manic caricature may not be calibrated to everyone’s taste, but her go-for-broke performance — which earned her an Oscar nomination — stands out even amid the film’s anything-goes atmosphere.
For a movie that pokes fun at the Roaring Twenties, Thoroughly Modern Millie seems surprisingly old-fashioned itself, especially in terms of its racial and sexual attitudes. The two Asian henchmen (Jack Soo and Pat Morita, billed as “Oriental #1” and “Oriental #2”) are egregious stereotypes of the inscrutable Chinaman, complete with gong sound effects.
Likewise, Millie’s decision to forsake the “modern” in favor of growing out her bob and becoming a housewife is portrayed as her coming to her senses, her previous desire for independence just a silly mistake. Even the supposedly ’20s fashions look suspiciously mod to contemporary eyes.
The most dated element of Thoroughly Modern Millie, however, is the fact that it was a hit at all. The era of the big movie musical would be finished within just a year or two, hampered by the bloat of movies like Millie, as well as the popularity of rock music and shifting tastes toward more realistic fare.
This decline would hurt Andrews’ career in particular. Her next two musicals, 1968’s Star! and 1970’s Darling Lili, were major flops, making Thoroughly Modern Millie her last hit for nearly a decade, and her last successful musical until 1982’s relatively low-key Victor/Victoria.
Thoroughly Modern Millie would become one of the Top 10 grossing films of 1967 and earn seven Oscar nominations, winning one for Bernstein’s score. Yet, inevitably, it couldn’t live up to the success of Andrews’ two previous smashes, nor their lifespan. While Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music remain as popular now as when they were released, Thoroughly Modern Millie is now probably better known for inspiring the 2002 Tony-winning stage musical of the same name.
But while it may be the weakest of the trilogy, Millie has its moments, and Andrews is charming throughout. Still, it’s worth wondering what the film would have been like if it had been shorn of the weight of expectation and allowed to be a silly little farce.
It Was 50 Years Ago Today examines a song, album, movie, or book that was #1 on the charts exactly half a century ago.
