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First Aired: Aug 24th, 1972, on ABCMusic: Nelson RiddleProducer/ Director: Blake EdwardsChoreography: Tony Charmoli
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"What to Stream: Blake Edwards’s Masterwork Documentary of His Wife, Julie Andrews"
By Richard Brody (2020)

[...]
On the other hand, there’s a secret masterwork by Edwards that’s hiding in plain sight, and one that’s vitally of its moment, a documentary that he filmed in 1972 called “Julie.” (The version that’s streaming, on YouTube, is lo-fi; it doesn’t matter.) “Julie,” too, is a sort of genre mashup—combining the portrait film and the personal documentary with the exotic category of documentaries by filmmakers who mainly made dramas. (Anthology Film Archives’s 2018 program “Documentarists for a Day” offered a remarkable batch of such one-off documentaries.) Julie Andrews was offered the chance to host her own network-TV prime-time variety show; Edwards, who’d been married to Andrews since 1969, was in a state of crisis under the pressure of studio power and was taking time off. He used that time to make a film that started with the very question of whether Andrews should accept the offer, and what the effect of her television schedule would be on her family life and her professional life.

Much of the movie involves scenes of Andrews and Edwards speaking together and separately about their relationship and their creative work and scenes of the couple together with their three children—a personal documentary of home life, at the breakfast table, the tennis court, the swimming pool, the beach, albeit with a pair of performers (Edwards started as an actor) for whom being on camera is automatically a self-conscious act of creation. The initial scenes of Andrews in a dressing room and on a set make clear that she accepted the offer—a five-year contract—and Edwards, though wary of the effect the show would have on her career, was completely encouraging at a personal level, and he films her work on it with enthusiasm, ardor, admiration, and love. (In 1986, Edwards directed “That’s Life!,” a movie starring Andrews and Jack Lemmon which he shot in his home and centered on his family life; “Julie” is the far greater work.)

The documentary starts with a closeup of Andrews that’s both intimate and glamorous, personal and radiantly cinematic. A seemingly infinite variety of such closeups of her recur throughout the film and sustain that abidingly dramatic tone, at once authentic and virtually fictional. Edwards also films with rapt fascination the rehearsal-studio process, of singing and dancing and strategizing and character-crafting. (He also creates an antic sped-up sequence that blends this process with the rituals of home life.) On the set of the broadcast, in rehearsal or during the actual recording of the broadcast, Edwards crafts lavishly textured and discerning sequences of Andrews and the crew at work, and the only problem with these grand and intricate scenes is their brevity—the whole documentary runs a mere fifty-two minutes, and these engrossing performance and pre-performance sequences could have run much longer. For all its offhanded and casual charm, “Julie” is one of Edwards’s major achievements.

Source: [ Ссылка ]


(Originally written for this "lo-fi" video: [ Ссылка ] )

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