On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970)

Director: Vincente Minnelli
Writer: Alan Jay Lerner, based on his musical
Stars: Barbra Streisand and Yves Montand

Index: The First Thirty.

Regular readers will know that I’m hardly a fan of most musicals and, for a while, this fell into the category of engaging story plagued by annoyingly bland songs. In fact, it opens that way, with gorgeous time lapse photography of flowers growing from seeds to being delivered to market, accompanied by the strong voice of Barbra Streisand singing a boring song.

By the time we get another boring song, the film has set up a serious amount of story and it’s rather fascinating. Yves Montand, playing Dr. Marc Chabot, teaches a psychology class about hypnosis by taking Preston back to his childhood but that’s paused as Daisy Gamble is accidentally hypnotised in the audience too.

She’s not a student; she came to him to help her quit smoking, for weird reasons that tease her as having ESP. She knows both what he’s looking for in his office and where to find it: in the dictionary under X. She knows when the phone’s about to ring, any phone. And she has feelings when people think about her so goes to see them in preparation.

She’s Streisand, of course, and she steals the film immediately with an effortless fish out of water charm. And then, when Chabot takes on her challenge and she regresses to a past life, exhibiting a completely different demeanour as Lady Melinda Winifred Waine Tentrees in a courtroom, because similar behaviour in 1814 was seriously dangerous, I was utterly sold on a thoroughly unusual fantasy movie.

Except that then everything’s interrupted at that point for another bland song and it took me right out of the story. I should point out at this point that the songs and the story are the work of the same man, Alan Jay Lerner, via a 1965 stage production that ran on Broadway for nine months, wasn’t well received but did land three Tony nominations.

The one saving grace is that there aren’t many songs in the first half so we can enjoy the weird psychological story and Streisand’s joyous schizophrenic performance. If that isn’t enough, there are some wonderful early 19th century sets, a few glorious British character actors—Roy Kinnear as the Prince Regent and good old Irene Handl as Lady Tentrees’s very working class mum—and a confident but oddly out of place performance from Jack Nicholson.

He shows up forty minutes or so in playing a sitar, as if he’d wandered onto the set from an exploitation movie like Psych-Out but without changing first. The story can likely be dated because of its take on particular psychological topics, Chabot’s lack of any professional ethics and the romantic angle between a 49 year old man and a 28 year old woman, but Tad Pringle can be dated to the counterculture of the late sixties far easier. Just look at him! He doesn’t even need to explain that he’s been searching for where he’s at. We can see it. We could even believe that he’s found it, even though he has a later scene in a knitted yellow sweater.

While we know Nicholson today as a pivotal movie star, this was his twentieth feature yet only his second for a major studio after Ensign Pulver, excepting movies like The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and Head that technically fit but don’t seem to because they’re indie wherever it counts. They must have wanted him because Tad Pringle didn’t exist on Broadway; he was a deliberate addition to the movie adaptation a year after his Oscar nod for Easy Rider. Yet he’s a clear B-movie character in an A-movie, just a very minor hook to the counterculture.

He’s also hardly in the movie, even if Tad is an important character to Daisy—“he used to be my brother,” she tells Dr. Chabot. Now, I’m watching the released version of the film, so it runs 129 minutes, which probably equates to a decent 100 of story if we cut out the songs that only get more frequent in the second half. The version screened for review in 1970 lasted 143 minutes and it included a song by Nicholson, Who is There Among Us Who Knows. The footage may no longer exist but the song itself can be found on YouTube and, while Nicholson’s no match for Streisand vocally, he delivers a very pleasant song that could have served as a neat interlude. Maybe that’s why it was cut.

Initially, I was drawn to the story but put off by the songs. As the picture ran on, I was more and more interested in Lady Melinda, who has serious depths, and a little in Daisy, who has some, but less and less in Dr. Chabot, who has none at all. While this is set up to be a cheesy romance, he doesn’t fall for Daisy, he uses her to get to Lady Melinda. And then he uses both as an example to teach his class. Maybe this is why he teaches rather than practices. Was he disbarred by the medical profession?

I never found myself drawn to the songs, Go to Sleep being the best of a poor lot, but I found myself drifting away from the story too. That was rather frustrating because it was what had held me thus far. I could feel my rating sliding downwards consistently for the last half hour. It’s not that it got less interesting, just that it got more annoying.

And that renders this a lost opportunity. It’s a great idea for a story and there’s a whole lot of background to draw on. While this film was based on the 1965 musical, that had roots in a 1926 play called Berkeley Square—which saw an adaptation to film in 1933 with Leslie Howard receiving an Oscar nod, and another in 1961 as The House in the Square. Berkeley Square was just as loosely inspired by The Sense of the Past, an unfinished novel by Henry James, published in 1917 after his death.

Those antecedents are time travel stories at heart, even though they’re not science fiction in the way most think of it. The musical adapts that base to the pseudoscientific trend of past life regression, which was a big deal before the mind opening sixties courtesy of the 1952 case of housewife Virginia Tighe being regressed to a 19th century Irish woman, Bridey Murphy.

So there was a lot of potential here, but it’s mangled twice, once through the logic of the Broadway musical where everything has to be a production number; and then again through the logic of classic Hollywood, because this fits much better with the misogyny of the fifties than the risks taken by New Hollywood during the early seventies. I wonder how obvious that will seem as I watch Nicholson’s next ten.

So for now, Streisand is brilliant, Montand does his job well enough, Nicholson is fine for the minute or two he has and Simon Oakland steals every scene he’s in, as he always did.

But this is a musical. The story falls away to nothing and the songs are bland. Oh well.