Hello, Dolly! (1969)
Directed by Gene Kelly
Dolly Levi is a strong-willed matchmaker who travels to Yonkers, New York in order to see the miserly "well-known unmarried half-a-millionaire" Horace Vandergelder. In doing so, she convinces his niece, his niece's intended, and Horace's two clerks to travel to New York City.
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Screenplay: Ernest Lehman (based on the musical show Hello, Dolly!, music and lyrics by Jerry Herman, itself adapted from the play The Matchmaker by Thornton Wilder).
Adapted by Ernest Lehman from a record-setting 1964 Broadway musical that was itself based on Thornton Wilder's 1955 play The Matchmaker (which based on Wilder's earlier The Merchant of Yonkers and onward back to the beginning of time), Hello, Dolly! opens in New York City, where the region's most famous and beloved matchmaker/factotum Dolly Levi (Barbra Streisand) is heading off to the suburb of Yonkers, with her own marriage in mind: she's hellbent on snaring wealthy, grumpy hay & feed store owner Horace Vandergelder (Walter Matthew).
Though both films saw huge box office returns that didn't offset their even huger budgets, it was Hello, Dolly! that somehow managed to scratch its way to three Oscar wins and another four nominations, one of them for Best Picture - the third time in six years that 20th Century Fox had managed to hoist one of its gargantuan, tacky megaproductions into that nominally august company, after 1963's Cleopatra and 1967's Doctor Dolittle (and credit where credit is due: Hello, Dolly! may be a tasteless behemoth, but it's still far better than the enervating Dolittle, surely among the worst movie musicals ever made).
Though both films saw huge box office returns that didn't offset their even huger budgets, it was Hello, Dolly! that somehow managed to scratch its way to three Oscar wins and another four nominations, one of them for Best Picture - the third time in six years that 20th Century Fox had managed to hoist one of its gargantuan, tacky megaproductions into that nominally august company, after 1963's Cleopatra and 1967's Doctor Dolittle (and credit where credit is due: Hello, Dolly! may be a tasteless behemoth, but it's still far better than the enervating Dolittle, surely among the worst movie musicals ever made).
Watch even a film like Cukor's My Fair Lady, not the most dynamic of stage-to-screen adaptations, and observe how even its most lavishly static set-pieces (the Day at the Races, etc.) confine themselves to a few key colors, a controlled range of musical notes, a spoofish self-awareness of all the outrageous get-up.
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Watch Hello, Dolly! in close succession to, say, The Sound of Music, and the latter film's elegant editing and harmonious visual schemes are all the more conspicuous.