Scorched By a Critic

[David]

One of criticism's greatest torch jobs: John Simon's review of the Streisand "Star Is Born," which begins by calling it an arrogant aberration ("This third version is not only unneeded, it is emphatically uncalled-for") & claiming that the star seems to be playing both the female & the male leads, & ends with a devastating excoriation of not only Streisand's "hypertrophic ego & bloated countenance" but also the tastelessness of the hordes of moviegoers who made the film a hit ("I feel as if our entire society were ready to flush itself down in something even worse than a collective death wish -- a collective will to live in ugliness & self-debasement").

Along the way, there's a description of Streisand's physiognomy that rivals Ruskin on Venetian architecture:

"Oh, for the gift of Rostand's Cyrano to evoke the vastness of that nose alone as it cleaves the giant screen from east to west, bisects it from north to south. It zigzags across our horizon like a bolt of fleshy lightning; it towers like a ziggurat made of meat. The hair is now something like the wig of the fop in a Restoration comedy; the speaking voice continues to sound like Rice Krispies if they could talk. And Streisand's notion of acting is to bulldoze her way from one end of a line to the other without regard for anyone or anything; you can feel her impatience for the other performer to stop talking so she can take over again. If dialogue there is, it is that between a steamroller & the asphalt beneath it. Whenever possible, she gets herself shot with a halo of backlights from head to foot; yet she insists on wearing the most ridiculous glad rags, especially on horseback, where she looks like a takeoff on Brando in his Missouri Breaks granny outfit. Her clothes, a screen credit states, came out of her closet; if so, I am dead against Schmatte Liberation."