I just love this movie, and especially Shirley Booth in the lead roll of Dolly Levi. I had seen the Barbara Streisand version first and didn't know this one even existed until many years later. Once I saw "The Matchmaker", "Hello Dolly" took the backseat to the movie and has stayed there since. "Hello Dolly" is creative and innovative in its dance numbers and stagings etc, but Barbara Streisand is more of a nuisance and pest, and Walter Matthau is downright bitter (and tone deaf if his croaking out on "It Takes a Woman" is any indication). The enmity between Matthau and Streisand is palpable -- supposedly Matthau hated Streisand and refused to be on set with her unless they were specifically shooting a scene together. The hatred shows. Streisand was TOO YOUNG for the role of Dolly Levi. The whole idea of her seducing a bitter pill like Matthau is laughable. But in "The Matchmaker" -- Shirley Booth is incredible as the constantly meddling, good hearted, slightly nosy, overbearing at times, loving widowed woman, trying to find a living for herself in an age where middle aged women really didn't have many options. She is always cheerful, scheming and conniving but with only the best intentions for everyone involved. and here's my potential spoiler when I first saw the movie, and Dolly Levi was at the Harmonia Gardens with Horace Van Der Gelder, and she had ordered dinner and was serving his food like a mother hen and he was getting flustered and flabbergasted, but Dolly was center stage for the moment. THEN when Horace spies Irene Malloy in the next dining room and they get back together and leave, the crushed, disappointed look on Dolly's face, and when she reached over and helped herself to Horace's abandoned desert, made me start crying for this woman who wanted nothing more really than to marry Horace.
Review of The Matchmaker
