Funny Girl

Wyler's only musical, Funny Girl is the fictionalised biography of Fanny Brice (Streisand), the ugly duckling who became a glamorous Ziegfeld star and achieved fame as a comic, so puncturing the mythic public eroticism of the Ziegfeld Follies. The film's central irony is not the usual one of public success at the expense of private pain, but the complex one of success at the expense of personal knowledge. Streisand never looks into the mirrors that Wyler surrounds her with. Well worth watching, even if most later Streisand movies aren't.