On a Clear Day You Can See Forever

Fashioned from a Broadway half-success of 1965, this can be strongly recommended to all who like curate's eggs, good tunes, and nice colours. On the surface, Alan Jay Lerner's libretto could have been made to measure for Minnelli, with its emphasis on lavish imagined worlds juxtaposed with reality (under hypnosis a Brooklyn girl reveals a past life as a Regency dazzler called Melinda - and guess who the hypnotist falls in love with?). And Minnelli is able to decorate his material with beguiling visual conceits - the opening time-lapse photography, the colour contrasts between past and present. But he can do nothing to combat the script's length and shallowness, and there are some thumb-twiddling moments in between Burton Lane's delightful songs. The two star performers make an odd team, with their varying kinds of professionalism and vowel sounds.