The sparkling new Blu-ray upgrade of Hello, Dolly! looks and sounds great, but is the film good? In a word, no, but it wasn’t for a lack of trying.

In a making-of remembrance by Gene Kelly’s widow, we’re reminded that stars Barbra Streisand and Walter Matthau and choreographer Michael Kidd were attached to the film before Kelly was hired to direct. Kelly had misgivings about the approach the producers wanted to take, thinking the film version of Jerry Herman’s 1964 musical should be filmed in the intimate style of The Matchmaker, Thornton Wilder’s play upon which the musical is based. The producers would have none of that. They wanted another hit in the style of Robert Wise’s 1965 film of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music, the megahit musical of four years earlier.

It couldn’t have been easy for Kelly to accept Kidd’s choreography in lieu of his own ideas, but he did, putting his own unique stamp on very little. Mrs. Kelly tells us that he loved working on the film and loved working with Streisand and Matthau. One of Hollywood’s worst kept secrets has always been that while Kelly went into the film with enthusiasm, he was exhausted by the time it was over. It was also no secret that Streisand and Matthau did not get along, which couldn’t have been easy on the director.

The film, like many musicals in the years immediately following the success of The Sound of Music was overproduced and overlong, but that could have been tolerable it there was something at the core that drew the audience in. Unfortunately at the core was a performance by Hollywood’s newest star that didn’t fit. There was no question that Streisand could sing – she had been a recording and concert star before she became a stage and film star, but the role of Dolly Levi called for an older actress, not a bright 26-year-old who looked and sounded like a bright 26-year-old.

Actresses from their mid-40s to early-70s had done the role proud around the world in the years preceding the film and have continued to do so in the years since. Indeed, Broadway’s original Dolly, Carol Channing, was 43 when she first played the part in 1964 and 74 when she brought it back to Broadway in 1995. If the producers didn’t want Channing, whose film career had never taken off despite more than a decade of trying, there were any number of age appropriate stars who could have done the role justice. My choice would have been Irene Dunne, 69 at the time of filming. Dunne, who had been off the screen since 1952, but had made TV appearances through 1962, campaigned for the part but the producers thought her name wouldn’t have meant anything to 1969 audiences. Dunne, who had begun her career as a singer, still entertained guests in her home with her lilting soprano. She and Fred Astaire, then 71, in the Matthau role would have been perfect casting.

Despite the film’s mixed critical reception and disappointing box-office, it was nominated for seven Oscars and won three.

Channing herself co-starred in one of the era’s most overproduced and overlong musicals, 1967’s Thoroughly Modern Millie which earned her a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her enthusiastic playing of a 1920s chanteuse. She was the best thing about that lumbering fiasco about young girls being kidnapped and sold into slavery, which couldn’t be saved even by Julie Andrews in the title role.

Hollywood’s love of big musicals reached their zenith with the Oscar winning productions of West Side Story, My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music, the latter having become the highest grossing film of all time up to that point. The studios were falling all over themselves trying to duplicate its success, but only Carol Reed’s 1968 Oscar winning adaptation of Lionel Bart’s Oliver! came close to recapturing the magic in the remainder of the decade.

William Wyler’s film of Jule Styne and Bob Merrill’s Funny Girl, the other Oscar nominated musical of 1968, gave us Barbra Streisand reprising her star-making turn as Fanny Brice, but the film jettisoned all the songs that were sung by other characters, making it more of a one woman show than it had been on stage. That may have made it great for Barbra fans, but a bit less so for everyone else.

The problem was that most of these films went for bigness over substance. Simple stories were stretched to their ridiculous limits and beyond. Lerner and Loewe’s fondly remembered 1951 musical, Paint Your Wagon, about an old prospector, his daughter and a young widower who comes between them became a 1969 saga about two partners and the woman they took turns sleeping with. It might just as well have been renamed Jules and Jim in a Cabin.

Fred Astaire, who hadn’t sung and danced on screen since 1957’s Cole Porter musical, Silk Stockings, was back in a musical in Francis Ford Coppola’s lumbering 1968 adaptation of Burton Lane and Yip Harburg’s once pungent 1947 musical, Finian’s Rainbow. Petula Clark, who played his daughter in that, essayed the role of Mrs. Chipping in 1969’s Goodbye, Mr. Chips opposite Peter O’Toole with a score by Leslie Bricusse which improved upon the silliness of his Doctor Dolittle score of two years earlier. Unfortunately for her, Clark was eclipsed by Sian Phillips (then Mrs. O’Toole) in a minor role which had all of the pizzazz that Clark’s characterization lacked.

Bricusse also provided a better than expected score for 1970’s Scrooge with Albert Finney proving he could sing and dance with the best of them.

Julie Andrews, who first delighted film audiences in the 1964 Sherman Brothers’ Disney musical, Mary Poppins, and then enchanted everyone with The Sound of Music the following year, followed those milestones with a series of unfortunate choices. Not only did she have the silliness of Thoroughly Modern Millie to knock her down a few notches, she had 1968’s Star! in which she beautifully reinterpreted Gertrude Lawrence on- stage but not off, and 1970’s Darling Lili in which she played a World War I German spy opposite Rock Hudson. That one was dead on arrival.

A World War I musical that did work was 1969’s Oh! What a Lovely War, a scathing burlesque of the silliness, as well as the horrors, of war, featuring parodies of the popular songs of the day as sung by war weary soldiers at the time. Richard Attenborough’s direction was the antithesis of the stuffiness that marred his later work and the sterling cast couldn’t be better. The standout numbers were many, but to name just two, Maggie Smith’s recruitment song, “I’ll Make a Man of You” is unforgettable, as is the ironic “They Didn’t Believe Me”, a devastating parody of Jerome Kern’s ”They’ll Never Believe Me” sung by a chorus of dead soldiers as the camera pans over their graves in the film’s much imitated finale.

The Sherman Brothers gave us several scores that brightened the musical landscape during the period. Mary Poppins may have been their best, but 1967’s The Happiest Millionaire; 1968’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and 1971’s Bedknobs and Broomsticks were also quite good. So was 1973’s Tom Sawyer, but that was after Bob Fosse’s 1972 film of Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret which raised the movie musical bar forever.

New releases this week include Hyde Park on Hudson and Gate of Hell.