Be Yourself!

"Be Yourself!" is only one of a handful of films made by Fanny Brice. Despite being a bit of a sensation for the Ziegfeld Follies, she never hit it off in movies. And, as an astute reviewer already pointed out, the Fanny Brice we all are familiar with is really Barbra Streisand PLAYING Fanny. Here, you get a rare chance to actually see her as she really was in films. Sadly, what I saw was NOT good at all. Fanny's Jewish ethnic humor is off-putting today, though it might have played better back in 1930. The same can be said DOUBLE for that of Harry Green as her brother. His routine is completely one-dimensional and dumb. And, THE joke was that he was a shyster Jewish lawyer--a nasty stereotype that, again, played well back then but which is painful to watch today.

When it comes to plot, it's pretty limp. Robert Armstrong is a nasty guy who loves to punch people, so Brice and her on-screen brother decide to become his boxing managers! Despite knowing nothing, the guy inexplicably wins---and none of this makes any sense. On top of the plot, there are some songs (not good ones) and some very ethnic humor which falls flat. Frankly, there's just not much to like about this film--it's terribly written, dull and the humor is so incredibly awful. Not worth your time--even if you want to catch a glimpse of Fanny.

After seeing this film, I think I understood why Brice did few films. She just wasn't enjoyable in the least and you wonder what Ziegfeld and the audiences of the 1920s saw in her. Painful and awful.

Just watched this Fanny Brice movie on YouTube. While she's better known as a comedienne who portrayed Baby Snooks on the radio, she was also a fine singer whose first husband Billy Rose wrote many of her standards during this time. This picture showcases many of those songs to good effect and also provides some of her sense of humor but most of the plot is more of a melodrama about her romance with a boxer played by Robert Armstrong who then falls for a gold-digger played by Gertrude Astor after winning lots of bouts. So there's not much time for the comedy sense Ms. Brice is known for and that was a disappointment for me. At least the film is only little more than an hour's length. So on that note, Be Yourself! is at the least worth a look once. P.S. If you're a film buff, you probably know the Robert Armstrong here is the same one that would eventually portray Carl Denham in the original King Kong.

"Be Yourself" was a hastily thrown together film that had to include a few musical numbers just to satisfy a 65 minute runtime. It starred Fanny Brice, Robert Armstrong, Harry Green, G. Pat Collins, and Gertrude Astor.

Robert Armstrong played Jerry Moore, a wannabe boxer who spent more time on his back than on his feet. After he slugged the reigning champion, McCloskey aka Mac (G. Pat Collins), in a nightclub, some palooka put the idea in Fannie's head that Jerry could fight professionally.

Fannie (Fanny Brice), who worked at the nightclub of topic, got her brother Harry (Harry Green) to be Jerry's manager and the three were off and running. Fannie just had to figure out how to keep Jerry from going to the canvas with every landed blow.

The movie was so-so at best. They filled too much time with singing and stage acts, and the gold digger routine by Gertrude Astor was unimaginative. I can tell that a lot of Hollywood writers were victims, or afraid to become victims, of gold diggers because they wrote about them so much.

Free on Tubi.

Fanny Brice is a nightclub entertainer who has a couple of prize fighters tangle over her. She sides with Robert Armstrong and becomes his manager. Things go along swimmingly, unti he starts to have some success, whereupon very blonde Gertrude Astor moves in on him.

It's enough plot to hang the movie on. The real purpose is to have Miss Brice sing five songs by Billy Rose and do her ballerina shtick. Producers John Considine and Joseph Schenck must have figured that as long as Broadway was going Hollywood, the perennial Ziegfeld Follies star was a natural. While she's good and believable, especially with Harry Green to do the raw comedy, the movie career didn't materialize. I expect it was the destruction of the musical movie in 1930 and Miss Brice's pleasant but ordinary appearance that closed that door, and her needing an audience. She remained an occasional guest star, particularly when someone was doing a movie about Ziegfeld, but she retreated to the stage, and let radio stardom come her way.

Fanny Brice is one of those old-time performers who remains well-known only indirectly, through an impersonator: nowadays, most people who think they're familiar with Fanny Brice's style as a performer are actually recalling Barbra Streisand in 'Funny Girl' and 'Funny Lady'. (A similar problem exists with George M. Cohan, whom most people know only through James Cagney.) Personally, I've never understood the appeal of Fanny Brice, and I suspect that most of the people who claim to be Brice fans are really thinking of Streisand's two movies, which do NOT depict Brice's life or her personality with any accuracy. If you want to see a movie which tells the true story of Fanny Brice's life, watch Alice Faye in 'Rose of Washington Square' ... a movie which is so accurate in its depiction of Brice's romance with Nick Arnstein, the characters' names had to be changed to prevent Brice from suing.

Fanny Brice made very few films; late in her career, she starred in a popular radio sitcom as Baby Snooks, a bratty little girl. When performing this role, Brice would actually dress up in costume as a small girl, thus creating the misperception (which I still encounter) that radio actors often dressed up as the characters they played, for the benefit of the studio audiences. Brice was the only radio actor who did this. (Although a few other radio actors occasionally wore costumes for publicity photos.)

'Be Yourself!' is a poor film, although the underrated director Thornton Freeland does his job well with weak material. Part of the problem is that this movie is almost but not quite a musical: Fanny sings a couple of numbers, but they're spaced very thinly through the movie, so the transitions are jarring. And the movie isn't really a comedy either; Fanny makes a few wisecracks, but this film is basically a character study (of the male lead, not Fanny Brice's role). Although Brice gets top billing, the plot of the movie is really about the washed-up boxer played by Robert Armstrong. The make-up man has equipped Armstrong with a severely flattened nose, which looks quite realistic and is appropriate for his character ... but it also looks very distressing. Every time Fanny Brice looked at Armstrong, I expected her to sing "Second-Hand Nose".

This movie suffers from the presence of Harry Green, an actor who portrayed Jewish stereotypes in much the same way that Stepin Fetchit played Negro stereotypes. Harry Green's "Yiddisher" schtick grew so annoying that he eventually became unemployable in Hollywood, and he landed up in England ... giving exaggerated portrayals of pushy American Jews for British audiences who had no frame of reference for these characterisations.

Some parts of 'Be Yourself!' are so weird, I can't even guess if they're intentionally strange or merely inept. When Robert Armstrong's Irish-American boxer first becomes attracted to Fanny Brice's character (named Fanny Field, but clearly meant to be Jewish), he moves in with her. A few minutes later, Fanny Brice is screeching her way through a ditty: "My baby wants bacon, so that's what I'm makin', and I'm cookin' breakfast for the one I love." Nobody connected with this movie, including Brice herself, seems to find any irony whatever in the idea of a Jewish woman cooking bacon (which she just happens to have handy). I can't even tell if the irony is intentional: maybe the lyricist just needed a rhyme for "makin'".

At one point in this movie, Armstrong calls Fanny Brice 'a funny girl', which in post-Streisand hindsight looks like a deeply significant line, but wasn't meant to be.

I'll rate "Be Yourself!" precisely one point out of 10. Fanny Brice really didn't have the right sort of talent for movies.