Photo: ChildSouljaBoy, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Barbra Streisand as Doris, directed by Herbert Ross
After two large-scale musicals, Barbra Streisand made a deliberate change of direction with The Owl and the Pussycat in 1970. Directed by Herbert Ross from Buck Henry’s screenplay, based on Bill Manhoff’s stage play, it was her first film without a song, her first outright contemporary comedy, and a declaration that she intended to be taken seriously as an actress, not only as a singer who acted. The result is a sharp, funny, two-person battle of the sexes that still feels bracingly adult, and it remains one of the most revealing performances of her early career.
Streisand plays Doris, a New York woman who works as a model and actress when she can and as a part-time sex worker when she must, living in the same apartment building as Felix Sherman, played by George Segal. Felix is a would-be novelist who earns his living in a bookshop and prides himself on his intellectual seriousness. One night, peering through binoculars, he sees Doris entertaining a client, reports her to the landlord, and gets her evicted. Doris, furious and homeless in the middle of the night, turns up at Felix’s door with her television set and demands retribution. What follows is a long, raucous night — and then a longer, more complicated entanglement — in which two people who seem to have nothing in common discover an unexpected attraction.
The premise could easily have become crude or sentimental, but Henry’s screenplay keeps it verbal, witty, and surprisingly tender. Doris is loud, frank, and funny, but she is never a caricature. She is educated in the ways of survival, quick to spot pretension, and unwilling to apologise for how she earns a living. Felix, meanwhile, is educated in books but naive about people, and his moral outrage is exposed as partly snobbery and partly fear. Their arguments are the film’s engine: long, overlapping exchanges in which each character scores points, retreats, and then returns with a better line. Streisand and Segal play these scenes with the rhythm of a stage comedy, but with a cinematic intimacy that makes the jokes land as character revelations.
Herbert Ross, who had staged the musical numbers for Funny Girl and would later direct Streisand again in Funny Lady, directs with a light but disciplined touch. He keeps the camera close enough to catch flickers of embarrassment and affection beneath the shouting, and he allows the film to move beyond Felix’s cramped apartment to a friend’s flat and to the streets of New York without losing its claustrophobic, two-hander energy. The supporting appearances, notably Robert Klein as Felix’s friend Barney, are well judged, but the film succeeds or fails on its central pairing, and Ross clearly trusted his stars to carry it.
For Streisand, Doris was a risk. Audiences associated her with Fanny Brice and Dolly Levi, heroines who sang their feelings gloriously. Doris does not sing at all, and her feelings arrive in wisecracks, outbursts, and sudden silences. Streisand meets that challenge with a performance that is both broader and more naturalistic than her musical work. She is hilarious in Doris’s set pieces — her attempts to act in a commercial, her demolition of Felix’s literary pretensions — but she is also touching when Doris admits how tired she is of being judged, and how much she wants a life that does not require constant performance. It is a reminder that comic timing and emotional honesty are not opposites.
George Segal is an ideal partner. His Felix is fussy, earnest, and genuinely likeable despite his priggishness, and Segal never makes him a mere straight man. He gives Felix a real intellectual life, a real loneliness, and a real capacity for change, so that his gradual surrender to Doris feels earned rather than imposed by the plot. The chemistry between the two stars is prickly rather than smooth, which suits the material: this is a romance built on argument, and the film’s pleasure lies in watching two stubborn people negotiate their way toward each other, sentence by sentence.
The film also captures a specific New York moment. Released in 1970, it belongs to the era when Hollywood comedies were becoming more frank about sex, class, and urban life, and when leading women were allowed to be sexually experienced, economically precarious, and funny on their own terms. Doris is not punished for her work, nor is she sentimentalised; the film treats her choices as practical responses to a difficult city. That matter-of-factness was progressive for a mainstream studio comedy, and it helps explain why the film still plays well, even where some of its language and attitudes now feel dated.
Contemporary audiences responded warmly, and the film became a commercial success, proving that Streisand could open a non-musical comedy. Critics praised her comic energy, though some found the film’s second half less disciplined than its first. That unevenness is real — the story occasionally strains to keep its two characters together — but it hardly diminishes the central achievement. Streisand had shown range, and she had shown it in a role that asked her to be funny without a song to hide behind, vulnerable without becoming a victim, and modern without losing her old-fashioned star quality.
Today, The Owl and the Pussycat is best appreciated as a turning point. It sits between the musical spectaculars that made Streisand a film star and the dramatic and romantic roles of the mid-1970s that deepened her reputation. Doris is not her most famous character, but she may be one of her most honest: a woman who talks too much because silence has never protected her, played by a star who was learning, film by film, how much she could say without singing a note.
It is also worth noting how much of the film’s humour depends on language itself. Doris and Felix argue about words, about books, about the difference between being educated and being wise, and their debates reveal as much about class and gender in 1970 New York as any dramatic scene could. Streisand delivers this wordplay with the speed of a nightclub comic and the precision of a stage actress, while Segal matches her line for line. For audiences who enjoy witty dialogue, the film offers a feast, and for those tracing Streisand’s development, it shows her learning to trust silence as well as speech, letting a pause after a joke do as much work as the joke itself.