Why did he marry her? He hated her guts! Here he was, all set to marry Ms. Molloy, and then, boom! - just like that he wants to marry Dolly? WTF?
I asked the doctor to take your picture so I can look at you from inside as well.
I believe it's because it came to see her in a different light by the end.
"Samantha! You picked a lemon in the garden of love!"
I think he apparently hated her guts. I mean...at the begining, after the sing "It takes a woman" and Dolly appeares and compliments him alot, he feels flattered by her , look at his facial expressions, and he does considers her smart.(:"With a head like yours you should be a rich woman someday").
I think Horace is a man that age and loneliness made him bitter and I think he liked Dolly from the beggining...her brain esspecially...:P...he was just too proud at that time to aknowledge it.
At the end Horace realised he was too lonely and suddenly realised he really does need a wife ( especially after all the people who were near him sort of started their own lifes). Dolly is a woman that with all her scheming succeeded in turning Horace into the man once was.
I loved the ending...it's a bit like fairy tales, but the whole movie has been, and actually, that's the greatest thing about the movie: joy of being alive.
P.S: You are a man, aren't you?...:P
The problem isn't with the character eventually marrying her. He does the same in the stage version. The problem was in the casting. Walter Matthau and Barbra Streisand hated each other while making this movie, and thus had no chemistry at all on screen. That was the biggest flaw of this film, in my opinion, and I think that is what the original poster is picking up on.
BTW, andrieutzabal, asking if he's a man is just a tad sexist. I'm a man, and I "get" it. I was also in a production of this musical, so that may have a little to do with it as well.
JOE TYRIA
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He hates her. He wants to marry someone else. He suddenly ends up marrying her just in time for the story to end.
The reason is that it is a musical and those types of unreal, quickly resolved happy endings only happen there.
"The reason is that it is a musical and those types of unreal, quickly resolved happy endings only happen there."
Exactly why I despise musicals.
I asked the doctor to take your picture so I can look at you from inside as well.
Horace wasnt marrying Irene for love, he was marrying for convenience. This was noted in the song "It Takes A Woman" all the reasons he wanted to get married had nothing to do with love.
He didn't love Irene. (and she didn't love him either)
the point of the story was to show how eveyrone eventually fell in love.
dare u, www.spaces.msn.com/members/waterprincess222
That is in the original Matchmaker. He realizes that he cares for her and has been a fool, although probably not in the way he was always complaining about people being fools.
shareHe was a man, & did not know his own mind.. so she helped him see the light :)
shareI finally watched this movie. It was OK.
And I agree - what's the deal with that sudden change? It wasn't even convincing that there was a real change, much less that it could happen that fast.
Bottom line I felt no reason for them to be together. Besides the apparent distaste, I could see no real logical reason that they would even decide unromantically, matter-of-factly to be together. Not to mention no chemistry.
Shoot, Anna and the King from "The King and I" (and I daresay its various incarnations) had much more chemistry, you understood the attraction, but they never got married or even close to it. That had more "love" than this story.
Part of the reason it is just "OK" in my book.
Stage musicals of that era(40s into 50s into 60s) were generally intended to play at a "surface level" and sudden character changes were to be expected.
I recall with "Damn Yankees"(1958) the Devil's chief Femme Fatale(Gwen Verdon) switches sides within minutes of meeting the "nice" baseball player Joe Hardy(Tab Hunter.) This was just accepted as part of the genre.
But in "Hello, Dolly," things are a bit better laid-out than that.
For instance, the movie makes clear from the very first musical number that Dolly, while hired to make Vandergelder a match...is setting out to marry him instead. ("Why don't you marry him yourself?" asks a railway ticket clerk. "Who put that idea into my...into YOUR..head?" she replies.)
And as the story goes along, it is clear that Dolly is out to sabotage her own "matchmaker picks" FOR him.
As played by Streisand, this Dolly is indeed passionate in her love for Vandergeder, though lurking behind her mission is the fact that he is the richest man in Yonkers, and she is the most dynamic woman in New York and hey --she should be rewarded with his money for her greatness(she reveals after a certain point that her goal is not only to marry Vandergelder, but to "spread his money around" to make people happy. Hmmm.)
So the ball shifts to Vandergelder himself. Dolly clearly wants HIM; does he want HER?
I think it is pretty evident in Matthau's playing and his lines that he does indeed. Vandergelder knows that Dolly is his "business match." He shows a certain respect for her opinions and for her business savvy. He's always better matched with HER than with the women Dolly sets him up with. (In that not-too-subtle Hollywood tradition, Streisand and Matthau are equated as "big movie stars" who should get together, because everybody else is just frivolous support.)
Near the end, when Streisand is singing her big and funny "Goodbye!" number to Vandergelder, Matthau barks out "nonsense!" to Dolly's intimation that he will never see her again. He WANTS to see her again.
And thus, in the final scene, it makes sense(to me at least) that Vandergelder has finally been broken down by Dolly, does love her, does want to marry her. Unfortunately, it also makes sense that Walter Matthau personally doesn't much like Barbra Streisand, because this very good actor(Matthau) subtly telegraphs in his line readings and facial expressions, that this "happy ending" is a crock.
A crock to Matthau...not to Vandergelder and Dolly.
I think she got him to see the joy that she got in doing things for other people: that once he stopped being so entrenched in his "rules about fools" and always putting himself first, he could see that making your friends and family happy just doubles your own happiness. And there was a trace of that in him, when he talks at the end about encouraging new businesses, but she got him to expand his encouraging to encouraging the young people in his life.
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