Barbra Streisand — “The Way He Makes Me Feel”

Entered Top 40:  December 10, 1983
 2 weeks 
Peaked at: 40

Since we last encountered Barbra Streisand, she teamed with Barry Gibb for the 1980 Guilty album, which became the best-selling album of her career, and yielded three Top 10 hits, including the #1 “Woman in Love.” “The Way He Makes Me Feel” was the first single from Streisand’s new 1983 film. This is a decent “I am newly horny” song, and it can hold up outside the context of the very, VERY specific world of its source film, Yentl.

Yentl, of course, is Streisand’s directorial debut, in which she plays a rabbi’s daughter in early-20th-century Poland who disguises herself as a man so that she can pursue a life of Talmudic study forbidden to women at the time. Streisand had been interested in adapting Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy” for the screen since about 1968. For years, the reservations were that Streisand was too old to play a young girl disguised as a “yeshiva boy.” By the mid-’70s, she started to agree, and began pursuing the project as a director only, but it became apparent that Yentl’s commercial prospects lay in it not only starring Streisand — but as a musical.

I ended up watching Yentl for the first time recently, as homework for the project. It was quite good in fact. Streisand directed and acts well, her supporting cast is appealing, not all the songs work, but they do more often than not. The big problem is…yeah, she’s still too old for this role. They wrote Yentl as a 28-year-old spinster, but Streisand’s 40 at this point. The film’s still a strong feminist statement, and it, and the story of its long path to production, are testaments for doing the thing you’re driven to that everyone says you can’t.

Streisand got Alan & Marilyn Bergman (they wrote “The Way We Were” for her with Marvin Hamlisch) to write lyrics, which in Yentl are sung as her internal monologue. In “The Way He Makes Me Feel,” Yentl is starting to have stirrings for her study partner Avigdor (played by Mandy Patinkin, who was already a Broadway name at this point, but this is one of his first major screen roles). As I alluded to earlier, this works as a pop song because it taps into something familiar beyond the film’s specific context. I can’t say the same about “Papa, Can You Hear Me?,” the film’s other single, which didn’t make the Hot 100 and topped out at #26 AC.

Yentl ended up being a modest hit, and won an Oscar for its score (both “The Way He Makes Me Feel” and “Papa Can You Hear Me?” lost Best Song to “Flashdance…What a Feeling”). Streisand directed a couple more films, and continued to be an Adult Contemporary chart fixture, and can pretty much do whatever she wants at this point.