Dori Berinstein’s cinematic love letter masquerading as a documentary presents a totally adoring portrait of the 91-year-old Broadway icon, who tells many great and funny stories about a show business career (including stops in Hollywood) that stretches back more than 60 years.
But there’s little sense of the Carol Channing beneath the overdone makeup — if there is one — except maybe to celebrate her fourth marriage to a high school classmate who died recently.
She talks briefly about her long and unhappy marriage to her third husband, a Broadway producer — but there’s no mention of allegations Channing made at the time of their separation that he was gay and they only had sex twice during 42 years together. Channing’s son, editorial cartoonist Chan Lowe, from her second marriage — to a Canadian hockey player — is mentioned just once in passing.
And you have to wonder about the veracity of some of Channing’s stories. She ends a lengthy account of giving Clint Eastwood his first onscreen kiss in 1956’s “The First Traveling Saleslady’’ by flatly claiming it turned out so awkwardly the smooch wound up on the cutting-room floor.
Really, Carol? If the director of “Carol Channing: Larger Than Life’’ had bothered checking Google, it would have taken about 30 seconds to come up with a clip of the offending kiss.