Barbra Streisand has always been more of a movie star than an actress, which is fine for fans like me but can make her movies difficult for non-fans to enjoy. There are exceptions, of course: "The Main Event," which was just plain insufferable for fans and non-fans alike, and "Up the Sandbox," a forgotten gem in the Streisand filmography that even the non-fans can appreciate.

Ironically, Streisand gives her most naturalistic performance in a movie about a housewife who frequently escapes into fantasies, like debating Fidel Castro and joining a band of revolutionaries who blow up the Statue of Liberty. It's also ironic that "Sandbox," the first movie made by Streisand's Barwood Productions, is one of the few times she seems to have checked her ego at the door, more concerned with embodying a character than how she's lit. This was the movie for which she deserved a second Best Actress nomination, even more so than "The Way We Were."

Not only is Streisand's performance more natural, the fantasy elements seem organic in the way director Irvin Kershner introduces them. There are no swirling blurs or harp music, heretofore the usual way filmmakers signified a character was fantasizing. Instead, Margaret does something mundane, like going to her husband's (David Selby) office, but upon seeing he's been chatting with an attractive female colleague decides to voice here suspicions about an affair. The confrontation takes a strange turn and then we learn the scene was all in Margaret's mind. This approach to handling fantasy is so commonplace now that it's even been employed in pornography, but apparently it was enough to confuse audiences when this movie was released with a resounding thud in 1972. (The movie's poorly conceived trailer didn't help.)

Of course, a movie's commercial success has little bearing on its quality and "Up the Sandbox"'s quality is far greater than its box office take. It's not a masterpiece by any stretch - the tone is often spotty and some of the fantasy sequences are a bit silly - but "Up the Sandbox" deserves higher acclaim than it receives. Also appearing in the movie are future sitcom stars Isabel ("The Jeffersons") Sanford as the maid of Margaret's overbearing mother (Jane Hoffman) and Conrad ("Diff'rent Strokes") Bain, as Margaret's bored, chauvinistic gynecologist.

Low-keyed, but nevertheless wicked and funny comedy-drama that sneaks up on you. Barbra Streisand, in terrific comic form, plays a stressed-out, unsatisfied New York housewife afraid of telling her brilliant husband she's pregnant for the third time. The film is made up of her many daydreams, some of which are hilarious (the bit where she enlarges her breasts at a party) and some that meander without much point (the assault on the Statue of Liberty). Nevertheless, Barbra's lovely and is completely at ease in this non-flashy role, just as content to sit and listen to her girlfriends bitch in the park as she is telling off Fidel Castro at a political rally. David Selby is nicely understated as Barbra's husband and Jane Hoffman is a hoot as her meddling mother. I have many favorite lines from this film, but you rent "Up The Sandbox" and discover them for yourself. A minor treat. *** from ****

As a devoted wife and mother, Barbra Streisand brings fun into her Manhattan household. Playing with her children as she bathes them, teasing husband David Selby with water from a plant as they prepare for bed, or taking her kiddies grocery shopping in their rough neighborhood, she seems to enjoy her life. Her nagging shrew of a mother (the very funny Jane Hoffman) keeps urging her to move out to New Jersey so she can get away from the undesirables in the community. Streisand meets the same moms at her Riverside Park playground on a daily basis for typically boring conversations that would drive any woman bonkers after a while. Before you know it, she is having strange fantasies about her husbands's female colleague, an old college professor of her own, an encounter with a transsexual Fidel Castro & smashing her mother's head into an anniversary cake. She also somehow ends up a terrorist, tipping the Statue of Liberty over with the yet uncompleted original World Trade Centers right in the background, visible with the floors of one of the buildings not yet completed.

An ill-advised drama about one woman's crisis in finding her place in the new world of a new woman, this really delivers no message other than the fact that men and women have to compromise in order to make it work. There are some hysterically funny comments about the red tape of living in New York, where even going to the doctors can be a challenge because of all the red tape. For some reason, the pregnant Streisand decides not to tell her husband that she is expecting their third child and as a result, goes through all of these hallucinations of people she encounters and how she truly does not want to end up like her mother. For me, the highlight of the film was the fantasy sequence at a family anniversary party where mother and daughter get into a cat fight and her reaction to the little girl snapping pictures in everybody's face. It was like watching Elizabeth Taylor with the little girl in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" who truly does get ice cream on her face.

If this is supposed to be a "women's lib" film, the only liberation seems to be the fact that the character has an exciting fantasy life. Some people may truly be disturbed by the whole Statue of Liberty sequence with the Trade Centers in the background, but this being almost 40 years before 9/11, you can't tie the film together with that horrific terrorist attack. The supporting cast consists of some of New York's finest character actors, including Conrad Bain (playing basically the same doctor character he portrayed on "Maude"), musical theatre legend George S. Irving, and two actors from "The Jeffersons"-Isabel Sanford and Paul Benedict, who for some reason ends up in a fantasy sequence with Streisand in Africa. Trying to explain this in writing is difficult, so watching it may be better. You may be perplexed, but you won't be bored.