A Star is Born
There isn’t really a more quintessential show-business drama than a love story between two professionals, one on the way up, the other on the way down. Variations abound, but the most famous of these——the “Star is Born” story——has been made four times (and a fifth is being readied): The first, about a struggling young actress and an alcoholic film director (Constance Bennett and Lowell Sherman), was a modest success called What Price Hollywood? and was directed in 1932 by George Cukor (one of his first films) and produced by David O. Selznick, who five years later turned it into a rising young actress and a fading movie star (Janet Gaynor and Fredric March), in the smash success——and one of the earliest color films——A Star Is Born (1937) directed by William Wellman.
Seventeen years later——and 22 years before Barbra Streisand’s extremely popular 1976 semi-rock version——came the first musical adaptation of the story; directed by the original director, George Cukor, and conceived as a comeback vehicle for Judy Garland, then age 31, whose star had faded at the end of the ‘40s: it was the brilliant 1954 color and Cinemascope A Star Is Born (available on DVD). The irony is that this Cukor-Garland production--co-starring an excellent James Mason as the doomed star, with a fine, insightful script by Moss Hart and a smashing group of new songs (like “The Man That Got Away”) by legendary composer Harold Arlen and equally celebrated lyricist Ira Gershwin——remains both the very best of all the versions and also the only one that in its own day was not a financial success.
There has been a good deal of controversy about this, because the warmly received initial release in New York of Cukor’s A Star Is Born ran over three hours; soon afterward, studio head Jack Warner recut the film and replaced the first release version with one that was 42 minutes (!) shorter. Garland and Cukor were furious and heartbroken. Cukor said to me years later: “Awfully sad. Bosley Crowther in The New York Times wrote an article called ‘The Star Is Shorn.’ For Judy Garland, it was a great injustice, maybe because of that she didn’t win the Academy Award.”
I was one of the lucky few who saw the original long version down near Times Square the first week of its release, and there was an overwhelming emotional wallop and an epic sense of truth which the shorter one undeniably lacked. For years, Cukor and others tried to find the missing sequences--including a Garland musical number--and finally many of these, though not all, did turn up just before Cukor died in 1983 and have been lovingly restored. The only problem with this version (the only one commercially available) is that big hunks of picture are still missing, while the track has been found, so the decision was made to illustrate those sequences with the few stills or bits of shots that remain. Visually and dramatically, this has the unfortunate effect of pulling the viewer repeatedly out of the picture, out of the story. I believe it would have been better for the impact of the film to use those sound-only sequences as a DVD extra. The movie is a dramatic work, not a film study class.
As a tragic show-business fable, it carries all the substantial weight of Cukor’s life experiences in the theater and film with some of the greatest star players of the 20th century, from Greta Garbo, Ingrid Bergman and Jean Harlow to John Barrymore, Spencer Tracy, both Hepburns (he discovered Katharine!) and Cary Grant, James Stewart, Judy Holliday, etc. And his Star Is Born has the absolutely truthful ring ——no matter how brassy at times, or even sentimental——of the way it really is in show business. Garland is astonishingly good, terribly moving, naked, honest. Mason has charm, dignity and a sense of great talent wasted, but not quite the star allure the role could have used.
Cukor wanted Cary Grant and you can see why——he would have been far more romantic, therefore more touching. (Hitchcock would prove my point in North by Northwest, by casting Mason and Grant as heavy and hero, and in their scenes together, Mason couldn’t be better, but Grant radiates stardom.) Cary reportedly read the script aloud superbly to Cukor but was afraid the role might be interpreted as autobiographical because Grant’s career was in a slump at the time, and he was fighting a drinking problem. The saddest irony is that Judy Garland’s amazing comeback essentially became her swan’s song. She did some emotionally charged acting in a couple of films (like John Cassavetes’ 1963 A Child Is Waiting), yet A Star Is Born was her farewell to Garland the singer-actress-movie superstar. But then again, what an exit!
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5 Comments
Andrew Schoneberg | December 1, 2011 11:52 PM
In an audio interview (on webpage: DVD Classics Corner with Dick Dinman), Stewart Granger says he was the first pick for Norman Maine role and that Moss Hart wrote it for him. Granger says he got pissed at Cukor giving him line readings in an initial rehersal and quit the project. I recently watched the film again and it really does seem so. The role seems tailored for Granger, and I think he would have been excellent in it, though Mason is such a good actor that it never before dawned on me that he was not really the type who'd be a swashbuckling movie hero.
Rustin Klein | May 26, 2011 10:13 AM
So is it more than rumor that Clint Eastwood is going to helm the remake of remakes with Beyonce? Would love to see Clint's spin on it.
MAK | May 7, 2011 8:08 AM
Two extra things worth mentioning: The astonishing visual flair of the opening two reels: CinemaScope films at the time were rarely this adventurous, and the flow, pacing & use of color is just masterly. Yet, Cukor had never used 'scope or color before. - And an extra nod to Moss Hart's remarkable script - such a brilliant piece of work - the first half is mostly new, but he was smart enough (and confident enough) to keep what worked so well in 1937 in the second half. Often, not changed so much as 'tweaked' to make it more effective. Look at the very end of both versions to see the huge emotional lift Cukor's version has over the Selznick/Wellman. Going back to the first half; has the power & sleaze of Hollywood in the big star/big studio days ever been captured as bluntly as it is in the scene where Mason just misses Garland at the night club and is walked around by the floor manager and 'offered' his pick of young starlets. And his line about one of them, "No, no, they only hit me once.'
Christopher Stilley | May 1, 2011 10:07 AM
..Is it only a rumor that they also considered Humphery Bogart and Errol Flynn for Norman Maine?.That almost seems like a cruel joke,altho I can picture both as being..."naturally" very good.It is ,in my mind tho ,James Mason that gives the picture a bit of an edge by taking it out of the norms of Hollywood typecasting.An english actor ,using his own accent.An actor more noted perhaps for his post A Star Is Born movies than past films, and theres the irony that he was the actor coming up in the business while Garland was on her way out..Charles Bickford is one of my favorite things about the movie,a hard guy with always that bit of wisdom and fair play beneath his tough shell...and Jack Carson,is there anyone more intimidating than Jack Carson and Lionel Stander before him?..Lee Tracy in Dinner at Eight..wonderful watchdogs..yes they'd drive me to drink.
Blake Lucas | May 1, 2011 7:04 AM
"One of the lucky few" is right. I'm tremendously envious of you for that, Peter. I'm one of those who did see the film when it was initially released but after it had already been cut, something I was vaguely aware of when I caught up with it a Balboa theatre. in early '55. The Pantages in L.A. also had that original long version for a couple of weeks, and I'd heard something about the cuts. Even at the age of 10, I could kind of feel it and an effect on the flow of it as a movie as well as on some of the dramatic nuances. Still, that movie was powerful for me and has remained so. I also agree with you that while the best of all possible worlds would have seen a full restoration of the original, the found material should have been kept for extras or maybe for a documentary. The stills break the flow and the film becomes frustrating at that point. I saw the 154 minute version many times but have seen the present one only twice, not for lack of opportunity, but I find I'm not as motivated. I know what's there, am grateful especially to have seen the cut musical numbers (even if, as I understand, at least one of these was an alternate take), certainly won't say I don't want to see it again. As much as I love it, though, and do regard it as a masterpiece--perhaps even the top of my own Cukor list if I had to choose (of course we don't), "A Star is Born" is a flawed film in any version I've seen and not for the reason you say. It's because of that long "Born in a Trunk" number in the middle that Cukor did not direct. Of course, Garland delivers the songs, but why would a number like that actually be in a movie in which they were trying to launch someone as a star?--it feels more "Judy Garland" than "Vicki Lester," like it's someone who has already made it. I don't say the director of this Richard Barstow was not conscious of Cukor's style for the whole film, but this just doesn't work for me, and I know Cukor didn't want it. It strains the patience of the viewer absorbed in drama of the film. None of the songs in it, including that "Born in a Trunk" one, is on a level of the Arlen-Gershwin ones, which are not only supremely wonderful, but all contribute to the drama as well. And since we already know that Vicki is a great singer, and has innate star appeal, at least from "The Man That Got Away," we don't need any convincing that her screen debut will be a success So, a flaw--but I won't necessarily say it is in that longest original version, which maybe absorbed it into the flow of the whole better. I'd be interested to know what you think about this, having seen it that way. I must say honestly, though, that I disagree with you about James Mason, even though I realize you write about his performance with some appreciation. Though he was not the first choice, probably far from it, I believe he turned out to be the ideal choice and gives a memorable performance, one of his very greatest, having chemistry and playing well with Garland, really understanding that character beautifully--his "I need a job" scene is surely one of the film's very greatest. It seems a little unfair to hold Cary Grant over him when Grant did not play the role. I have never doubted what Cukor and others said about that memorable reading Grant did at Cukor's house--but he wouldn't take the film so it remains a reading. And it seems to me that it's right to take a film as it is, to see how a director did with who's there, and Cukor got the very best from him. How is "North by Northwest" related to the role of Norman Maine? The Roger Thornhill character, rarely absent in it, is built around Cary Grant's persona, and he is meant to carry the film in the way he does--it's arguably his most definitive role. Mason was cast because he could play a smooth, silky villain so well--and indeed, his reading of that line "Games...must we?" by itself contributes mightily to setting the tone for the whole film. But that's not all he could do. Cary Grant is your favorite actor. Who could argue with that? There's nothing he didn't do well--there was never anyone who did comedy who could look great in a tuxedo but be equally great doing pratfalls in the way he could. And he could do any serious dramatic role just as well. But he's not in this. Mason is--and he's great, at least as I experience the film. And I experience it as as not only rich, beautiful filmmaking for the mise-en-scene, but also a powerfully dramatic and emotional experience--and did even at the young age I first saw it. So it seems to me James Mason has to be considered an essential part of that.