A while back Warner Bros. finally got around to
putting out the restored version of A Star Is Born, directed by George Cukor, in
a DVD version that is an estimable improvement over the letterbox video tape
that was previously available. After the initial release of A Star Is
Born,
Warners', dubious about its chances of selling a three hour long picture to
exhibitors who wanted to get in an as many showings as possible--at a time
when double bills were still the order of the day--reduced the length to about
two and a half hours. But in the early 1980s, the late Ronald Haver undertook
the pious labor of restoring the movie to its original form.
While Haver was able to come up with many
missing pieces of film, some sequences had to be reconstructed using still
photographs combined with sound track. In all honesty, it is not easy to get
an idea of what the film might have been like in its original version--seeing
the restoration is a bit like reading an unfinished novel, parts of which only
survive as drafts. Nevertheless, we all owe Haver a great debt, and it is sad
that he did not live to supply a commentary for the DVD, which does not offer
too many goodies. However, it does contain the rejected takes of the great
"Man That Got Away" number, which are quite fascinating to compare
with the version finally used in the film.
Perhaps this film might have been more aptly
titled A Star Is Reborn, since it marked the return to the screen of Judy
Garland, who some years earlier had been fired by MGM after she attempted to commit
suicide just before beginning to shoot Annie Get Your Gun. Unfortunately, the
rebirth turned out to be an aborted one. Although A Star Is Born was no box
office flop, the high costs of production cut into the grosses, and no Hollywood
studio was encouraged to make a musical starring Garland, although she appeared
in a couple of dramatic features--most memorably in a cameo role as a witness in
Stanley Kramer's Judgment at Nuremburg--as well as hosting a highly successful
television series in the 1960s and continuing to tour right up to her death.
Even if A Star Is Born had been directed by
someone like George Sidney or Charles Walters, it would possess a special cachet
as Judy Garland's farewell to the genre that had elevated her to stardom. But
the film also marked the debut of one of the most formidable figures in the
industry, George Cukor, as a director of musicals. Cukor, who was nearing the
end of a long tenure at MGM, where his latest experiences had not been
especially happy ones, and who was probably tired of being stereotyped as a
director of "women's pictures," obviously was looking for new
territory to conquer. And what project could have been more promising than one
which would give him the chance to triumphantly bring back to the screen the
former wife of Vincente Minnelli, the director who had virtually reinvented the musical in
the 1940s and 1950s?
But Cukor possibly had an additional, if less
evident, motive for making A Star Is Born since it was going to be a remake of
one of David Selznick's most successful pre-Gone With the Wind
pictures, made in 1937. In fact, it was Cukor who
in 1932 had directed what might be called the Ur-Star Is Born, What Price Hollywood? as his first work at RKO under Selznick, who had
only recently become head of production at the studio. Selznick was infatuated
with the movie land fable about a woman who rises to fame as her lover goes into
decline, and when he finally set up his own studio he set about filming the
story a second time. But when he asked Cukor to direct, the latter refused, and
William Wellman guided the first A Star Is Born to the screen.
The rising stars of both Cukor and Selznick had
been much intertwined during those years. There can be little doubt of the
catalytic effect the producer had upon the director. Cukor had had only moderate
success at his first studio, Paramount, and left after an unhappy collision with
its premier director, Ernst Lubitsch, but he bloomed out under Selznick's
tutelage at RKO. Conversely, Selznick must have realized the possible advantages
to be gained by cultivating the friendship of a man who was obviously destined
to become one of the leading directors in the industry in a short period of
time, and he brought Cukor with him when he moved to Metro in 1933.
If everything had gone according to plan, the
next step would have been for Cukor to eventually move to Selznick International
Pictures, which had been created in 1936. Yet Cukor never made a film for
Selznick at the latter's own studio. Although he signed a contract with SIP in
flagrant violation of the one still in effect at MGM, he remained firmly planted
in the fief of Louis B. Mayer, rejecting the projects Selznick proposed and only
polishing up the work of other directors uncredited, like John Cromwell's The
Prisoner of Zenda. Whatever strains may have been at work in the friendship came
to a head when Cukor was fired off Gone With the Wind--on which he had done
extensive pre-production work--after a few weeks of shooting.
The two men remained on friendly terms after
that, but the damage was done and Cukor never again made a movie for his former
boss. By 1954, however, the positions of the two were totally reversed, and
while Cukor's star had continued to rise in spite of losing Gone with the
Wind,
Selznick's lot now almost resembled that of Norman Maine, although Selznick's fall
from grace resulted from erratic business and artistic decisions rather than
from alcoholism. According to a famous Hollywood dictum, "You're only as
good as your last picture," and studio executives were more likely to
remember Selznick for fiascos like Portrait of Jenny or The Paradine Case than
they were to remember him as the man who made Gone With the Wind or even
Duel in
the Sun.
I have never read anything that would suggest
George Cukor was a vindictive man, but I find it difficult to imagine he would
not have relished this truly ironic reversal of fortune. While Selznick had to
hustle to find bankrolling for his projects, his former employee was about to
direct a blockbuster remake of one of Selznick's prize productions at one of the
biggest studios in town. But rather than simply competing with the earlier movie
on its own ground, the 1954 A Star Is Born profoundly revises it, and in the
process gives the story a depth and intensity lacking in its predecessor.
Where the 1938
production is a piece of self-mythologizing in the "Hooray for
Hollywood" mode, the remake offers a more far disenchanted view of
Tinseltown. The second Star Is Born forms part of the group of
movies initiated by Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950) and that also
includes Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place (1950), Vincente Minnelli's The
Bad and the Beautiful (1953), Joseph Mankiewicz' The Barefoot Contessa
(1954) and Robert Aldrich's The Big Knife (1955), movies that hold up a
far from flattering mirror to the motion picture industry itself.
The difference between
the romanticism of the one film and the disillusion of the other is already
evident in the depiction of the press agent Matt Libby. As portrayed
by Lionel Stander in the Wellman version, the character is basically an
insensitive lout who dislikes having to babysit Norman Maine and to keep his
drunken escapades out of the newspapers, but he could in no way be called a
vicious person. However, in Cukor's film Jack Carson--in a frighteningly
effective performance--makes Libby into a resentful, sadistic ogre who just
waits for the chance to kick a once great star when he's down.
Interestingly, the figure who remains unchanged is the studio boss, Oliver
Niles, played in both versions as a benignly patriarchal figure--by the dapper
Adolph Menjou in 1937, and by crusty Charles Bickford in 1954.
Even more striking,
however, is a fundamental shift in dramatic equilibrium. The first Star
was dominated by Fredric March's performance as the disintegrating star, and his
descent into drunkeness and ultimately death supplied the focus of the
narrative. (In the remake, James Mason gives a more subtle, but also more
subdued performance in the same role.) Janet Gaynor, on the other hand,
was not very credible as an ingénue about to be elevated to stardom--and the
film rather shrewdly emphasized the self-sacrifice of Mrs. Norman Maine more
than it did the metamorphosis of lowly Esther Blodgett into stellar Vicki
Lester. But the remake was planned as a comeback vehicle for Judy Garland, and
she was the star about which this planetary system was destined to revolve.
The 1938 Star
might be called a drama of transfiguration, in which a Cinderella from the
sticks becomes first a star and finally a grande dame of the screen.
Moreover, while these fictional events take place within a short time on screen,
they parallel a "real life" story with which everyone in Hollywood was
familiar and one whose high points had been spread out over a decade or so.
Norma Shearer had started off in small parts in the silent era, risen to stardom
at MGM, married the "boy wonder" Irving Thalberg, and continued her
career after Thalberg's premature death. Shearer's story was a bona fide legend,
and undoubtedly furnished part of the inspiration for the Selznick production.
But the Garland picture
is a drama of alienation. The process by which the slightly homely
Esther becomes the glamorous Vicki is marked by violence from beginning to end,
starting with the grotesque attempts of a pair of makeup artists to remake
Esther when she first comes to the studio. However, the process continues as
violently if less obviously so as Esther is transformed into Vicki and drawn
into the studio's elaborate machinery for manufacturing stars. In contrast to
Gaynor's "This is Mrs. Norman Maine," which sounds like a
ringing affirmation, Garland's identical declaration at the movie's conclusion
sounds like a cry of despair from the depths.
It is interesting from
the point of view, to compare the Cukor film with Max Ophul's great Lola
Montes, released a year later. (Whether
or not Ophuls, also shooting in color and using an anamorphic process for the
first time, may have been influenced by the 1954 Star is likely to remain
a moot question.) Both films portray the dramatic trajectory of a strong
feminine character--in one case, from a low position to a high one, and in the
other, in exactly the opposite direction, but with opposite signs, so to speak.
Lola, in the final shot of the Ophuls movie, on
display before the circus patrons, seems utterly purified in spite of her fallen
station. All of the experiences which have brought her to this point have merely
reduced her in the alchemical sense of the word, eliminating everything
inessential, and only leaving behind the corporeal manifestation of her soul. In
contrast, Vicki, who is at the height of her fame, appears utterly lost and far
more abandoned to the whims of fate than Lola in New Orleans. Lola's
is the true drama of transfiguration, unlike the bogus one of the earlier Star
is Born.
Yet Cukor does offer an
alternative to this bleak vision, in a remarkable moment of magic that occurs
just before the end. Backstage, just before Vicki arrives,
Spanish gypsies and circus clowns briefly appear on screen--phantoms from the
heroic days of modernist art, refugees from the world of Picasso (one of the
clowns could have stepped out of his 1905 painting The Mountebanks), of
Stravinsky (Petrouchka),
and of Schönberg (Pierrot Lunaire). For an instant, Vicki becomes one of them, no longer a star and
only an almost anonymous presence. But that anonymity is a condition of the
transcendence of art to which Cukor obliquely points, the transcendence which
makes us all participants in a larger than life spectacle.
Any great motion picture results from the
collaboration of a number of talents and the 1954 A Star Is Born is no
exception. Moss Hart did a superb job of adapting the original screenplay by
Alan Campbell, Dorothy Parker, Robert Carson (story), and William Wellman
(story), Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin contributed the songs, Sam Leavitt (Exodus) photographed the movie in
Technicolor®, and Gene Allen did the
production design.
This
DVD is available from Amazon.com
Production
data courtesy of The Internet Movie Database
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