George Cukor (1954)

There are three versions of A Star Is Born and a fourth, starring Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper, is due for release this year.  The 1954 film is the most famous one (so far) and this is thanks to Judy Garland.  Her own life story was a Hollywood tragic melodrama.  Her performing style was remarkable for its all-out emotionality.  As a result, the distinction between Garland and the character she’s playing is often, in retrospect, blurred – from the teenage Dorothy singing ‘Over the Rainbow’ in The Wizard of Oz (1939) to the screwed-up superstar Jenny Bowman in I Could Go on Singing (1963), her last film, where the role has unmissable autobiographical flavours.  In A Star Is Born, Garland plays the antithesis of the popular image of who she was.  Vicki Lester, the title character, is professionally reliable, a devoted wife and an emotional tower of strength compared with her helplessly alcoholic ex-matinee-idol husband Norman Maine (James Mason).  Even so, the lead performance and the exposé of how cruelly studio-system Hollywood used and abused its stars, coalesce – so that the film’s subject seems to be Judy Garland.

Moss Hart’s screenplay, adapted from that of the 1937 A Star is Born (by Robert Carson, Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell), skewers not only the Hollywood machine but also the fickle public whose appetites it exploits.  The machine, represented chiefly by the nasty studio fixer Matt Libby (Jack Carson), is largely upstaged by hoi polloi, especially in the hysterical sequence in which a baying horde of Vicki’s fans (‘There she is!’) bursts into the foreground of Norman’s funeral and his grieving widow collapses in the press of bodies and an explosion of flash bulbs.  The lone bastard Libby doesn’t make a lot of sense since his boss, the studio head (Charles Bickford), is, much of the time, a model of dreary probity and a caring father figure to Vicki.   These clichéd character types are one example of how George Cukor’s film is a reflection rather than a critique of contemporary Hollywood.  The sumptuous, extravagant production, reinforced by the CinemaScope presentation, is another:  some of the sets and elaborate costumes for the chorus line get no more than a few seconds of screen time.

In spite of which, the picture is insanely long – 178 minutes.  The only point at which George Cukor is at pains to save time and cut costs is shortly after the first encounter of Norman and Vicki – or Esther Blodgett as she still then is.  Cukor abbreviates what-happened-next to an extended sequence of black-and-white still photographs.  This temporary switch to monochrome has considerable impact because of the extraordinary richness of the film’s colour scheme, which often heightens its emotional effects.  (The DP was Sam Leavitt and the fashion photographer George Hoyningen-Huene a special colour consultant to Cukor.)  The stills shorthand is puzzling nonetheless:  Cukor doesn’t use it again and it’s not as if these are photographs of Norman and Vicki that will appear in the press.

A Star is Born begins and ends with a benefit at the Shrine Auditorium.  At the opening benefit, Esther Blodgett is a showbiz hopeful, performing a song and dance number with others.  Norman Maine is a big star, his arrival eagerly awaited by the crowds lining the street outside the Shrine.  The closing event takes place shortly after his suicide; Esther-Vicki emerges from the depths of despair to attend.  She introduces herself from the stage, to tumultuous applause, as ‘Mrs Norman Maine’.  Because Judy Garland became a star thanks to talent rather than conventional beauty, there’s a resonance to the sequences that show the studio giving Esther Blodgett a disfiguring facial makeover.  There’s a minor resonance too in the heroine’s change of name:  Garland was born Frances Gumm.  The persisting connection, however, is between her personality and the themes of disintegrating fame and mental health pulsing through the story.  Garland is in fine voice but the voice, and the misery it’s difficult not to hear in it, consistently overpower the songs.  Her acting, alert and accomplished as it is, is sometimes hard to bear:  she seems to be emotionally electrified by the camera – so little of what she does registers as painless or casual.  Her dancing – I’m always surprised that her legs are so long and shapely – is the most comfortably appealing aspect of her repertoire here.  Her performance is phenomenal but exhausting.

The best thing about the film is James Mason’s Norman Maine.  In the opening section at the Shrine Auditorium, Mason’s athleticism and smiling, sneering instability make the drunken Norman truly unpredictable and threatening.  (He eventually barges his way onto the stage where Esther and her colleagues are performing.  She resourcefully pretends he’s part of the act and saves the day for all concerned.)  Mason plays this quite brilliantly but he’s very good throughout, especially at conveying Norman’s sense of humiliation and a self-loathing that’s increased by Vicki’s love for and loyalty to him.  This on-the-skids character is a very familiar one, of course, and it may have helped Mason that his role was smaller than the leading lady’s.  Whatever the reasons, you increasingly want more of Norman and less of Vicki.

Except for ‘The Man That Got Away’, the new songs by Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin are undistinguished.  The film also reuses standards (‘Swanee’, ‘I’ll Get By’, ‘You Took Advantage of Me’, ‘The Peanut Vendor’ and more) but A Star Is Born seems to have as many melodramatic set pieces as it does song and dance numbers.   Standouts include a sequence at a racecourse, where Libby goads Norman – they both just happen to be there – into (1) a fist fight and (2) falling off the wagon; and the courtroom sequence in which a judge hands down sentences to a drunk and disorderly group that includes Norman.  When Vicki intervenes to appeal against her husband’s going to jail and insists that she’ll ensure Norman doesn’t reoffend, the judge relents and gives him a suspended sentence instead. (If only Cukor had had the non-celebrity drunks react and one of them say, ‘I wish my wife would do that for me’.)  Comfortably eclipsing these highlights, however, is the notorious Academy Awards ceremony scene.  This is not just a runaway winner in the competitive so-bad-it’s-good category in A Star Is Born but a masochistic classic of its kind.

The clothes, the references to television, the mention of a dream sequence as an obligatory part of a new musical:  all these indicate that the film is set in the 1950s.  One immediately striking thing about the Oscar episode is that the guests at Cukor’s ceremony sit at little tables rather than in auditorium rows of seats:  the actual venue from 1950 to 1960 inclusive was the Pantages Theatre.  What’s more, Vicki Lester is one of only four nominees for Best Actress:  since 1936, there have always been five.  I’m not sure if these differences from the real thing were stipulated by the Academy – albeit pointlessly, since their name and statuettes are being used – but that’s by the by.  As she waits for the result to be announced, Vicki is as worried by Norman’s absence from the ceremony as she is about the outcome.  When her name is called, she comes onstage and begins her acceptance speech, only to be interrupted by a loud, solo handclap from the back of the room.  Norman has arrived:  he makes his inebriated way to the stage, hijacks his wife’s speech and, in an over-expansive arm movement, with his back to Vicki, inadvertently whacks her in the face.

For Oscar nerds, however, even this on-screen episode is challenged by Judy Garland reality.  This is how Robert Osborne describes the Best Actress contest for 1954, in his book Academy Awards Illustrated:

‘It was a neck-and-neck race to the finish between two red-hot favorites:  Judy Garland, in the midst of a major career comeback, and Grace Kelly, the new golden girl of the movies.  On the night of the awards – March 30, 1955 – Garland was in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, new mother of a day-old son.  NBC-TV, anticipating a possible Garland victory, had television equipment set up outside her hospital room, ready for on-the-spot coverage.  But when William Holden announced the winner …, it was newcomer Kelly who stepped up to receive the award. …’

The NBC camera crew allegedly left Garland’s bedside with a grumpy lack of ceremony.  Groucho Marx cabled her to describe the Academy’s decision as ‘the biggest robbery since Brink’s’.  Judy Garland certainly deserved the award more than Grace Kelly in The Country Girl or any of that year’s other nominees (Dorothy Dandridge in Carmen Jones, Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina and Jane Wyman in Magnificent Obsession).  But Groucho’s judgment, for all that it’s a good line, is OTT.  As such, it’s a fitting capper to A Star Is Born.

7 January 2018