Frank Pierson (1976)

I don’t usually return to films I walked out of.  Keen to compare the 1976 A Star Is Born with the 1954 one, I made an exception.  I feel I did George Cukor and Judy Garland an injustice in the note I wrote earlier this month.  Cukor’s film, half an hour longer than this remake, is turgid but it never occurred to me to leave it early (and I watched it straight after seeing another film on the same day).   The Barbra Streisand version of A Star Is Born – surely the only way to describe it, though Frank Pierson was nominally the director – has now attained unique status in my cinema-going history.  It’s the only film I’ve walked out of twice.

I don’t remember why I exited forty years ago – at least this time I can record the reasons.  First, there was a bad smell close to where I was in NFT2.  I’m nearly certain it was the feet of the BFI usher who took a seat and his shoes off just behind me – not the fault of the film of course, though a better one might have distracted my nostrils.  The setting of A Star Is Born in this version has switched from Hollywood to the music business and the self-destructive leading man is now a hell-raising rock star, instead of a matinee idol on the skids.  Whereas the Cukor film didn’t show James Mason’s Norman Maine acting on screen, there’s no such luck with John Norman Howard (Kris Kristofferson).  The hour that I lasted included lots of his boring music.  Worse than the smell and the noise, however, and the main reason for walking, was Barbra Streisand.

This isn’t an unusual objection to the film.  Streisand’s allegedly high-handed behaviour during the development and making of it guaranteed exceptionally bad advance press.  By the time it opened in the US in December 1976, Frank Pierson had virtually disowned A Star Is Born (as had Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, with whom Pierson wrote the screenplay).  Streisand had initially wanted her then-boyfriend, hairdresser-to-the-stars Jon Peters, to direct.  When that didn’t happen (Peters eventually shared the producing credit with her), Streisand, according to Pierson, constantly interfered and took over the direction when she felt like it.  Many of the negative reviews the film received when it finally appeared majored on how thoroughly incongruous Streisand was in the rock world of the story.  As a Broadway and screen musical star and pop performer, perhaps she was miscast but what makes her intolerable is the overbearing quality that also disfigured Funny Lady the previous year:  she was hardly miscast in that, having given a great performance as Fanny Brice in Funny Girl (1968).

Barbra Streisand combines exceptional performing skills and enormous self-confidence.  Everything she does in Funny Lady and A Star Is Born is filtered through her superstar persona – and her awareness of it.  Perhaps this affected Streisand only in musical roles of the period:  I didn’t dislike her in The Way We Were (1973) when I last saw it a few years ago (she sang the theme song over the titles but not on screen).  But in Funny Lady and A Star Is Born her mixture of self-assertion and self-approval doesn’t merely detract from her singing:  it charges her every expression of emotion and delivery of lines (including the casual, goofy ones).  It suffocates characterisation.   What kind of a singer Esther Hoffman, the heroine of A Star is Born, is meant to be is virtually irrelevant:  she is, to all intents and purposes, Barbra Streisand.  Streisand is the polar opposite of Judy Garland in the Cukor film.   Esther Blodgett/Vicki Lester was authoritative on stage and screen and, in her personal life, an utterly dependable wife; yet, with Garland playing her, she always seemed on the verge of breakdown.  However tough the going gets for Esther Hoffman, Streisand makes her invulnerable.

A Star Is Born opens in a huge stadium where John Norman Howard is performing – barking out numbers in a manner that betrays his contempt for his zillions of fans.  It’s immediately clear that this is a screwed-up superstar.  After various brawls and a set-to with his road manager (Gary Busey), he gets into a car leaving the stadium, the driver asks, ‘Where to?’, and John Norman replies, ‘Back ten years’.  I wasn’t sure from what follows whether the car’s destination is the bar where John Norman discovers Esther, singing in an all-girl trio; or whether the words ‘back ten years’ bring on an extended flashback that describes this first meeting and the development of their relationship.  In any case, the camera discovers Esther before John Norman does, and her amazing voice commands attention before he has had chance to hear it.  From pretty well the start of the scene in the bar, the focus is on Esther and the two black girls flanking her – the trio’s name is The Oreos – are effectively her backing singers.  The idea of Esther emerging from obscurity makes no sense:  she’s in the spotlight from the word go.  The film is less a case of a star being born than a demonstration that celebrity is preordained.

It fits with the Streisand effect that the line between the on-screen audiences’ response to the characters of John Howard and Esther, as distinct from the actors incarnating them, is blurry.  This is quite interesting in the opening section.  The stadium crowd switches instantly from why-are-we-waiting impatience, when John Howard still hasn’t appeared, to deafening adoration the second he comes on stage, though he’s obviously drunk.  Even if this crowd is just doing what Frank Pierson (or Streisand) told them to do, their abrupt change of mood does convey a plausible sense of fickleness; John Howard’s zonked disrespect for them is increased by his realising that the fans either can’t see or don’t care how he’s treating them.   There’s no such ambiguity in the interaction between audiences and Esther.  At a Native-American-rights fund-raiser, John Howard disappoints punters by pushing Esther on stage to perform in his place.  This turns into a rags-to-riches-story trope:  her irresistible singing melts the audience’s hostility and wins them over.  Yet Streisand hardly bothers to suggest that Esther is apprehensive before she works her magic – and the audience’s grinning acclaim seems to confirm we’re watching a Barbra Streisand concert.  This approach proved to be commercially shrewd:  in spite of its bad press, A Star Is Born became the second highest-grossing American movie of 1976.  (The film’s softest-of-soft-porn icing – epitomised by its ‘sexy’ theatrical release poster – probably didn’t harm either.)  But the heroine’s moment of triumph at the benefit is also the moment of Esther Hoffman’s complete submersion by Barbra Streisand.  And the moment at which the film and I parted company again.

25 January 2018