George Cukor (1950)

I remember watching, on a flight back from Greece in 1993, the poor remake of Born Yesterday (starring Melanie Griffith, John Goodman and Don Johnson).  Ahead of this month’s BFI screening of the original film, I couldn’t remember if I’d already seen this too.  What made me suspect I had was nagging apprehension at the prospect of Judy Holliday’s famous performance as Billie Dawn.  Billie, the brassy girlfriend of a bullying business tycoon, comes to realise, under the tutorship of a Washington journalist, that she’s not as dumb as everyone – herself included – thought, and that the tycoon is even more despicable than she realised.  I knew that Holliday’s Billie was vocally extraordinary and had a feeling that her voice had got on my nerves.  She’d also played Billie during the long Broadway run of Born Yesterday (it opened in February 1946 and closed in November 1948).  Wasn’t Holliday’s recreation of Billie on screen a prime example of a performance that had been thoroughly worked out on stage – an act of reheating rather than a piece of creative acting?   Born Yesterday was showing at BFI in their ‘Member Picks’ slot.  I wasn’t encouraged either by the fairly baffling quote at the start of the programme note from BFI member Matthew Motyka (the picker, I suppose):  ‘Judy Holliday’s exceptional performance as Billie says so much about the contradictory messages of what it was to be a woman in Cold War America’.  The real pleasure of George Cukor’s film was in discovering that I needn’t have worried about any of these things (and I couldn’t have seen it before).  Judy Holliday is a delight.

Harry Brock (Broderick Crawford), who began as a rag-and-bone man and graduated to scrap metal, arrives in Washington to make his latest dodgy business deals.  His entourage includes his cynical lawyer Jim Devery (Howard St John), a seedy factotum Eddie (Frank Otto) and the ex-showgirl Billie Dawn.  We immediately get what Harry’s like, as he bawls at the obsequious manager (Grandon Rhodes) about being given a suite rather than a whole wing of the hotel.  It’s a few minutes, however, before Billie Dawn opens her mouth at all.  When she does so, what first comes out is a high-decibel, screeching ‘Whaaaat?!’  It gets a laugh, of course, but this comical noise is also a good indicator of the intelligence of Judy Holliday’s approach (confirmed when the ‘Whaaaat?!’ is delivered a second time).  It comes across as an expression of Billie’s frustration with Harry’s bellowing – as a desperate, futile attempt to get her own back.  The combination of theatrical verve and sympathetic characterisation in her opening screech is what makes Judy Holliday’s playing of Billie successful and affecting throughout.  Her game of gin rummy with Harry is a deservedly celebrated sequence; the babyish Bronx accent and sashaying walk are remarkable technical feats.  But the voice and movement belong to a woman whom Holliday, while being very funny, also suggests is stubborn, bewildered and vulnerable.  (She stops short of implying this has anything to do with the Cold War.)

Infuriated by his girlfriend’s dumb conversation and lack of social graces, Harry employs a journalist called Paul Verrall (William Holden) to improve her.  Paul introduces Billie to American history and politics, to art, music, literature and the law.  He also falls in love with her.  The last two things come in handy for delivering Born Yesterday’s happy ending, which sees Billie and Paul get married and Harry his comeuppance.  (On his lawyer’s advice, he signed over many of his assets, for purposes of tax avoidance, into Billie’s name.)  As you’d expect, Billie’s crash-course schooling involves plenty of malapropisms and thumbing through a dictionary and encyclopedia but the pupil isn’t simply transformed.  The literal meaning of education in its Latin root – a leading out – is significant here.  Paul Verrall helps Billie Dawn to realise her native intelligence. Judy Holliday, under George Cukor’s skilful direction, ensures this morally uplifting message doesn’t get too heavy.  In other respects, the comedy topping of Born Yesterday doesn’t obscure the pious and partisan heart of Garson Kanin’s play or, at least, Albert Mannheimer’s adaptation of it.

By coincidence, I saw Born Yesterday just a couple of days after Ace in the Hole:  Cukor’s film admires crusading journalism as simply as Wilder’s excoriates exploitative journalism.   (There seems to be no compelling reason for choosing a journalist to educate Billie or for Paul Verrall’s accepting the assignment:  it’s just that, after coming to the hotel suite to interview Harry, he’s in the right place at the right time.)   Born Yesterday is also, as Pauline Kael complained, a ‘civics lesson’ and an assertion of the fundamental rightness of the US political system:  a crooked congressman (Larry Oliver) with whom Harry is wheeler-dealing is described by Paul Verrall as a rare rotten apple.  George Cukor opens out the material to enable Billie and Paul to visit the Jefferson Memorial, the Library of Congress, the Capitol building, the National Gallery of Art, and so on.  This is apt enough, given the movie’s reverence for what these places represent, although the guided tour also tends to dilute the momentum of the story.

Harry Brock is a problematic character – and not just in the physical violence he metes out to Billie at one point.  There’s no recognition of any virtue in Harry’s working his way up to wealth from nowhere (that is, from Plainfield, New Jersey – a real place).  Whereas Billie is revealed as innately bright, Harry is presented as inherently corrupt (and the foundation of his fortune is junk).  The argument that he’s a pantomime villain – even to the extent of his acolyte Devery turning on him – and not to be taken seriously doesn’t fit with Born Yesterday‘s evident seriousness about what’s good in American life.  Harry is a contemptible, philistine boor – as played by Broderick Crawford, a bore too.  William Holden does better.  He communicates Paul’s enjoyment of Billie’s company – possibly expressing Holden’s enjoyment of Judy Holliday’s – and is a willingly uncompetitive partner in their scenes together. Holden’s relaxed, natural style also deflates the pomposity of some of what Paul Verrall is given to say, though he can’t entirely disguise this – or that the role he’s playing is a weak one.   The supporting cast is no great shakes but Frank Otto is amusing enough as the crumpled Eddie, who never wants anything more than his next drink.  There isn’t a costume design credit as such but Jean Louis was responsible for the ‘gowns’.  I’m not sure if these included Harry’s garishly patterned dressing gown; they presumably did include everything Judy Holliday wears.  According to the website Hollywood’s Golden Age [1930-59][1], ‘Each outfit became more stylish to reflect the character’s growing self-knowledge’.  One of these outfits – I can’t begin to describe it – seems rather to illustrate a serious identity crisis.

8 September 2016

[1] http://www.hollywoodsgoldenage.com/