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A Star Is BornRating:
Release Date: 01 May, 2001 Retail Price: $19.98 OUR Price: $14.99 You SAVE: $4.99! Cast: Complete Cast (8 total) |
A Star Is Born Reviews
An admirable and interesting failure.
Not a few persons consider "A Star is Born" to be Judy Garland's finest film, and there is, indeed, a great deal to admire in it.
Among the good: First, Sam Leavitt's Cinemascope cinematography may well be the best demonstration of wide screen Technicolor photography ever committed to celluloid. His compositional balance in each frame is rarely less than breathtaking, and this also applies to the Technicolor whose chroma is similarly balanced and visually thrilling. The reds and blues achieved in the opening backstage sequence startle the sensibilities in their effectiveness.
Ray Heindorf's orchestrations are the finest in any Garland film, even surpassing those of Lennie Hayton and Johnny Green. The use of brass in many of the orchestrations attains a big band blues perfectly in pitch with the rueful story about to unfold. This is particularly true during the overture where the picture's principal themes are laid out in swinging rhythms drenched in deep emotion.
Art direction is similarly distinguished perhaps most evidently in the Academy Awards banquet sequence, (astonishing use of wide-screen here!) and the otherwise expendable "Born in a Trunk," segment.
Alas, we come at last to the screenplay. Few would argue with the choice of Moss Hart as a scenarist, but despite the best efforts of those involved, the story fails to cohere.
This failure has less to do with the situations themselves, than with the characters as they are delineated in both script and performance.
Norman Maine is ostensibly intended to be a charming and attractive man, despite the fact that he is in the throes of a losing battle with dipsomania. However, as etched by James Mason, Norman fails entirely to transmit even the remotest appeal. Consider his opening sequence, as he smashes mirrors and attempts to pinion showgirls, not to mention a whole raft of similar offenses. Where is the charm in this? Where is the appeal? What on earth would endear him to a total stranger? Most people would be running for the hills to get out of his way. His only genuine moment comes when he describes Esther's talent to her after hearing her in the after hours club.
If Mason had brought some of the smoldering appeal he had manifested in "The Man in Grey," perhaps the audience could buy Esther's infatuation. As it stands, her interest in him seems wholly contrived.
Judy Garland's Esther Blodgett is a woman of considerable charm, but the emotional instability she suggests throughout, throws the whole script off kilter. Surely, Mr. Hart intended that she provide the ballast to Mr. Mason's portrayal. After all, she is the woman who thinks she can save Norman Maine. As it is, however, she is so utterly neurasthenic in not a few of her on screen moments, that the viewer is forced to conclude that, of the two of them, Norman appears far more psychologically self possessed. Indeed, her dependence on Norman seems almost childish, consisting, as it does, of a tremulous, clinging desperation--raising the uncomfortable question: How did she ever survive prior to his arrival?
Then there are simply blatant inconsistencies in the script. For example upon meeting Norman, Esther recalls a low period earlier in her life where she was forced to wait tables. "Wow that was a low point," she intones, "...and no matter what I'll never do it again." What kind of "low point" was it ? however, when she is later depicted working as a car hop!
Musically the film serves to transition Miss Garland from MGM sweet miss to international concert diva, sometimes at the expense of the introspective plaintiveness she had displayed so often in the 40s.
Presumably the premiere of her "new voice" as she called it, was the by-product of her play dates at the Palladium and Palace, where she embraced a powerhouse style of belting not found in her MGM vocals. Certainly the voice is deeper and harder hitting. How appealing the change is considered varies according to the taste of the listener.
Nelson Riddle later averred that he had difficulty in convincing her to revert to her earlier style, though when he succeeded, (as in her late 50's Capital recording of "Just Imagine" )the results were enchanting.
Not only, however, had Miss Garland's voice changed; her appearance, in a relatively short span of time, had radically altered. In the intervening years since the MGM termination, Garland had abandoned the various shades of auburn and/or titian hair color she had worn in her MGM Technicolor films. For "A Star is Born" she appears with a deep chestnut brown verging on outright black hair color, now cut very short, (her MGM shoulder length pageboy had been banished forever) which, whatever the aesthetic or practical reasons behind the switch, is rarely flattering or suited to her coloring.
To illustrate the point, the close-up at the conclusion of "Born in a Trunk" reveals a facially distorted star, in pomaded jet black boyish bangs, and puffy eyes and cheeks--nearly Italianate looking--a vision so unrecognizable and disconnected from her late 40's MGM appearance, that my nephew to whom I recently showed the film couldn't even recognize it as the same woman!
Then, as Noel Coward confided to his diary after seeing the unexpurgated version, it's "interminable."
Indeed, recently published correspondence reveals that Messers. Cukor, Hart, Luft, and Warner all felt judicious cutting would benefit the picture's narrative. Unfortunately, the resultant cuts were ham fisted, with the removal of worthy sequences.
Few could deny that "Born in a Trunk" (yes it has virtues--such as the stunning "Melancholy Baby" with Garland in the swank gray gown with opera gloves) is padded and dramatically unnecessary, bringing the whole momentum of the story to a dead halt, and causing British critic Leslie Halliwell to conclude that the "musical numbers add very little except length."
All of which probably contributed to the picture's commercial failure. Certainly, none of the blame lies with Garland, who does turn in an arrestingly sincere performance. In this connection it must be recalled that musicals were collapsing at the box office at this time, and many such extravaganzas were failing to reap back their production costs.
Perhaps Garland's Best Work
I reluctantly gave this superb film 5 stars not because of any shortcomings in the script or the acting-both are unbelievebly good-but because of what the studio had done to the movie.
It was originally released at over 3 hours in lenght. When exhibitors demanded that it be shortened Warner's obliged by cutting it to 154 minutes. In the early 1980s the studio realized what it really had, and set about reconstructing and restoring the movie.
Because of initial sloppiness (footage being thrown out), it became impossible to fully reconstruct the film. The result is that there is a segment of some 7 minutes of stills about one hour into the picture trying to restore some of the lost scenes. Gone, too, apparently. is Vicki Lester's screen test.
All of this aside, what the viewer sees on the 1999 digitally restored DVD is superb. The color correction of the nearly 20 minutes it was possible to restore is excellent. The actors' performances are outstanding. Not only is Garland a superb singer and dancer,but the close intimate scenes with Mason radiate a warmth and tenderness rarely captured on film. Mason, too, is superb as Norman Maine. When drunk, his character is absolutely dispicable-becoming phisical and violent. Great, too, is the supporting cast.Jack Carson as the studio publicist Libby plays the role with much more profesionalialism and less corniness than his counterpart Lionel Streater did in 1937.
This is, by far, the best version of the film and well worth owning and viewing- dispite the minor shortcomings of its reconstruction.There is not one corny word of dialog in the Moss Hart script.
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