A Star is Born (Again)

Why, exactly, do we love movies about the making of movies? Showbiz seems like a glamorous , mysterious world that most of us aspire to enter. Many of us nurse private fantasies about a stardom we know we’ll never achieve, and there’s a perverse comfort in discovering that show business has its seamy side—and its tragic side—as well.  

 Curiously, in the early days of sound movies, most of the showbiz stories on the screen—pictures like Busby Berkeley’s 42^nd Street and Footlight Parade as well as chestnuts like Stage Door—were devoted to the challenge of putting on a theatrical production. It was Broadway that seemed most glamorous back then. Berkeley’s famous musical numbers, like the “By a Waterfall” extravaganza from Golddiggers of 1933, contained elements like scantily-clad chorines swimming in formation, gliding underwater, or sliding down waterfalls into welcoming lagoons. Such moments were often shot from above, and the joke was that they couldn’t possibly work in a Broadway theatre.

 Despite moviedom’s ongoing fascination with success on the Broadway stage, the 1930s also saw two popular flicks that chronicle a newcomer’s overnight rise to Hollywood stardom. In 1932, George Cukor directed Constance Bennett in What Price Hollywood?, the saga of a waitress who’s discovered by a film director with a drinking problem. She quickly achieves fame and fortune, while he spirals downward, with romantic complications galore. It was briefly popular, though no one pretended it was a realistic look at the film industry. A mere five years later, William Wellman directed Janet Gaynor and Frederic March in A Star is Born, which is quite similar to What Price Hollywood ? in its plotting, but adds the complication that Vicki Lester (née Esther Blodgett) loves and marries her champion, fading actor Norman Maine. The lavish production, which some say mirrored the troubled marriage of Barbara Stanwyck and Frank Fay, was enormously successful.

 Almost twenty years later, in 1954, Cukor took another crack at the material, which was to be his first musical and first Technicolor film. This version of A Star is Born showcases the powerful singing of Judy Garland, who was looking for a career comeback, as well as the dissolute complexity of the ageing thespian played by James Mason. (In his George Cukor’s People, film historian Joseph McBride calls this film, despite its studio butchering, Cukor’s very finest effort.)  The restored version I’ve just finished watching is 178 moments long, and there are some unusual tonal shifts from cheery musical comedy hijinks to downright tragedy, but this is the version to see. And hear: Garland belting “The Man That Got Away” is a moment not to be missed. (It was nominated for a Best Song Oscar, but—unthinkably—lost to the sweet, syrupy “Three Coins in the Fountain”).

 Making Esther into a singer opened the door for two further remakes featuring pop legends of the moment. The 1976 film, starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, shifts the familiar story to the world of rock ‘n’ roll, adding onscreen sex, a soupçon of infidelity, and a really memorable poster.  The year 2018 saw Bradley Cooper’s re-imagining of the story, with Lady Gaga garnering raves for her first serious acting role.

 Who knows when the next version will show up? Maybe—why not?—it could involve an older female star and an appealing young male newcomer. After all, there’s nothing that says that the woman can’t be the knowledgeable veteran of Hollywood. But we as audience members wouldn’t easily accept that as anything but grotesque. See, after all, Sunset Boulevard. 

 

When Irish Eyes Aren’t Smiling: “Odd Man Out”

For St. Patrick’s Day, it seems only right to focus on a film with an Irish pedigree. I could come up with something sweet and lively like John Ford’s The Quiet Man or Disney’s Darby O’Gill and the Little People. Or perhaps a luminous animated adventure like The Secret of Kells. I’ve already written, with great affection, about Martin McDonagh’s Oscar-snubbed but wonderful The Banshees of Inisherin.

 So instead I’ll go back in time to praise a classic film by a Britisher, Carol Reed. He’s best known for directing Orson Welles and company in a taut international thriller, The Third Man (1949). And 20 years later he won an Oscar for helming a splashy film adaptation of a Broadway musical, Oliver! But some (including Reed’s biographer) consider his masterpiece to be a 1947 film set in Ireland during the time of The Troubles. It’s called Odd Man Out, Two master directors, Roman Polanski and Sam Peckinpah, cite it as one of their favorite films of all time. It also was the recipient of the inaugural BAFTA award for Best British Film.

 Critics have said that Odd Man Out dramatically captures the mood of post-World War II Europe, a time when dread and cynicism reigned supreme. Its backdrop is the ongoing street battle between Protestant and Roman Catholic forces over control of Northern Ireland, though the politics of the matter are not really discussed. Instead this is fundamentally a human rather than a political story, set in a Belfast that is never named. The focus is on a small cell of rebels who have been called on to commit a robbery in support of their cause. Their leader, Johnny, has been in hiding for six months following his escape from prison. He’s determined to do his part, though his weakened physical condition makes others beg him to stay behind. Of course the inevitable happens: he lacks the agility to make a quick escape, and suddenly he’s a fugitive.

 Johnny’s local fame is such that he’s immediately recognized by much of the citizenry, while his comrades too are endangered by his mishap. We see a cross-section of city life:  a priest who supports him, a well-heeled woman who betrays him, an eccentric who haplessly tries to help, lovers who stumble on him as he’s hiding—badly wounded—in a storage shed. His goal, in his increasingly disoriented state, is to get to the harbor. But the arrival of the young woman who loves him changes the equation, leading to an ending that’s intensely dramatic but also foreordained.

.Most of the actors in Odd Man Out, beautifully playing slice-of-life roles, were affiliated with Dublin’s famed Abbey Theatre. But the leading man was an Englishman, James Mason, long before his Hollywood successes in such films as A Star is Born, North by Northwest and Lolita. Richard Burton noted in his diary that the part was originally offered to another Brit, Stewart Granger. But Granger, thumbing through the script, concluded that the role wasn’t big enough to interest him. What he overlooked was the fact that the part of Johnny—though short on dialogue—is intensely dramatic. He may not have much to say, but his plight, as a wounded man watching his death approach, is riveting. Wrote Burton, “It's probably the best thing that Mason has ever done and certainly the best film he's ever been in while poor Granger has never been in a good classic film at all.” According to Burton, “Granger tells the story ruefully against himself.”

 May the road rise up to meet you!