Several Stars are Born
Nov. 3rd, 2020 06:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustThere seem to be more 'classic' movies on my (Freeview) television these days: I don't know if it's a result of filling the space left by the difficulty of making new programmes in these restricted days, but any silver lining is welcome. And so we watched A Star is Born on BBC4's Thursday Night Film Club - the 1954 Judy Garland and James Mason version. I've seen it before, but not recently: I was taken by surprise at the announcement that we were being shown the restored version - but the restoration dates to 1983. I don't know how far that accounts for my feeling at times that I had never seen this before, while some scenes were vividly familiar; perhaps it's just an artefact of my erratic memory.
I assume we all know the story: fading star Norman Main discovers, nurtures, falls in love with talented Esther Blodgett: as she achieves stardom, he falls from it. What I remembered, in addition to this outline, are three scenes: one early in the relationship, in which he eavesdrops as she sings with the band in a late night session; one midpoint when she returns from a day at the studio and attempts to divert hom by performing the big production number she has been working on - and of course, the final shot, the moment when she returns to the stage and claims the name of 'Mrs Norman Main', the moment when she is born as a star.
That selection encapsulates the film pretty well, I think: I had remembered above all the trajectory of the relationship between two people, but I had retained - most clearly of all, in fact - the scene of domestic domestic life which is also a (not unkind) mockery of Hollywood pretensions. I had completely forgotten all the film's big production numbers (I remembered the song Born in a Trunk, but not the routine that accompanied it) but this scene which ridicules them had stayed with me. I can't claim too much credit, though, because I had remembered it for what it says about the couple, not as part of a critique of Hollywood: one this second viewing, that is the aspect of the film which really stood out for me, but it struck me as something new, something which I had previously either not noticed or not remembered.
For whatever reason, what really stood out for me this time round was the extent to which this is a film about Hollywood - and I kept seeing resemblances to another film about Hollywood, made a couple of years earlier, and which could also have been titled A Star is Born: one in which the girl we see coming to stardom is Kathy Selden. Granted, seeing patterns is something I am prone to, but even so...
A Star is Born (1954) opens as the stars arrive at a theatre for a charity gala show, with glamour girl Lola Lavery fretting at the absence of "Normie". Singing in the Rain (1952) opens as the stars arrive at a theatre for the premier of their new film, with glamour girl Lena Lamont fretting at the absence of co-star Don Lockwood (with whom she believes she is romantically involved). Both scenes feature a sycophantic showbiz reporter, too.
This goes beyond the echoes you get if two works in the same genre tackle the same topic, doesn't it? Either one of these movies is nodding to the other, or they both owe something to some common source - and of course there's an obvious candidate in the original (1937) version of A Star is Born, which I confess I have not seen. (For the record, I have seen the 1976 Barbra Streisand / Kris Kristofferson version. I don't remember why - a weakness for Streisand, possibly; and I have not seen the 2018 remake, and have no plans to do so.) And there's more -
In each film, the big production number, Born in a Trunk and Gotta Dance offer a stylised account of the charater's career. They are very different, but in each the young performer, newly arrived in town / launched on a solo career, visits a series of offices and displays their wares, to be cut off each time with a rapid: "No!" Yet that sequence as a whole belongs so distinctly to Gene Kelly ...
Add to this that when Vicki performs her big number for the benefit of her stay-at-home husband, she describes the theme, that she is searching for love all round the world, and he counters "An American in Paris?" - not Singing in the Rain but not far off. Where Singing in the Rain offers glimpses of history, Hollywood coming to terms with the challenge of sound, A Star is Born throws in references to contemporary musicals to tell us that this is what Hollywood is like now.
Or not. But that's my best guess.
I want to love Norman Main. I'm pretty sure I did first time round, and James Mason continues to be wonderful. But the rôle hasn't aged well. Yes, alcoholism is a disease, and the man can't help it; he doesn't get any pleasure out of behaving badly, his pain is tangible. But, but, but. He hits down: he disrupts the charity show by a band who are less successful than he is, he insults the publicist assigned to him (and yes, eventually the man justifies his disklike, but which is chicken and which egg?); he finds it unbearable that his wife is more successful than he is (a success he has brought into being, but I do see that that doesn't help), that she is working and he isn't; he can't even make an eatable sandwich...
Of course, this is Vicki Lester's tragedy as much as it is Norman Main's. I may have been slow coming to this conclusion: I've resisted allowing awareness of Judy Garland's own story to colour my reaction to the fiction. And what really cristalises this may just be a question of my personal musical taste. But Esther Blodgett's high point as a creative artist, as far as I'm concerned, is that first scene I remembered, the one in which she and the band and relaxing after a performance, trying something new, and Esther - no, dammit, Judy Garland - sings The Man That Got Away. It's stunning, and I say that as someone who is not usually a fan of the torch song.
The process of becoming a star removes this intense, personal art, and substitutes the anodyne, pleasantly wistful It's a New World. It isn't enough for Esther Blodgett to be eclipsed by Vicki Lester, to become a star Vicki Lester must be remade as Mrs Norman Main. There is no way this is going to end well.
ETA:* Unless I am confusing this with a sequence in On the Town in which the characters go 'on the town', from night club to night club, and we catch the end of a succession of chorus acts, identical except for costume ...
I assume we all know the story: fading star Norman Main discovers, nurtures, falls in love with talented Esther Blodgett: as she achieves stardom, he falls from it. What I remembered, in addition to this outline, are three scenes: one early in the relationship, in which he eavesdrops as she sings with the band in a late night session; one midpoint when she returns from a day at the studio and attempts to divert hom by performing the big production number she has been working on - and of course, the final shot, the moment when she returns to the stage and claims the name of 'Mrs Norman Main', the moment when she is born as a star.
That selection encapsulates the film pretty well, I think: I had remembered above all the trajectory of the relationship between two people, but I had retained - most clearly of all, in fact - the scene of domestic domestic life which is also a (not unkind) mockery of Hollywood pretensions. I had completely forgotten all the film's big production numbers (I remembered the song Born in a Trunk, but not the routine that accompanied it) but this scene which ridicules them had stayed with me. I can't claim too much credit, though, because I had remembered it for what it says about the couple, not as part of a critique of Hollywood: one this second viewing, that is the aspect of the film which really stood out for me, but it struck me as something new, something which I had previously either not noticed or not remembered.
For whatever reason, what really stood out for me this time round was the extent to which this is a film about Hollywood - and I kept seeing resemblances to another film about Hollywood, made a couple of years earlier, and which could also have been titled A Star is Born: one in which the girl we see coming to stardom is Kathy Selden. Granted, seeing patterns is something I am prone to, but even so...
A Star is Born (1954) opens as the stars arrive at a theatre for a charity gala show, with glamour girl Lola Lavery fretting at the absence of "Normie". Singing in the Rain (1952) opens as the stars arrive at a theatre for the premier of their new film, with glamour girl Lena Lamont fretting at the absence of co-star Don Lockwood (with whom she believes she is romantically involved). Both scenes feature a sycophantic showbiz reporter, too.
This goes beyond the echoes you get if two works in the same genre tackle the same topic, doesn't it? Either one of these movies is nodding to the other, or they both owe something to some common source - and of course there's an obvious candidate in the original (1937) version of A Star is Born, which I confess I have not seen. (For the record, I have seen the 1976 Barbra Streisand / Kris Kristofferson version. I don't remember why - a weakness for Streisand, possibly; and I have not seen the 2018 remake, and have no plans to do so.) And there's more -
In each film, the big production number, Born in a Trunk and Gotta Dance offer a stylised account of the charater's career. They are very different, but in each the young performer, newly arrived in town / launched on a solo career, visits a series of offices and displays their wares, to be cut off each time with a rapid: "No!" Yet that sequence as a whole belongs so distinctly to Gene Kelly ...
- More trivially:
- in each film, the man loses touch with the woman, and searches for her, while she pursues her career, as seen in a montage of identical productions of the same song-and-dance number in which only the costumes change*;
- the head of the studio is sympathetic to the central character(s), and supports them against forces within the studio
- In the Lose That Long Face routine, Garland dances up to and is stopped dead by an authority figure, then the next phrase of her dance ends with her jumping into a puddle.
- A purely verbal one:
- On his last morning Norman Main declares that he has slept well, feels well, and will henceforth swim in the ocean every morning: he is "fit as a fiddle and ready for love," though he wonders why a fiddle should be a model of fitness. It's a fair question: but the line comes from the vaudeville number performed by Gene Kelly and Donald O'Commor which counterpoints Don Lockwood's claims to a highbrow career. It's an incongruous juxtaposition - but then, Norman's use of the expression is deliberately, ironically, even tragically incongruous.
Add to this that when Vicki performs her big number for the benefit of her stay-at-home husband, she describes the theme, that she is searching for love all round the world, and he counters "An American in Paris?" - not Singing in the Rain but not far off. Where Singing in the Rain offers glimpses of history, Hollywood coming to terms with the challenge of sound, A Star is Born throws in references to contemporary musicals to tell us that this is what Hollywood is like now.
Or not. But that's my best guess.
I want to love Norman Main. I'm pretty sure I did first time round, and James Mason continues to be wonderful. But the rôle hasn't aged well. Yes, alcoholism is a disease, and the man can't help it; he doesn't get any pleasure out of behaving badly, his pain is tangible. But, but, but. He hits down: he disrupts the charity show by a band who are less successful than he is, he insults the publicist assigned to him (and yes, eventually the man justifies his disklike, but which is chicken and which egg?); he finds it unbearable that his wife is more successful than he is (a success he has brought into being, but I do see that that doesn't help), that she is working and he isn't; he can't even make an eatable sandwich...
Of course, this is Vicki Lester's tragedy as much as it is Norman Main's. I may have been slow coming to this conclusion: I've resisted allowing awareness of Judy Garland's own story to colour my reaction to the fiction. And what really cristalises this may just be a question of my personal musical taste. But Esther Blodgett's high point as a creative artist, as far as I'm concerned, is that first scene I remembered, the one in which she and the band and relaxing after a performance, trying something new, and Esther - no, dammit, Judy Garland - sings The Man That Got Away. It's stunning, and I say that as someone who is not usually a fan of the torch song.
The process of becoming a star removes this intense, personal art, and substitutes the anodyne, pleasantly wistful It's a New World. It isn't enough for Esther Blodgett to be eclipsed by Vicki Lester, to become a star Vicki Lester must be remade as Mrs Norman Main. There is no way this is going to end well.
ETA:* Unless I am confusing this with a sequence in On the Town in which the characters go 'on the town', from night club to night club, and we catch the end of a succession of chorus acts, identical except for costume ...
