A Star Is Born (Transcona Enterprises, Warner Bros., 1954)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago at 8 p.m. I ran a DVD of the 1954 film A Star Is Born, either the second or the third version of the story (depending on whether you count the prototype version from 1932, What Price Hollywood?, produced by David O. Selznick during his brief tenure as studio head at RKO, starring Constance Bennett, Lowell Sherman and Neil Hamilton, and directed by George Cukor, who also helmed the 1954 version). The imdb.com Web site actually lists seven films called A Star Is Born: the original 1937 version with Janet Gaynor and Fredric March; the 1954 version with Judy Garland and James Mason; a 1973 Spanish version directed by Armando de Guzmán; the 1976 reworking with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson (and directed by a no-name, Frank Pierson, instead of someone at the stature of Cukor or William Wellman, who directed the 1937 version); a 2010 documentary about a rock band called The Decemberists, directed and written by Vanja Kovacecic; the 2018 version with Lady Gaga, directed, co-written by and co-starring Bradley Cooper; and the most recent one, a 2021 four-part TV mini-series directed by Asbjørn Røel Halston and billed as a comedy.

Judy Garland’s involvement with A Star Is Born began well over a decade before she made this film, dating back to December 1942, when the Lus Radio Theatre program offered her the part of Vicki Lester, nèe Esther Blodgett, in a radio adaptation of the 1937 film with Walter Pidgeon as Norman Maine, né Ernest Gubbins. It was at a time when Judy was pleading with MGM boss Louis B. Mayer for non-musical dramatic acting roles – she had seen Ginger Rogers win an Academy Award for the 1940 film Kitty Foyle, a non-musical, just a year after her last RKO film with Fred Astaire, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, and wanted to make the same career transition. Mayer kept turning her down, so when she was offered the chance to play Vicki Lester on radio she jumped at it. The December 1942 A Star Is Born is a mixed bag – Pidgeon was just too stolid and self-controlled to be credible as a self-destructive star dooming himself to an early grave through alcohol, and whoever directed and wrote the show had the actors speak unusually fast to try to cram as much of the movie as they could into a one-hour time slot – but Judy’s performance was brilliant. She went back to Mayer pleading with him to buy her the remake rights to A Star Is Born, but Mayer turned her down, telling Judy, “Your public wouldn’t want to see you as the wife of an alcoholic.”

Meanwhule Selznick had liquidated the Selznick International studio, so others owned the film rights to remake A Star Is Born, but Selznick still owned the original negative and he worked out an elaborate deal with Warner Bros., who had bought the remake rights to Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms from Paramount. Selznick had tried to get the assignment to produce A Farewell to Arms at Paramount in 1932 but had been turned down on the ground that he was too young and inexperienced, and later Warners bought the story and used it as the basis for a 1950 war drama called Force of Arms, starring William Holden. By offering Warner Bros. a substantial payment as well as giving them the original negative of A Star Is Born, Selznick acquired the remake rights to A Farewell to Arms, which he filmed in 1957 as a co-production with 20th Century-Fox that turned out to be a disaster both artistically and commercially. Meanwhile Judy Garland had been released from MGM and had divorced her second husband, director Vicente Minnelli. She had remarried producer Michael Sidney Luft and he set up a production company called Transcona Enterprises to make films with her for Warner Bros. distribution, though the only two films Transcona ever actually made were A Star Is Born and a Randolph Scott Western called The Bounty Hunter, directed by André de Toth.

Judy and Luft scored some impressive talents to work on their version of A Star Is Born, including George Cukor as director, Harold Arlen as composer, Ira Gershwin as lyricist (people who knew Ira during this period recalled that he was making so much money off the songs he had written with his late brother George Gershwin that it was difficult to get him to work since he didn’t need to) and Moss Hart as screenwriter. The 1937 version was co-written by Dorothy Parker with her then-husband, Alan Campbell, and Robert Carson, and there are some brilliant Parker witticisms in that script, like the “Good for Amusement Only” token Norman Maine (Fredric March in 1937, Jame4s Mason in 1954) hands out to explain who and what he is, and the savage put-down by studio publicity man Libby (Lionel Stander in 1937, Jack Carson in 1954) after Norman has committed suiicide by drowning himself at the beach under his palatial home, “How do you wire congratulations to the Pacific Ocean?” Hart saw part of his mission as sentimentalizing the story, which he did largely by taking out Parker’s acid lines, though there are still bits of the old flair in his script, like the final confrontation between Norman and Libby at the racetrack which precipitates Norman’s final fall off the wagon. Norman comes on to Libby as if they were friends, and Libby tells Norman flat-out that he never liked Norman and only covered for him and his excesses because the studio paid him to. What struck me this time around was the sheer authority of Judy’s performance – even though it’s obvious she was on speed through much of the film (it’s ironic that the two stars’ real-life relationship to substance abuse was precisely the opposite of the one depicted in the film). Judy was a strong enough actress that she was able to use that to create her character; whereas Janet Gaynor in the 1937 version seemed all too innocent and easily swallowed up by Fredric March’s problems, Judy is at once tough, nervous, defensive, fiercely independent and at the same time believable as a woman willing to sacrifice her own career for her scapegrace man.

When I first saw A Star Is Born in the late 1960’s, squished from its original CinemaScope dimensions to the 4:3 ratio of an old TV and in black-and-white instead of Technicolor – I loved Judy Garland but thought James Mason was too weak, too decadent to be believable. It wasn’t until I finally saw the restored 1983 version of the film, in which a crew led by Ronald Haver scoured Hollywood for the missing scenes that had been deleted on Jack Warner’s insistence to shorten the running time from 180 to 135 minutes, that I realized that Mason had fully acted the part and it was Jack Warner’s cuts that had eviscerated his role and made his performance seem too one-dimensional. One irony of A Star Is Born is that Humphrey Bogart desperately wanted the part of Norman Maine – he and Lauren Bacall were good friends of Judy Garland and Sid Luft, and he pleaded with them for the role – but obviously Luft wanted a more suave, more conventionally attractive and romantic leading man. Their first choice was Cary Grant, who turned it down either because he was overscheduled or he didn’t think he had the acting chops for the role. Mason was their second choice, and as I said above he delivered the goods brilliantly in the restored version of the film.

Incidentally there’s an ongoing controversy over which real-life Hollywood actor the character of Norman Maine was based on: the initial consensus was John Gilbert but I’ve long thought the real basis for the character was John Barrymore – especially since in 1930, seven years before playing Norman Maine, Fredric March had played another character based on John Barrymore in a film of George S. Kaufman’s and Edna Ferber’s comedy The Royal Family (renamed The Royal Family of Broadway, no doubt out of fear that potential audiences might think it was about actual royals). This time around it seems as if Mason was at least partly patterning his performance on Errol Flynn, another Hollywood bad boy whose early death was triggered largely by alcohol and drugs. In its restored version, the 1954 A Star Is Born emerges as a masterpiece (which the truncated film was not; George Cukor was so traumatized by Jack Warner’s cuts he refused to attend a career retrospective at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado because they were going to show it, so they substituted another film of his, The Women, instead), with excellent performances all around and inspired direction by Cukor, who along with cinematographer Sam Leavitt ignored the idiotic directive from 20th Century-Fox, which owned the rights to the CinemaScope process that because of the sheer size of the screen, close-ups were no longer necessary. Judy Garland’s performance is incendiary, and it remains inexplicable that she was denied the Academy Award she so richly deserved for it. This was one time the much-abused Golden Globes got it right and the Oscars got it wrong! Instead the Academy Award for Best Actress went to Grace Kelly for The Country Girl, which when my husband Charles and I finally got t o see it was strikingly similar in its plot line to A Star Is Born: an innocent young woman gets mixed up in the life of an alcoholic entertainer whose drinking has put his career on the skids. The only difference was that Kelly’s character was not a performer herself.