Born Yesterday (Columbia, 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday (Saturday, January 11) I did a three-film marathon from Turner Classic Movies consisting of the Judy Holliday vehicles Born Yesterday (1950) and The Solid Gold Cadillac (1956) and an oddball choice of Eddie Muller’s for his “Noir Alley” presentation, Deadline at Dawn (1946). I’d only seen Born Yesterday once before, on a videotape I recorded from a previous TCM showing, which I showed to my husband Charles back when he still lived in his mother’s old place in City Heights. It was Judy Holliday’s star-making vehicle, first on stage in 1946 and then on film four years later, but it dates rather badly. It was originally written by playwright Garson Kanin as a vehicle for, of all people, Jean Arthur, but she had some killer bouts of stage fright during the out-of-town tryouts and finally walked out of the show. Kanin looked around for a replacement and landed Judy Holliday, whom he remembered from her days as partner with Betty Comden, Adolph Green and two other people in a comedy troupe called The Revuers which had had a modest success in Greenwich Village nightclubs. When Kanin placed the play with his agent, he stipulated that the agent could sell the movie rights to any studio but Columbla – which of course made Columbia’s tyrannical studio chief, Harry Cohn, all the more determined to get them. One reason Kanin didn’t want the play filmed at Columbia was he had supposedly based the male lead, tyrannical Harry Brock, on Cohn and even given him the same first name. When Cohn finally wore down Kanin’s resistance it was with a special deal offer that would have allowed Kanin not only to write the script but direct the film, but Kanin insisted on final-cut privilege and Cohn angrily turned him down with the words, “I thought you were different, but at heart you’re just a writer!” (Remember Raymond Chandler’s acid comment at the end of his essay “Writers in Hollywood” in which he said, “The highest compliment Hollywood can pay to a writer is to tell him he’s too good to be just a writer.”)

The basic plot deals with junkyard kingpin Harry Brock (played by Paul Douglas on stage and, at Cohn’s insistence, by Broderick Crawford in the film), who, for tax reasons, has signed over many of his properties to his typical blonde-bimbo mistress, Billie Dawn (Judy Holliday). Brock is on a lobbying trip to Washington, D.C. to work with corrupt Congressmember Norval Hedges (Larry Oliver) on a bill that will earmark most of America’s scrap metal to his enterprise and thereby make him tons of money beyond what he already has. But he’s worried that Billie Dawn will embarrass him in front of Washington’s power elite, including Congressmember Hedges and his wife Anna (played by Barbara Brown as a Margaret Dumont type). So he hires Paul Verrall (William Holden), a Washington-based reporter whom he’d first met when Verrall showed up at his magnificent digs (Brock has booked three suites in his hotel, all connected with each other, one for himself, one for Billie and one for receiving guests) to interview him. Brock demands to know immediately whether Verrall’s story about him will be positive or negative, and when Verrall says, “I’m just interested in the facts,” Brock says, “Oh, a pan, eh?” Verrall’s job will be to educate Billie and make her presentable to Washington society, but he does his job too well: he takes her to the big Washington monuments, gives her stacks of books to read – mostly on government and civics – and educates her about the principles of democracy in terms that sound hopelessly naïve in 2025 when a man very much like Harry Brock has been elected President twice and the American people – a plurality of its voters, anyway – seem O.K. with a leader who shares Brock’s belief that government is a commodity to be bought and sold like anything else. It’s impossible (at least for me) to watch Born Yesterday in 2025 and not notice the similarities between Harry Brock and Donald Trump. I couldn’t help thinking that if Brock is so worried about the potential legal consequences of his actions, all he’d need to do is run for President and, if he won, all the charges against him would vanish as if by magic. (And at least Brock could have honestly run for President as a self-made man, which he is and Trump isn’t.)

Rejecting Kanin’s demand for final-cut authority, Cohn hired the great George Cukor to direct and originally wanted Rita Hayworth to star as Billie Dawn, but Hayworth had just married Aly Khan and announced her retirement from films. (In 1952 she and Aly Khan would break up and Hayworth would return to Columbia, tail between her legs, to make a quickly-assembled film gris called Affair in Trinidad.) Seen today, aside from the Brock/Trump parallel, Born Yesterday is an O.K. movie but really not much to write home about. Judy Holliday’s performance as Billie Dawn is good but too strident – even after she’s supposedly been educated she still speaks in a proletarian New York screech – and it seems strange that she would have won the Academy Award for Best Actress over two far worthier competitors: Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard and Bette Davis in All About Eve. Holliday is also obliged as part of her characterization to sing Jimmy McHugh’s “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” deliberately badly, when anyone who’s heard her little-known Columbia album Trouble Is a Man knows the real Judy Holliday could sing quite well. Broderick Crawford also plays his part as if it were one continuous scream; when he pleads with Billie at the end to go through with their long-planned marriage and she says no, a subtler actor might have made us feel a bit sorry for him at long last as well as leaving us feeling he’d had his long-deserved comeuppance. And William Holden comes off as such a nonentity he barely seems to be there – a far cry from the subtle, nuanced performance he gave the same year as Gloria Swanson’s kept screenwriting partner and boyfriend in Sunset Boulevard. Nothing much happens at the end of Born Yesterday except that Billie and Verrall get together (we’re not sure why, since their interest in each other seems to have been kindled by mere proximity) and Brock goes on to heaven knows what. (There’s a plot gimmick that Verrall has stolen papers from Brock that proves he’s a crook, but in the Trump era we hardly think that any mere newspaper story can do in this thoroughly corrupt man.) One thing that amused me about both Born Yesterday and The Solid Gold Cadillac is that the film editor on each was my husband’s namesake, Charles Nelson, and both of us used to go into near-hysterics when we’d see his name on a list of credits.