A Star is Born

THE STAR THAT WITHERED AWAY

The restoration of George Cukor’s A Star is Born is a sad example of what happens when movie executives and exhibitors made cuts and dumped footage without any respect for the artists who made the picture. Almost immediately after opening with the 196 minute version, and in spite of very good reviews, theatre owners called for it to be shortened and Warner Bros initially agreed to a version running 181 minutes but they wanted more cuts, so then came the 154 minute mess and eventually there’d be the 100 minute infamy. At every stage of the dwindling process the box office receipts likewise tumbled. Roughly 20 minutes remain lost. The sepia-toned replacement stills used in the first 176 minute refurb are pitiful—they disrupt viewers’s continuity and not any better served in the second and highly praised 2010 renovation, which somehow redeems the overblown 50s set designs. What matters is not the missing footage or lousy subs; what matters is Judy Garland survives in wonderful voice. The rendition of the Arlen-Gershwin “The Man That Got Away” is her most poignant and deserving signature before she succumbed to the sobs of “Over the Rainbow” cultists. She does well with the other numbers, too, even if they make you cower. As for her “performance” in between the songs, that is another matter. Other than her singing, The Wizard of Oz and the energetic funfests with Mickey Rooney, can anyone make sense of Garland without the personal troubles? Is there any other singing movie star who withers away in front of us in quite the way she does? Was there some deep-rooted need for self-punishment to explain, before onset of overt generational divides, why we made her a huge movie star when she’s its antithesis? There are some moments in Garland’s pictures during which we don’t dare not say “She’s what movies are all about”—one of them of course “The Man That Got Away” as the right torch for the right singer who could do it rightful justice at the time; being responsively real to the material she manages to get us to forgive Tommy Noonan’s god damn gum-chewing and not make us wonder if she popped a few bennies. Then-husband Sid Luft denied the hope when admitting in his book Judy and I that he enabled by monitoring intake after pleading to him she “couldn’t sustain a work mode in front of the cameras without taking some kind of medication” and mantra-obsessing “I can’t be fat.” Watching James Mason walk into the ocean, we’re quite sympathetic to why he got away: a few hours of Garland “acting” should have us all jumping into the deep end.

If not as insufferable as butch-throated June Allyson, Garland’s as sexless, a kind of neutered Raggedy Ann. I don’t mean this maliciously; I like her—for awhile—and then wait for the inevitable reminder she’s one of the least romantic and least bedroom-bound of movie topliners; she seems alien to amatory reception because she’s a nervous wreck waiting to be used. She’s such an attraction of icky pathos that intended escapism gets reversed—especially pronounced in The Harvey Girls—and all one can think about is what in the world can any man who isn’t a masochist see in her? On screen she isn’t arousing, or sensuous, she isn’t even pretty, and in her crumbling frailness one good hump would split her in two. Did audiences back in 1945 laugh as hard as we do now at the inanity of John Hodiak having it for her sickly anxious waif over Angela Lansbury’s super Technicolor ripeness? (In an interview, Angela hints at getting heated by his presence.) Emergency volte-face at first, Garland’s fluctuating physical state and drug-addled terrors became defacto salvaging of the concerts: her frequent deviation from the joys of warbling to “11th Hour” sessions intoxicated worshipers by the excitation of not knowing what would happen next. They were paying to see her fall apart.

And why I maintain she was better and presumably at her safest when all she had to do was face the camera and sing, as she did for The Judy Garland Show (1963-64, available on DVD) after the less-appealing comedy formats were discarded for a “Judy in Concert” mode for the last seven broadcasts. She didn’t have to worry much about an audience; needed only to remember the lyrics; had great guests who fronted love for her. (Beaming a toothy smile for the camera, Lena Horne fumed backstage over Garland’s lack of professionalism.) Probably at her peak of autumnal vocal powers, having reduced the moviebiz style of singing, she brought her own feelings to the material; appearing to subdue dependencies, she delivered. But a TV year is longer than anyone thought she could make it through, as the show was canceled in January, ostensibly due to mediocre ratings, though taping would continue into March, one month after musical director Mel Tormé was fired. Gardland’s transgressions, including her new fix labeled Blue Nun, became at least half the text in his 1971 The Other Side of the Rainbow, published two years after she died at 47 and prompting her family to wage an unsuccessful law suit to soothe the tragedy of Mama not returning from the valley of dolls, presaged in 1967 when accepting in a not-far-from-death condition the part of an Ethel Merman-type opposite Neely O’Hara, a ripoff of herself.

Irritated and flummoxed by his own mistakes helping to squash box office for A Star is Born, Jack Warner spent next to nothing on Oscar advertizing, not even an apology in the trades, thereby decreasing Garland’s chances to win one, already lowered by repeated bad publicity about the movie’s multiple cuts and by Academy voters, rather charitable most of the time, not forgetting she had been fired from 3 movies previously, attempted suicide maybe 3 times and maybe suspicious she might be to blame for the 1954 debacle instead of who actually was. Being allergic to her relapses, many voters avoided a screening. While the musical received six nominations thanks to in-studio voting policy, the one shoo-in—best song—lost to the insipid “Three Coins in the Fountain.” I’d call that the ultimate insult. Very briefly a roadshow. In CinemaScope.

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ralphbenner@nowreviewing.com