A Star is Born

ICKY VICKI WITHERING 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. Soon after opening with the 196 minute version, and in spite of very good if not suspiciously supportive 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 job and eventually there’d be the 100 minute infamy. At every stage of the dwindling process the box office receipts dipped. Today, 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. What really matters isn’t the missing footage or lousy subs, it’s Judy Garland as a timorous, anxious mess throughout, as viewers not a part of her fanatic fan base recognize the reality she’s in need of as much help as James Mason’s fictional Norman. Pulling for her to cross the finish line, there’s a lot of stickiness between some good musical numbers—she’s thick with the icky playing Vicki. We’re lucky the rendition of the Arlen-Gershwin “The Man That Got Away” comes early, as she’s at her most poignant (and delivers her better signature before she’d succumb to the sobs of “Over the Rainbow” cultists in concerts). She does well with the other songs, too, even if they make us cower. But an actor she isn’t: excepting The Wizard of Oz and the energetic funfests with Mickey Rooney, and her comedic and possibly spontaneous “When I Look at You” in Lily Mars, can anyone make sense of Garland without the attachment of personal troubles? Is there any other singing movie star who withers away in front of us in quite the way she does? Was there back then some deep-rooted compunction requiring self-punishment for making her a huge movie star when she’s the antithesis? There are some moments in Garland’s pictures during which she transcends her limitations—one of them of course “The Man That Got Away” as the right torch for the right singer who could do it rightful justice; being responsively real to the material she manages to not only get us to forgive Tommy Noonan’s god damn gum-chewing but also to feel comfortable she didn’t pop a few bennies. Then-husband Sid Luft would deny the hope when admitting in his book Judy and I that he was enabler 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/or cry out the mantra obsessive “I can’t be fat.” Watching 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 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 labored 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 might 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 waif over Angela Lansbury’s super Technicolor ripeness? (In an interview available on YouTube, Angela hints at getting heated by his presence.) Didn’t viewers note there’s not a moment of believable romantic feelings between Fred Astaire and Garland in Easter Parade? She’s not a love object, she’s his sister, and when “re-acting” in scenes with busybody, always-on Ann Miller, she’s pouty-faced. Eventually her fluctuating physical state and drug-addled terrors became defacto salvaging of the concerts: the 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 lining up 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 scrapped for a “Judy in Concert” mode for the last seven broadcasts. She didn’t have to worry much about an audience, needing only to remember the lyrics, having great guests who fronted love for her. (Though beaming a toothy smile for the camera, Lena Horne fumed over Garland’s backstage lack of professionalism.) Probably at her peak of autumnal vocal powers, reducing the moviebiz style of singing, she merged with the music and lyrics, appearing to subdue dependencies. But a TV year is longer than anyone thought she could make it through, as the show was canceled in January, 1964, ostensibly due to mediocre ratings, though taping for the remaining season would continue into March, one month after musical director Mel Tormé was fired. Her transgressions, aided by the new fix Blue Nun, became roughly 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 Garland’s image.

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 advertising, not even an apology in the trades, thereby decreasing Garland’s chances to win, 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, attempting suicide maybe 3 times and perhaps believing she might be to blame for the 1954 debacle instead of those who actually were. Allergic to her relapses, many voters avoided a screening. While the musical drama 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