In 1983 a friend and I attended the screening of the reconstructed version of the Judy Garland/James Mason A Star is Born, a movie made the year I was born. Not being a star myself, I understand that the title doesn’t refer to me, but at the same time the concidence provides me with a certain hum of resonance.
The 1983 restoration attempted to return the film to its original running length, after Jack Warner had excised about a half-hour’s worth of footage, including two musical numbers. Given that the entire soundtrack had survived, but not all the film, stills were necessary for some passages. As we were walking up the aisle after the showing, my friend asked me what I thought of the restoration. I’ll admit that occasionally I rather enjoy tempting fate, so right then and there, surrounded as I was by gushily ecstatic queens and/or Judyphiles, I stated firmly that not only did I think that adding the missing footage was unnecessary, but they would have done well to cut more out.
I made it out of the theater without getting slapped even once, by the way.
The new Blu-Ray edition of the reconstituted film was recently released so I snagged a copy. (Something about a fool and his money goes here, but in my own defense I’ll say that I put it back several times and then finally scooped it into my basket immediately before heading over to the checkout counter. I didn’t really want it so much as I didn’t want not to have it. Does that make sense? Or have I just revealed myself as a sick man suffering from a consumerist disorder?)
Maybe I didn’t really want it all that much, or at all, but at least in my own defense (I seem to be saying that a lot today) I duly loaded it into the player and watched it. Well, I watched the first half. Then I switched over to the accompanying documentary disc, which is laden with some very interesting goodies, including a sequence of unused versions of "The Man That Got Away" that reveal how long it took for George Cukor to arrive at the scene as it is in the movie proper. My private verdict: George, you went on revising too long. Some of the earlier versions were much better, especially since they left Judy Garland in an appropriately unflattering brown shirt instead of trying to gussy her up with a wholly misplaced Jean-Louis blue suit.
I never did make it back for the second half of the flick, and I don’t know if I ever will. I know how it ends: James Mason kills himself, so it’s not as though I’m sitting there in drooling suspense over my popcorn. I’m not sure if I have that much willpower, or that much tolerance for overblown Hollywood hagiographies, because it’s the star of the show that’s the whole problem with A Star is Born. Yes, I said the star, as in Judy Garland.
Before continuing, let us establish the clear understanding that I am immune to celebrity fixation, especially the signature queer type in which a gay man develops a weird, wild, and willful attraction to some lacquered female figure of the silver screen. I never had any truck with Norma Shearer, Jeanette MacDonald, Gloria Swanson, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Bette Midler, Liza Minnelli, or whomever and whatever. To me all actors are the same: their job is to impersonate other folks in front of an audience, with or without a mediating camera. That’s what they do, just as other folks might be bankers or clerks or dentists. Glamor, PR stuff, all that image-y stuff—it gets nowhere with me. For whatever reason, call it a blessing or call it a disorder, I don’t "get" celebrity in any emotional sense.
So Judy Garland exerts no hold over me beyond just evaluating her actual abilities as presented. Thus when I see her grandstanding A Star is Born, chewing the scenery left and right, hogging the camera like some spoiled-rotten Ritalin-soaked brat in Dad’s home movies, pudgy and sloppy, horribly made-up and even worse dressed, caterwauling her way through a galumphing mess of a disgusting potboiler, I come to the conclusion that Jack Warner knew his business far better than is usually credited. Warner took a big pair of shears to A Star is Born and excised as much of that gawdawful hambone as he could. I’ll bet D.W. Griffith was applauding from the grave.
But he should have cut more, as I said to my friend lo those many years ago. That entire "Born in a Trunk" sequence might be porn for Judyphiles, but it’s like dropping a lead weight into the middle of an already sinking ship. I know we’re barely staggering to the halfway point, folks, but now let’s stop everything so OUR STAR can entertain you with an interminably long song-and-dance number. SNIP.
Away with the "Somewhere there’s a Someone" song—way, way too long and completely unnecessary except, of course, as here’s OUR STAR showing you how cute and comic she can be! SNIP.
Away with her honeymoon song, sung to the radio in the seaside motel room—here’s OUR STAR having a moment of heartfelt lyric emotion, don’t you just want to cry? SNIP.
The Lose that Long Face number restored to the 1983 version? Pointless, invasive, poorly choreographed, and possibly deserving an NAACP picket line. SNIP.
And so on and so forth. SNIP. When you get right down to it, A Star is Born is a grade-B melodrama that had been a perfectly decent little weepie back in the 1930s with Janet Gaynor and Frederic March. It needed remaking about as much as Jane Russell needed a boob job. It boasts a musical score by two of the greatest of them all—Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin, fer krissake—but it really isn’t a musical. The songs are awkwardly basted into a plot that doesn’t need them, and the movie would be a lot better off without them.
And once you allow that the movie didn’t need its songs, then you must conclude that it didn’t need Judy Garland, either. She was all of 32 years old but looked ten years older, considered a has-been making her Big Comeback after having left MGM only a few years previously. Perhaps had she returned to movies with the surprisingly restrained supporting-role performance she gave in Judgment at Nuremburg, she might have actually resuscitated her film career. As it was, though, Star is Born played iceberg to her Titanic. The Hollywood illuminati might have gushed over her one-woman show, but audiences (and more importantly, studio execs) saw through her histrionics and vocal bombast. Imagine a smaller-scale Star is Born remake with Grace Kelly playing the ingenue on the way up with James Mason on the way down; it would have been way, way better. But in that case, what was wrong with Janet Gaynor and Frederic March? Heck, the original version was even in color.
So when you get right down to it, I would recommend that Jack Warner continue cutting A Star as Born much in the same way as the Marx Brothers cut up their contract in A Night at the Opera—sanity clause and all.
A Star is Born: Jack Warner’s only offense was to stop cutting