The 1954 version of A Star is Born should never have turned out as well as it did. It was a remake of a remake (with two more to come); it was director George Cukor’s first musical and Technicolor film in his already-extensive career; and it was the first CinemaScope film ever shot by Warner Brothers (a few shots are a little more distorted than ideal). It was a notoriously expensive and troubled shoot marked by Judy Garland’s increasingly severe emotional issues, and she hadn’t appeared in a film in four years after the ignominious end to her MGM contract. It inserted an extended musical showcase for Garland, “Born in a Trunk,” after Cukor had already departed the production, then was hacked down by about half an hour to allow for more showtimes, with most of that footage never being properly recovered. (The restored cut has to use production stills for the thankfully still-extant soundtrack.) It made only $6 million after $5 million was spent despite receiving critical acclaim, its six Oscar nominations didn’t include Best Picture, and it lost all of them — most infamously, Garland was bested by Grace Kelly struggling with a surprisingly similar part in The Country Girl, in a decision called “the biggest robbery since Brink’s” by Groucho Marx. And yet, it somehow still stands as perhaps the peak of the Hollywood studio-era musicals, which makes it a serious contender for the greatest of them all. (Two of the other serious contenders also star Judy Garland. You can’t argue with that voice.)
Most readers probably know the broad strokes of this particular story; in this case, fairly close to the 1937 William Wellman version and rendered bigger. (Cukor himself had directed What Price Hollywood?, the 1932 film that had inspired the Wellman.) Esther Blodgett (Garland) aspires to be a Hollywood star, and her talent and beauty attracts the rapidly fading alcoholic has-been Norman Maine (James Mason) during a chance meeting, who successfully pushes her to the front of the pack. She ascends (and becomes Vicki Lester) while he descends, and even if they’re married and very much in love with one another, it’s not enough to stop his downward spiral. He kills himself so that her career can stay at the top: that’s showbiz.
Cukor was one of those directorial talents who seemed to do it all effortlessly, particularly when it came to women. He’d already played an enormous part in the Garland mythos via a creative advisor role on the first of her undeniable classics, The Wizard of Oz: he played a critical part in how we remember Dorothy Gale as looking like Garland with simple braids, rather than a blonde doll with heavy makeup. Under his assured hands, A Star is Born managed to be a devastatingly intimate marital drama, a testament to the highs and lows of the Hollywood machine and what it produces, and a meta text about what it takes to make a Judy Garland movie — it’s frequently exhausting in the sheer amount of detail and emotional wear we accumulate, but it’s always sumptuous thanks to the sheer enormity of the frame and the vivid colors that seem to bloom during moments of neurosis. It’s Hollywood-about-Hollywood at its most mythological and self-mythologizing, a full-bodied reckoning with how artistic expression isn’t a neat little thing, and it has Cukor shepherding some of the most talented craftspeople of the era with the perfect taste to showcase its two leads and the needs of their sprawling story. He also didn’t neglect the details — there’s a great little background joke involving one of Esther’s pre-fame radio jingles. He was, in some ways, one of the best arguments for the studio system, and perhaps that’s why he was able to commit so fully to showing its highs and lows.
How about those two leads, then? If Mason had Garland’s voice it’d probably be a draw as to which performance we remember more. Both of them have a terrifying intensity to their low points, but he was faking it exceptionally well and she partially wasn’t. Where Garland gets to be brightly lit in expressive colors to highlight her, Norman is frequently surrounded by shadows that make it clear he’s going to be swallowed up. If Garland’s big scenes tend to be defined by her getting to luxuriate in her musical numbers, Mason’s are all about his impositions — the initial meet-cute when he nearly screws up her number, the summoning of a whole production she manages to throw in their living room to lull him out of his troubled mood, and the nadir: when he ruins her Academy Award speech by accidentally smacking her.
Still, even with the framing in the initial shock of that scene being all about Mason at his most raggedly embarrassing, you can still see Garland’s total commitment in the back of the shot, and anyone who’s heard her sing probably has a rough idea of what her total commitment could be. Esther/Vicki is a virtuoso who learns that it’s not enough to prevent the world from picking on someone who’s down and out, and Garland had both too much familiarity with that fact, and the technical ability to express it seemingly without effort. Her number that features the least amount of direct involvement with Norman watching her perform is the appropriately entitled “Lose That Long Face,” featuring her desperately trying to do just that to put on a proper show. This all makes her entire performance sound excessively grim, but she gets great laughs from giant sandwiches and peanut jingles, along with dry-humored “I wish I weren’t here right now, but I’m still a trouper” expressions during the lighter portions of the “Born in a Trunk” medley. Her famous “The Man That Got Away“ is the ultimate Garland torch song, but she’s taking too much pleasure in her delivery to make it a wallow.
A Star is Born is ultimately all about the final two moments of the respective acts that an intermission divides, and they’re both about the potency of having Garland justifying her titular star status in the center of the frame. The final moment before intermission finds her concluding the ”Born in a Trunk” medley, a surprisingly sustained 20 minutes despite Cukor not overseeing it, with a belt for the ages. (It has inspired spontaneous applause both times this writer has seen it in a theater — not bad for delivering it on the mundane-seeming line “Pocatello, Idaho.”) Still, in a film that is an audiovisual banquet of color, music, dancing, chiaroscuro, and dissolves, the sight Cukor leaves us with is relatively stripped back. Esther Blodgett/Vicki Lester finally chooses her own name at the stage where she first met the love of her life, and quietly soaks in the applause as Mrs. Norman Maine. It’s a moment that wouldn’t have worked with any other star: leaving us uncertain as to whether this woman’s triple performance will pay her lifelong tribute to the man that got away via working to keep her star persona at the top, or by redefining herself in his shadow.
