A Star Is Born

The only Oscar William Wellman won was for co-authoring the Original Story for 1937's A Star Is Born, the oft-remade show-biz fable that today, some seventy years later, seems like it could have never been original. But somebody had to dream up the plot that sees a young girl from the sticks become a star, while the man she loves slides into oblivion.

Janet Gaynor plays Esther Blodgett, a star-struck girl from North Dakota. She heads to Hollywood and finds that girls like her are a dime a dozen. She befriends a fellow trying to make it as a director (Andy Devine), and the two live in a boarding house and eke out an existence.

Devine gets Gaynor a job as a waitress at a big Hollywood party, and it's there she meets Norman Maine (Fredric March), a major star who is now a hopeless drunk. He takes a shine to her, and gets her a screen test. This leads to co-starring in his latest picture, but when it's screened, everyone loves her, not him. Eventually she wins an Oscar, and he interrupts her speech with a drunken tirade. She sticks with him, though, and he overhears her say she is going to quit the movies to take care of him. Not wanting to stand in her way, he walks into the ocean so she can have her dream.

I found it hard to enjoy this film for a number of reasons. Primarily it's a very dated concept. Some of it is enjoyably nostalgic, recalling the era of movie magazines and the most glamorous era in Hollywood (Gaynor does some nice impressions of Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn and Mae West), but most of it is strictly corny. Secondly, the two lead characters are very sketchy. Gaynor is a paragon of virtue, infinitely patient with March and seemingly without a flaw. March gives a canny performance, but we're left wanting more. What turned him into a drunk? The script tells us he's slipping, but we don't know why. And this film would rankle feminists. Gaynor only becomes a star because March wants to get in her pants, and the film's famous last line, "This is Mrs. Norman Maine," is not exactly a manifesto for a woman's individuality.

A final note: this film is in dire need of restoration. It was shot in Technicolor, and surely must have looked glorious at one point (especially the scene in which March wades into the surf as the sun sets). But the print used for the DVD I viewed is so dark in places to be almost incomprehensible.