The 1954 A Star is Born is a Timeless, Transcendent Hollywood Tragedy — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

If a single narrative could lay claim to being not just a Hollywood story but rather THE Hollywood story it would be the timeless story of A Star Is Born. Even when this quintessential inside-show-biz tale is told badly, as it was in the 1976 version starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, it was still an enormous success, winning the Oscar for Best Song for “Evergreen” and finishing third in the year’s box office race.

Hollywood is so enraptured of this particular story that it cannot stop re-telling it. In addition to the 1937, 1954 and 1976 versions, Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga starred in a 2018 version of the oft-told tale. The casting of Lady Gaga is perfect in that she, like 1954 version’s Judy Garland and 1976’s Streisand, became an explosive force in pop culture by virtue of being hard-working, talented and having ferocious drive rather than being traditionally gorgeous.

By Hollywood and pop-star standards, Garland, Gaga and Streisand are downright weird-looking. They were each doomed to make it largely through endless toil and natural-born magnetism instead of being able to breeze to pop culture super-stardom on their conventional good looks.

Indeed, George Cukor’s epic 1954 musical remake of A Star Is Born showcases the hard work, dogged determination and sweat required to make plucky wannabe Esther Blodgett (Judy Garland) into movie star Vicki Lester to an exhaustive degree. Along with “The Man That Got Away,” a song that was nominated for, but did not win, an Oscar, one of the musical’s signature songs is “Born On A Trunk,” an epic story-song about the endless toil of the inveterate show-business lifer that Judy Garland does not sing or perform so much as she acts it, inhabiting every word, every emotion, every lyrical turn of phrase with her whole body and soul.

With her mouth closed, Garland was a runty tomboy, short and unassuming. But when Garland sang, she became as big and grand and heartbreakingly All-American as the Statue of Liberty. Cukor’s A Star Is Born has an hour on the 1930s version largely to give Garland as big a showcase as possible for her gift for not just singing, but living the words she sang.

There was undoubtedly an awful lot of Esther Blodgett/Vicki Lester in Garland but there was an awful lot of Norman Maine, the film’s equally iconic male lead, in Garland as well. Garland did not famously end a troubled life by wading into the ocean, never to return, as Maine does here, but symbolically speaking, her end wasn’t that dissimilar.

Norman (James Mason) doesn’t just end the film a tragic alcoholic unable to manage the train wreck his life and career have become: he more or less opens the film that way as well. From the beginning, Norman’s drinking causes problems. Maine is introduced as a sentient ball of trouble, pinballing madly around an event at the Shrine Auditorium in a state of inebriated disrepair.

The fading movie star is charming but he is not charming enough to mask the crumbling state of his psyche. Mason’s comfort zone was “profoundly troubled.” He was a wiz at playing complicated, tragic characters who looked the very image of handsome, aristocratic respectability from the outside but were clearly dying on the inside, if not from alcoholism then from soul-sickness.

Norman Maine joins such other unforgettable Mason villains as Lolita’s Humbert Humbert and Bigger Than Life’s Ed Avery as men who are damaged almost assuredly beyond the point of salvation yet lurch about unsuccessfully trying to save themselves all the same. Mason was uniquely gifted at playing outsized figures of ego and arrogance who are undone by their imperfections.

Mason made damage seductive, but only to a point. Even someone as relatively naive in the ways of love as Blodgett can see that Maine is troubled, less a knight in shining armor than someone she will have to save from himself. Initially Esther is willing to accept the awful compromises that come with being a rich, famous powerful alcoholic’s wife, specifically all the awfulness that comes with addiction.

A Star Is Born is bracingly realistic and unsentimental in its depiction of both addiction and the Hollywood star-making process. The film regards the corruption, cynicism and game-playing of Hollywood at the height of the Hollywood system not with the usual glib snark of show-business comedies but rather with a profound sense of sadness and resignation.

Cukor, working from a script by Moss Hart, shoots the action as a widescreen Technicolor extravaganza whose massive scope highlights how small and insubstantial the film’s players seem, particularly the female lead, within the context of Hollywood’s vastness. For all her presence and charisma, Vicki Lester is like an ant running through a maze, never knowing if something bigger is going to come along to crush her at any moment.

Along with Hollywood and alcoholism, A Star Is Born is also unexpectedly blunt and incisive when it comes to gender and class. Part of what makes this story so resonant and timeless is the way it comments unsparingly on the fragility and vulnerability of the male ego when challenged by female success. Mason is brilliant at articulating, as much through body language and the tone of his voice as through dialogue, how emasculating and soul-crushing it is for a man used to being worshiped to be reduced to taking his much more successful wife’s telephone messages and hoping against hope that someone will take pity on him and through some work an old ham’s way.

Mason was a great actor but he was also a great reactor. Mason’s performance is famous for the set-piece here where, in a haunting echo of the drunken buffoonery that opened the film, he boozily ruins yet another important moment for his wife at the film’s climax, but he’s even more powerful and heartbreaking in the scene where he overhears what his wife thinks of him and makes the decision to sabotage his life and career in the most final and conclusive possible way by killing himself.

Jack Carson costars as Matt Libby, a studio publicist who doesn’t just view Norman with the skepticism and suspicion the actor’s misbehavior warrants. No, Matt Libby despises Norman with a deeply personal intensity that, to its credit, the film suggest is fairly warranted. A Star Is Born does not go easy on Norman, even after he ends his own life. Stardom is toxic in A Star Is Born. The film attains an additional poignance from the knowledge that a fatal combination of stardom, mental illness and addiction would claim its dazzlingly talented female lead in real life, just as sure as surely as it brings down Norman Maine.

Garland’s own experiences with addiction undoubtedly inform and deepen her portrayal of a woman who loves a man she cannot understand, and must grapple with an addiction and a depression in her partner’s life so vast and all-encompassing that it threatens to destroy her life as well as the life of her soulmate.

In A Star Is Born, Hollywood is tragedy and Hollywood is triumph. Hollywood is true, impossible love and Hollywood is the purest form of heartbreak. The result is one of Hollywood’s most uncharacteristically honest looks at itself and also, not coincidentally, one of the saddest and most powerful as well. It’s a big, flashy, tearjerking melodrama with the harsh, bitter taste of truth.

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