A Star Is Born

Esther Blodgett wants to be in pictures, and the film’s first job is to explain why a sensible person would want that. William A. Wellman’s A Star Is Born has been remade three times, most famously in 1954 with Judy Garland, and its shape is now so familiar that it is easy to forget somebody had to build it. This is the original, and it is good, with two lead performances that still hold and a harder eye on the studio system than its remakes managed. We would give it an evening without hesitation.

It begins a long way from Hollywood, on a farm in North Dakota, where Esther (Janet Gaynor) reads the fan magazines and her family tells her to grow up. The first twenty minutes are the softest in the film, and we fidgeted through the family supper. Then May Robson’s Grandmother Lettie takes Esther aside, hands over money she has been keeping back, and tells her that every Blodgett who ever amounted to anything got up and went. Robson plays it without a tremor, and we stopped fidgeting. From there the film moves fast: the bus, a boarding house, a casting office where a woman behind a desk explains the odds and means it.

The centre of the film is Fredric March’s Norman Maine, the star Esther marries and then outgrows. March plays a drunk as a man who is funny and knows it, who can switch on the charm the moment he sees a camera and cannot switch it off afterwards. The scene that won us comes at a party, where Esther is serving canapés and Norman, three sheets to the wind, decides to be gallant. We liked him and we dreaded him at once, because March lets us see that Norman has done this before and that it has never ended well. Gaynor’s Esther is quieter, sometimes too quiet, but she has one gift, which is that she never seems to be watching herself. When Norman tells her she has something, we believe him because she plainly has no idea what he means.

W. Howard Greene shoots it in Technicolor, and the surprise is how little he shows off. Most colour films of the period were costume pictures; this one is set in the present, and Greene keeps to daylight, tan stucco, dark suits and the odd red dress. Lansing C. Holden’s studio lot is all plywood and bustle, and Omar Kiam’s costumes for Esther chart her rise better than the dialogue does: a cotton print on the farm, a maid’s black and white at the party, and then the gowns, each a little more expensive and a little less hers. Max Steiner’s score does more work than it needs to in the early scenes and then, sensibly, gets out of the way.

The screenplay is credited to Dorothy Parker, Alan Campbell and Robert Carson, from a story by Wellman and Carson, with Ben Hecht and producer David O. Selznick also among the writers, and you can hear the different hands. The farm is one writer; the studio is another. The studio scenes are the better ones. Adolphe Menjou’s Oliver Niles runs the place as a decent man who has made his peace with being ruthless, and Lionel Stander’s press agent Matt Libby is the film’s sharpest creation, a man who has spent years covering for Norman and hates him for every hour of it. Stander gets the best lines and delivers them as if he resents having to.

It is not perfect. The middle stretch, in which Esther becomes Vicki Lester and the montages take over, is cut by James E. Newcom with more efficiency than feeling, and a marriage that ought to take time to sour does so in about four minutes of screen time. Andy Devine’s Danny McGuire, the assistant director who befriends Esther early on, is given less to do than his first scenes promise. And the second half goes somewhere we will not describe, except to say that Wellman does not flinch from it.

It runs 111 minutes and did not reach British cinemas until 17 December 1939. Watch it before the 1954 version if you can. Garland’s is the bigger film; this is the one made by people who had worked in the town and kept notes.