WORLD TOUR Day 9 - Hollywood, CA
BEFORE: I watched the 1970's re-remake of this film back in January of 2010, now it's time for the 1st remake, which ran this past February as part of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" line-up, on Hollywood day. Thanks for the assist, TCM! And thanks to the Oracle of Bacon for pointing out that Veronica Lake from "Sullivan's Travels" was also in a film called "Young As You Feel" with Jack Carson, who plays a movie studio executive in tonight's film.
THE PLOT: A movie star helps a young singer/actress find fame, even as age and alcoholism send his own career into a downward spiral.
AFTER: It's a classic story, but also a recurring one - so tonight I'm judging on style points. It's easy to nail the preliminaries on something like this (one person's stardom rises as the other's falls) so it's up to the judge to look at all the little flourishes that make the difference.
Unfortunately, that's where I start to run into problems with this film. There's a 10-minute sequence where the story is told via still photos - shortly after the two leads get together for the second time and start seeing each other socially. 2nd problem - the IMDB listed the running time as 2 hours and 34 minutes, but the version I had was just shy of three hours long! No movie should be that long, unless it's "Titanic" or "Lord of the Rings", or attempts to tell the entire story of the Civil War.
Ah, both problems are explained by the fact that TCM ran the "restored" version. The original 1954 release was shortened by Warner Bros. so that theaters could show it more times each day, and thus make more money. (How ironic that the film depicts how cold and unfeeling movie studio executives can be...). The removed footage was apparently not handled properly and is now lost to the ages, forcing the restored version to rely on production stills to bridge the resulting story gaps. Someone meant well, but in my opinion, if you don't have the footage, you don't have the footage, and maybe you should re-think this whole restoring thing since you don't...have...the...footage. Two wrongs don't make a right. As a result we've now got this monument to stupidity that's full of jump-cuts, and it looks like someone didn't even know that movies are supposed to, you know, MOVE.
There's more self-reflexiveness (or meta-ness) tonight as singer/dancer Judy Garland plays Esther (later Vicki Lester) who's an aspiring singer/dancer, and we get to see her attend the premiere screening of a film in which she plays, you guessed it, a singer/dancer explaining her career via a musical number. Wow, that's some "Inception"-level reality nesting, when you think about it. Imagine if we could go FOUR levels deep, with Judy Garland starring as Esther/Vicki, and in the film universe Esther/Vicki appears in a version of "A Star Is Born", playing another singer/dancer who stars in a film as a singer/dancer. Whoa...take the blue pill, Judy. Wait, bad idea.
To me, this was a sneaky way of getting Garland's trademark musical numbers into a film. And they tend to run LONG - "Born in a Trunk" alone is 15 full minutes. Since her character was always singing to playback (people think the technology was created for music videos in the 1980's, but come on, it's been around) the synch never had to be perfect. Any mistakes were easily covered up by this simple reasoning - OF COURSE she's lip-syncing, that's what they did in Hollywood musicals. And she's playing the star of a Hollywood musical, so cut her some slack.
But even if I cut this restored version a load of slack, I'm still left with a ton of logistical problems. Like Judy Garland playing an aspiring young actress, but at the age of 32, when she started to resemble that scary aunt who liked to pinch your cheeks. Or a scene where she removes an extreme amount of studio make-up to reveal nearly just as much (albeit different) make-up underneath.
What am I supposed to make of the musical number "Someone At Last", in which Garland's character performs an elaborate around-the-world musical number for her husband in their living room, and VERBALLY DESCRIBES the way that the fantastical sets will look in the studio, with the 30 dancers rising from the floor, and the African jungle and the Great Wall of China. Too bad WE the audience didn't get to see all that stuff. You can take this as a heartwarming sequence where a wife relates the events of her workday on the studio lot, or you can imagine a Warner Bros. executive saying, "You know what would be cheaper than building 20 more sets? She performs the entire number in her living room, using the lampshade and tea-tray as handy props!" Cheap bastards.
Also, I was troubled by the Academy Awards scene, where the aging drunk husband crashes Vicki's acceptance speech. I'd be silly to think this couldn't possibly happen, since people drink fairly liberally at the Golden Globes, we had that "Soy Bomb" guy at the Grammys a few years back, plus Kanye West interrupted Taylor Swift at the VMA's (not to mention the streaker at the Oscars back in the 1970's) - but what about the reaction to such an occurence? There was NO security at the Oscars back in the 1950's? The orchestra wouldn't have played music to drown this guy out? Nothing? Guys, a little help?
My mother tried her best to instill in me a love for the movie-musical form, making me watch the movie-clip series "That's Entertainment". I think she thought I'd then follow up by watching all the classic MGM musicals that were featured - yeah, mom, just me and my college boyfriend snuggling up together with some popcorn and watching movies, is that what you wanted? But soon "Star Wars" came into my life and my interests went in another direction. Credit to Carrie Fisher (along with Lynda Carter, Loni Anderson, Erin Gray and Charlie's Angels) for keeping me interested in women at a time when my experience with them was only theoretical. But as with many classic musicals, I'm out of my comfort zone tonight.
No mileage gained here, since I'm still exploring Hollywood (and Malibu in this one, but that distance is probably negligible). I did use a mapping program to estimate the theoretical length of the World Tour, and came up with a figure just under 46,000 miles. So having traveled only 500 or so virtual miles in the last week, I've still got a LONG way to go.
Also starring James Mason (last seen in "The Verdict"), Charles Bickford (last seen in "Days of Wine and Roses"), Tommy Noonan.
RATING: 3 out of 10 weeks in rehab
It's a tough call, isn't it? Reconstructing lost scenes opens up a lot of possibilities. If it's OK to deliver a scene with a still photo and audio dialogue...gee, why not use it to improve mediocre movies as well? Take a 2.5-star movie and invent some scenes that were never in the screenplay, but which make it more comprehensible and compelling.
ReplyDeleteI'm not even really joking. I don't have the persistence (or the financing) to make a whole movie on my own but it seems like it'd be a fun little hobby to spend a month or two building a version of "White Christmas" that I would consider "watchable." And I'm certain I could do it with $30 worth of software on my iPad, let alone what I could do with $500 worth of apps on my MacBook.
Restorations like this one are enticing because "the cut that the director produced for its film festival debut was brilliant, and then the studio came back with notes..." is a familiar horror story. "The Abyss" is one of my all-time favorite films. And yet when I originally saw it (in its "wide release" form) I thought it was draggy and confusing.
I don't know if the solution for "A Star Is Born" is to make the damn thing even longer. There's so much brilliant stuff there. "The Man That Got Away" has to be on any list of the greatest musical numbers ever filmed, and the scene in which she flips that switch from "completely exhausted and emotionally devastated" to "completely on for the cameras" is marvelous. But yeah, I agree with almost everything you said. Garland was playing a role she'd played a bunch of times before ("Young entertainer with limiteless talent but zero experience is mentored into stardom by an established Famous Person") and she was probably too old to pull that same roll off in the same way.