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02/27/2007 Entry: "A Star Is Born 1937"

Instead of watching the Oscars the other night, I watched the 1937 version of A Star Is Born. Fun backstage stuff about a young girl being remade into a Star. The alcoholism of her husband (Fredric March) sends his career into a tailspin though he was a bigger Star than she was at the beginning.

I was amused by this Suck.com piece about the Star is Born phenomenon. "The only one of the screen Esthers plucky or innocent enough to carry off the corniness of the conceit, [Janet] Gaynor renders the conquest of Hollywood as the continuation of a frontier narrative, with the grandmother character providing a thematic link to what could still be called without sarcasm 'the American spirit.' (Granny's life hearbreak came when 'some Indian devil put a bullet in' her sodbuster husband.) Connoisseurs of alcoholism appreciate the script's many boozer gag lines. (Written at a time when a whole nation of Barton Finks had taken a stab at movie writing, the script was variously claimed by, credited to, and disowned by Ben Hecht, Budd Schulberg, Ring Lardner Jr., Dorothy Parker, and others, while producer David O. Selznick stated that '95%' of the dialogue was taken from life; but the film's lines were pretty obviously written by people familiar with the end of a bottle.)

(tags: StarIsBorn, JanetGaynor, FredricMarch, SuckCom)