Janet Gaynor, born Laura Augusta Gainor and who died in 1984 at 78, was a new name on me – I am not a ‘cinéaste’ nor a ‘film buff’ so my ignorance might be overlooked and forgiven – but I had heard the name Fredric March, known to his mum and dad as Ernest Bickel, though I had never knowingly seen any of his films.
By the time she made A Star Is Born, Gaynor had won three Best Actress’ Oscars, her first at 23, and was nominated for a fourth Academy Award for A Star Is Born. March won two Oscars, his first in 1932 for Dr Jekyll
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I was never attracted to watching any of the three more recent versions of A Star Is Born and almost surprised myself to be watching the Gaynor / March take.
Perhaps my reluctance means I am missing out on three very good films, but horses for courses and I am not losing sleep over it of a night.
I was already familiar with the the film’s storyline – young ingenue from the sticks, who is in thrall to movies is determined to become a film star, succeeds under the mentorship of an older established star whose career goes down the toilet as hers soars.
More to the point and pertinently, experience has taught me that all-too-often when shaped by the dead hand of Hollywood the mawk factor is dialled up to eleven and with this storyline there is a great deal of space for doing so.
Given that the female stars of the more recent versions, Garland, Streisand and Lady Gaga – or Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta although I don’t know which of her given names she uses, so you get all three – began their showbiz lives as singers, given the singing abilities of those three ladies, that made sense.
Sadly, I care for musicals as little as I care for Hollywood schmaltz. If I am doing any of those three films a disservice and they are not shot through the with the kind of mawkishness audiences just love, by all means write in and tell me, but as I otherwise do not intend to see any of them, that is the only way I will stand to be corrected.
So how did I come to see the 1937 Gaynor / March version? And not just come to see it, but rate and enjoy it enough to recommend it, given that it is a sad tale and there is some pathos, but, almost incredibly for a Tinseltown film, at no point had me shuddering or cringing? Here’s why: Dorothy Parker co-wrote the screenplay.
I concede that cynical old Dottie did herself sometimes walk a fine line and was occasionally in danger of crossing over to the dark side of sentimental bollocks, but she as far as I know she didn’t.
She was born Dorothy Rothschild and grew up in New York, and the city was not just her home hometown but where she felt comfortable. Making her name writing for magazines and newspapers, she became a founding member of what became known at the Algonquin Round Table that daily went for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel at 59 West 44th Street in Manhattan.
The lunchers were a collection of writers, journalists, agents, actors and similar, and their various witticisms and other quips are still often quoted. From from I stand (or better where I sit in my North Cornwall kitchen writing this post) they strike me as not a little self-regarding, calling themselves ‘The Vicious Circle’ and thinking themselves funny and rather clever.
Perhaps I’m being unfair and perhaps not, but I tend to the view that it is up to others to judge whether a lad or a lass is funny and clever, not the lads or lasses themselves. No doubt many will assume I am thus a buttoned-up, stiff-necked, cold Brit for believing that, but then those many will dislike that I don’t go in for and never had all that whooping and hollering and ‘it’s insane’ hyperbole which seems to Yankee default mode.
Frankly for a nation which has twice elected as its president a dumb, fraudulent rapist and possibly also a paedophile (Brit spelling) whose odd antics are well on their way to wrecking the US and other global economies, many Americans should take the opportunity to shut the fuck up every time it is offered.
That is unfair to several million Americans, but to them all I can do is apologise and advise them to read the riot act to their more uncouth national cousins.
As for self-regarding, smug New York smart-arses, I can still remember when sitting on my bed in the house I shared in Gosforth, Newcastle-upon-Tyne on a Saturday morning 47 years ago, I heard interviewed BBC Radio 1 a Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, better known as Steely Dan.
Steely Dan were and still are one of my favourite bands, but in a matter of minutes I took well against Becker and Fagen after hearing their supercilious ‘well are’t we the clever ones’ banter and responses. I should imagine the good folk of ‘The Vicious Circle’ were pretty much like that, too, but that really is enough Brit sounding off, or I shall lose readers.
With fellow Vanity Fair writer Robert Benchley and Robert E. Sherwood, Parker was a founding member of the circle which lasted for a full ten years but the Wall St crash in late 1929 helped put paid to that way of life and the prosperity of some of it members, and Parker, for ever in debt at the best of times, eventually moved to Los Angeles to write screenplays.
This was usually in tandem with her second husband, Alan Campbell, whom she had met in 1930 and married two years later. Apart from the several volumes of verse and short stories Parker published in the 1920s, she had also produced, usually in collaboration, song lyrics and theatre pieces. But her lifestyle took its toll financially and she needed to make real money.
Given her national reputation for wit, Hollywood had come calling several times to try to entice her out west, but each time Parker resisted. That changed when she married Campbell, a bit actor and would-be screenwriter and they co-wrote several films together, apparently with Campbell, being the more disciplined of the two, taking care of structure and Parker contributing dialogue.
Altogether she completed eight film scripts, the first five with Campbell, A Star Is Born was their second collaboration, with the its director William A. Wellman and novelist Robert Carson also helping with the script.
It was based on a film made five years earlier called What Price Hollywood (itself based on a short story), which ran along similar lines, though the storyline was adopted for the first A Star Is Born.
You might have seen the subsequent versions, possibly all three and, unlike me you might care for a little schmaltz with your sentiment. In that case, Parker’s version will fall more than a little short for you as it deftly avoids each and every chance – and there are many – to lay it on with a trowel. And thank the Lord for that.
The ‘biz’ in showbiz does not get a clean bill of health by any means, and that is made clear to Esther Blodgett when she leaves the family farm to pursue her dream to see her name in lights: it will break your heart, she’s warned. And, yes, it does.
Her mentor, Norman Maine, aka Norman Hinkle, who falls in love with her, is an established ‘star’ and though his heart might not have been broken, it seems to have led him to alcoholism, though the film does not make a direct connection. In short, there are unsavoury aspects of film-making in Tinseltown.
This first version does not shy away from making those aspects clear, but possibly does play a little safe in the character of hard-headed producer Oliver Niles (Adolphe Menjou) who now and then betrays a soft heart. He, too, can be hard-nosed, though: when he is asked point blank by Maine, who has made his studio a lot of moolah, whether is career is ‘on the slide’, he doesn’t sugar the pill and confirms that it has been for some time.
The unpleasant ruthlessness of Tinseltown is highlighted in Matt Libby (Lionel Stander), Niles’s publicist. The man is a bastard of the first order.
He is the guy Niles has always sent to bail out Maine when has happens all too often Mainwe is arrested for drunkenness. Libby does so because that is his job, but his true nature comes out when Maine turns up at a racecourse after spending some time in rehab drying out. Libby is truly unpleasant, and then some.
The new star herself, Vicki Lester, is also shown to have a heart and bends over backwards to help her husband as he struggles to cope with his ever lower status. After he kills himself by walking into the sea to drown, she vows to retire herself but is talked out of hit by her down-to-earth granny.
As I say, there are acres of space for a lot of saccharine bullshit, but this version sidesteps it neatly and well. It also has some great lines.
I was already familiar with the the film’s storyline – young ingenue from the sticks, who is in thrall to movies is determined to become a film star, succeeds under the mentorship of an older established star whose career goes down the toilet as hers soars.
More to the point and pertinently, experience has taught me that all-too-often when shaped by the dead hand of Hollywood the mawk factor is dialled up to eleven and with this storyline there is a great deal of space for doing so.
Given that the female stars of the more recent versions, Garland, Streisand and Lady Gaga – or Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta although I don’t know which of her given names she uses, so you get all three – began their showbiz lives as singers, given the singing abilities of those three ladies, that made sense.
Sadly, I care for musicals as little as I care for Hollywood schmaltz. If I am doing any of those three films a disservice and they are not shot through the with the kind of mawkishness audiences just love, by all means write in and tell me, but as I otherwise do not intend to see any of them, that is the only way I will stand to be corrected.
So how did I come to see the 1937 Gaynor / March version? And not just come to see it, but rate and enjoy it enough to recommend it, given that it is a sad tale and there is some pathos, but, almost incredibly for a Tinseltown film, at no point had me shuddering or cringing? Here’s why: Dorothy Parker co-wrote the screenplay.
I concede that cynical old Dottie did herself sometimes walk a fine line and was occasionally in danger of crossing over to the dark side of sentimental bollocks, but she as far as I know she didn’t.
She was born Dorothy Rothschild and grew up in New York, and the city was not just her home hometown but where she felt comfortable. Making her name writing for magazines and newspapers, she became a founding member of what became known at the Algonquin Round Table that daily went for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel at 59 West 44th Street in Manhattan.
The lunchers were a collection of writers, journalists, agents, actors and similar, and their various witticisms and other quips are still often quoted. From from I stand (or better where I sit in my North Cornwall kitchen writing this post) they strike me as not a little self-regarding, calling themselves ‘The Vicious Circle’ and thinking themselves funny and rather clever.
Perhaps I’m being unfair and perhaps not, but I tend to the view that it is up to others to judge whether a lad or a lass is funny and clever, not the lads or lasses themselves. No doubt many will assume I am thus a buttoned-up, stiff-necked, cold Brit for believing that, but then those many will dislike that I don’t go in for and never had all that whooping and hollering and ‘it’s insane’ hyperbole which seems to Yankee default mode.
Frankly for a nation which has twice elected as its president a dumb, fraudulent rapist and possibly also a paedophile (Brit spelling) whose odd antics are well on their way to wrecking the US and other global economies, many Americans should take the opportunity to shut the fuck up every time it is offered.
That is unfair to several million Americans, but to them all I can do is apologise and advise them to read the riot act to their more uncouth national cousins.
As for self-regarding, smug New York smart-arses, I can still remember when sitting on my bed in the house I shared in Gosforth, Newcastle-upon-Tyne on a Saturday morning 47 years ago, I heard interviewed BBC Radio 1 a Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, better known as Steely Dan.
Steely Dan were and still are one of my favourite bands, but in a matter of minutes I took well against Becker and Fagen after hearing their supercilious ‘well are’t we the clever ones’ banter and responses. I should imagine the good folk of ‘The Vicious Circle’ were pretty much like that, too, but that really is enough Brit sounding off, or I shall lose readers.
With fellow Vanity Fair writer Robert Benchley and Robert E. Sherwood, Parker was a founding member of the circle which lasted for a full ten years but the Wall St crash in late 1929 helped put paid to that way of life and the prosperity of some of it members, and Parker, for ever in debt at the best of times, eventually moved to Los Angeles to write screenplays.
This was usually in tandem with her second husband, Alan Campbell, whom she had met in 1930 and married two years later. Apart from the several volumes of verse and short stories Parker published in the 1920s, she had also produced, usually in collaboration, song lyrics and theatre pieces. But her lifestyle took its toll financially and she needed to make real money.
Given her national reputation for wit, Hollywood had come calling several times to try to entice her out west, but each time Parker resisted. That changed when she married Campbell, a bit actor and would-be screenwriter and they co-wrote several films together, apparently with Campbell, being the more disciplined of the two, taking care of structure and Parker contributing dialogue.
Altogether she completed eight film scripts, the first five with Campbell, A Star Is Born was their second collaboration, with the its director William A. Wellman and novelist Robert Carson also helping with the script.
It was based on a film made five years earlier called What Price Hollywood (itself based on a short story), which ran along similar lines, though the storyline was adopted for the first A Star Is Born.
You might have seen the subsequent versions, possibly all three and, unlike me you might care for a little schmaltz with your sentiment. In that case, Parker’s version will fall more than a little short for you as it deftly avoids each and every chance – and there are many – to lay it on with a trowel. And thank the Lord for that.
The ‘biz’ in showbiz does not get a clean bill of health by any means, and that is made clear to Esther Blodgett when she leaves the family farm to pursue her dream to see her name in lights: it will break your heart, she’s warned. And, yes, it does.
Her mentor, Norman Maine, aka Norman Hinkle, who falls in love with her, is an established ‘star’ and though his heart might not have been broken, it seems to have led him to alcoholism, though the film does not make a direct connection. In short, there are unsavoury aspects of film-making in Tinseltown.
This first version does not shy away from making those aspects clear, but possibly does play a little safe in the character of hard-headed producer Oliver Niles (Adolphe Menjou) who now and then betrays a soft heart. He, too, can be hard-nosed, though: when he is asked point blank by Maine, who has made his studio a lot of moolah, whether is career is ‘on the slide’, he doesn’t sugar the pill and confirms that it has been for some time.
The unpleasant ruthlessness of Tinseltown is highlighted in Matt Libby (Lionel Stander), Niles’s publicist. The man is a bastard of the first order.
He is the guy Niles has always sent to bail out Maine when has happens all too often Mainwe is arrested for drunkenness. Libby does so because that is his job, but his true nature comes out when Maine turns up at a racecourse after spending some time in rehab drying out. Libby is truly unpleasant, and then some.
The new star herself, Vicki Lester, is also shown to have a heart and bends over backwards to help her husband as he struggles to cope with his ever lower status. After he kills himself by walking into the sea to drown, she vows to retire herself but is talked out of hit by her down-to-earth granny.
As I say, there are acres of space for a lot of saccharine bullshit, but this version sidesteps it neatly and well. It also has some great lines.
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