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- A Star Is Born
-
-
- (May 3, 1937)
-
- A Star Is Born starts by making the point that one girl in a
- hundred thousand who go to Hollywood to be stars becomes one.
- It then examines the career of the exception -- Esther Victoria
- Blodgett (Janet Gaynor) who, the day she arrives on the Coast,
- financed by her grandmother's nest egg, tip-toes into the outer
- lobby of Grauman's Chinese Theatre and stands tremulously in the
- cement footprints of her favorite actor, Norman Maine. From this
- point on, the story of A Star Is Born does not differ in
- superficial outline from the story that has been told a hundred
- times, usually as an excuse for weak screen musicals. It does
- differ -- as Esther Blodgett is supposed to differ from her
- competitors -- in essentials.
-
- Not until, with three weeks rent due at her boardinghouse, she
- gets a job as waitress at a party given by Producer Oliver Niles
- (Adolphe Menjou), does Esther encounter her hero in the flesh.
- By this time, like the rest of Hollywood, she is aware that
- Norman Maine (Fredric March) is an habitual drunkard whose
- dipsomaniac pranks are an intolerable nuisance or an aspect of
- his charm, depending on the point of view.
-
- The private tragedies of Hollywood cinemactors are something
- which the rest of the world, except possibly the readers of
- cinemagazines, can take in its stride. It is precisely this
- point of view as contrasted with Norman Maine's own evaluation
- of his decline and its effect on his wife that gives the latter
- portion of A Star Is Born its effectiveness. The drunken speech
- in which Maine betrays his jealousy when his wife gets an
- Academy Award; his sojourn in a sanatorium to recover from the
- jitters; his fist fight with Nile's press agent at Santa Anita
- race track, are related with superlative detachment. They lead
- up to the climactic scene in which sunset on the Pacific -- a
- magnificent shot which is possibly the best individual
- justification of Technicolor yet seen on the screen -- tempts
- Maine to an appropriately exhibitionistic suicide, leaving
- Esther to a Hollywood funeral in which an admirer steals her
- veil.
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