A Star is Born: how does version four compare with its predecessors?
A Star is Born is a film for the ages: here we look at past versions, and how the new movie compares.
Bradley Cooper’s A Star is Born, which opens next week, is a new version of one of the oldest movie narratives. Cooper is an experienced actor making his directing debut in a film he co-wrote and stars in; alongside him is Lady Gaga, a celebrated singer taking an acting role at odds with the persona she created. In an act of bravado, they take the leap with a film whose narrative is built into the history of Hollywood, a work with an intriguing history that each version leans on, deviates from, adds to.
A Star is Born, which had its origins in the 1930s, is essentially the tale of a male star plagued by addiction who becomes an advocate for the talent of an obscure young woman. He’s proved right. They marry. As she ascends, he declines. He becomes convinced he’s standing in her way, with tragic consequences.
There are backstories to each version that add to the mystique. Each film explores, in a different fashion, notions about the business of performance and celebrity. Each time, the film has involved the repositioning of the career of the female lead.
There are recurring motifs and themes. There’s always a debacle at an awards ceremony, in which the man creates a scene of humiliation at the instant the woman is about to achieve her greatest public triumph. There’s an au revoir/farewell moment that turns up once or more in every version with minor variations. The man pauses in the doorway as he’s about to leave, saying, “I just want to look at you, that’s all”, or words to that effect.
The first version came out in 1937, but there is a significant precursor, a 1932 picture called What Price Hollywood?, that can lay claim to being the first draft of A Star is Born. It’s a sardonic take on celebrity and ambition that assumes an audience that is well-versed in the machinery of fandom and stardom.
The opening sequence introduces Mary (Constance Bennett) flicking through a movie magazine and finding inspiration in it: stockings, dress, lipstick, they all come straight from the advertisements and articles on Hollywood styles. But Mary — who mockingly plays a love scene with a pin-up held next to her cheek — is no ingenue, no wallflower. She knows enough to steer clear of the hustlers but she’s quick to seize an opportunity. In this version, directed by George Cukor, everyone is starstruck or Hollywood-obsessed — even the elderly female customers at the restaurant where Mary works have a fantasy about being in the movies.
A key difference in this version is that Mary doesn’t marry the man who discovers her, a director with a drinking problem who gives her the break she needs. Her husband is a wealthy polo player who she captivates with a display of calculated indifference.
The first incarnation of A Star is Born, directed by William Wellman, with a script written by, among others, Dorothy Parker, appeared five years later: it’s a work that also expects its audience to appreciate movie references and behind-the-scenes insights.
It was seen as a comeback opportunity for Janet Gaynor, a silent star who won the first best actress Oscar, successfully made the transition to sound, but seemed to be falling out of favour in the late 1930s.
Her character, Esther Blodgett, has Hollywood dreams, but she’s a little more naive and restrained than Mary Evans. She encounters drunken actor Norman Maine (Fredric March) at a benefit show, then meets him later when she’s waitressing at a party and practising her accents on the Hollywood guests. Maine is bumbling, good-natured: inebriation makes him loose-limbed, amiable, playful. He seems unaware that he’s on the skids, but others are quick to diagnose the malaise. “His work is beginning to interfere with his drinking,” a bystander drily observes. He’s influential enough to get her a screen test. She’s signed to a studio, and set on her way. Her name is changed — she becomes Vicki Lester — and a star is born.
These films display an ambivalent attitude towards the art and the industry they depict. Deception and manipulation are understood to be part and parcel of the business. Sometimes it’s simply about showing the manufacture of screen illusions. Sometimes it’s a more satirical look at the PR machine grinding away, creating or suppressing facts: fabricating biographical details, keeping prying journalists at bay, feeding stories to magazines, using anything and everything as a photo opportunity. Journalists and photographers are fickle participants, and they create a hunger in the public that can turn ugly: avid fans can tear the weeds off a widow at a funeral.
Yet in these narratives some powerful figures get off pretty lightly. In 1937 and 1954, the closest thing to a villain is the studio publicist, a blowhard type called Matt Libby (Lionel Stander in 1937, Jack Carson in 1954), who resents covering up Maine’s erratic behaviour and takes a certain pleasure in taunting him, with disastrous consequences, when he’s trying for sobriety.
Studio bosses get a sweet ride by comparison. They are portrayed as thoughtful, supportive types, friends as well as employers: Oliver Niles (Charles Bickford) in the 1954 version is a paragon of decency and compassion.
What the 1954 version introduced, most powerfully, was the performance of songs, the capacity ability to distil and embody the “star is born” phenomenon. Like Gaynor, Judy Garland saw the film as a comeback opportunity. Critic Pauline Kael complained that she “looked far from fresh and rising”, which rather misses the point. Garland’s Esther isn’t represented as an ingenue or a newcomer. She has worked hard to get where she is, fronting a band, and thinks she has achieved as much as she can. Norman Maine, actor and drinker, sees something more in her. He first meets her mid-performance: she’s in a vocal trio, singing at a Hollywood benefit, and he stumbles drunkenly on stage. Somehow she handles his shenanigans, transforming what could have been humiliation into a moment of levity, and he’s intrigued by this.
He tries his charm on her, but she politely exits: he tracks her down to a club where a small group of musicians is playing just for the sheer pleasure. She sings — tentatively at first, then all stops out, a definitive Garland number, The Man That Got Away, with the fierce, tremulous, disturbing vulnerability that is hers alone. There is no audience and she doesn’t realise he’s there.
He’s hooked. James Mason’s Maine falls in love not only with the performer in front of him but also with her possibilities. He makes her see in herself what he sees in her. What he loves and takes pride in is her talent and that “little jolt of pleasure” that it gives him. Even when they’re a married couple at home, he seems happiest watching her putting on a show just for him, an improvised song and dance or a number to entertain him — anything that reminds him of what he believes in.
The first two films gestured towards the female character’s talents: the 1954 version can show them in action. Yet as this version allows us to experience Garland at her greatest, it also heightens the notion of Esther as a figure of insecurity, someone the studio wants to make over, an actress in need of a new nose as well as a new name.
As Maine, Mason is the perfect foil, a wonderful combination of light and dark, incarnating Norman’s sense of wonder at an artist at work and of self-loathing as he realises how his life is slipping through his fingers.
By the time we get to the 1976 iteration of A Star is Born, music is more explicitly at the centre as the celebrity focus shifts: it’s now a story of rock ’n’ roll egos and ambitions. The idea of positioning the story in a new milieu belonged to authors Joan Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne: they pitched the idea to Warner Bros, which owned the previous version of the film. Carly Simon and James Taylor were their models, Cher was a contender, but the project finally came into the orbit of Barbra Streisand and her boyfriend at the time, producer Jon Peters. It was meant to redefine Streisand as a contemporary figure, to turn her from Funny Girl and Funny Lady into Rock Star. The music, however, seems an odd fit, unconnected to the narrative and unable to illuminate character.
A 1970s version could hardly embrace the sexual politics of the 30s or 50s but there is something about Streisand’s assertive, forceful Esther Hoffman that throws everything out of kilter. She’s overwhelming from the start: she barely needs Kris Kristofferson’s stadium rocker, a more aggressive and risk-taking figure than previous incarnations. He does dumb, dangerous things with motorbikes, and fires a gun at a helicopter. He’s discovered in bed with a young woman who has come on to him in the hope of getting an interview with Esther. There’s plenty happening, but little sign of the complex character that March and Mason brought to life.
On set, Streisand and Peters argued with each other and with the director, Frank Pierson. Tensions erupted very publicly; Pierson wrote a tell-all account of dealing with the demands of Streisand and Peters that was published before the film was released. The pre-publicity was bad, the reviews were unenthusiastic, yet the movie was a box-office smash.
It was an idea waiting to be revisited: and so to Cooper’s A Star is Born, a project with a prehistory of rumoured participants including Will Smith and Whitney Houston; Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio and Beyonce. Clint Eastwood initially was attached and wanted Cooper to play the lead.
Finally, Cooper declared himself old enough to play the male lead — known this time as Jackson Maine — and ready to make his directing debut. His Esther, or Ally as she is called in this version, is Lady Gaga. Her musical gifts are self-evident; he, on the other hand, had to learn to play guitar and piano well enough to perform credibly, and to sing.
One of the critical things about this version is that the writing is as important as singing. The songs Jackson and Ally compose and perform are crucial narrative devices: they tell us about the characters and the moment, they represent stages in the relationship, they emerge gradually within the story. Maine wanders into a bar after a show; it turns out to be a drag bar, where he settles down for a drink. There he sees Ally, performing La Vie en Rose, and he’s transfixed.
As he attaches himself to her, he’s curious to know if she’s a writer as well as a performer, and she hesitantly sings him a few bars of something she’s working on. That’s enough for him. There’s a key scene in which he takes Ally on to the stage, in front of a large crowd, to sing her song with him. It is a moment of transformation for both; we see her gradual revelation of the rewards of performance, and a glimpse of the pleasure and pride on his face.
This A Star is Born is more about notions of creativity and the destructive potential of intense relationships than it is about the traps and trappings of stardom. There are demanding fans at the beginning of the film, bailing up a generally polite Maine, who seems to feel that recognition comes with the territory.
We never really see Ally under fan pressure, however. There’s little sense of the PR machine in this film: there’s no indication of the pressures of social media. There are glimpses of makeovers, photo shoots, dance routines, a Saturday Night Live performance, as Ally gradually succumbs to the demands of her new manager to become more of a pop performer. If there’s anything resembling a Matt Libby-style villain, it’s British producer-manager Rez (Rafi Gavron), who leads her in a direction that Jackson becomes increasingly uncomfortable with.
He’s in denial about many things, in addition to his drinking — the first sound we hear in the film is a ringing noise, a signal of the tinnitus he is never really prepared to acknowledge. But he’s very clear about Ally: he insists that she needs to have something to say, that mere talent is never enough.
This is the first A Star is Born to give both characters a backstory and a family. Ally has a pushy dad (Andrew Dice Clay), a limo driver and one-time wannabe crooner who’d like to think he was more talented than Sinatra. Jackson had an alcoholic father and a tormented childhood: his long-suffering older brother (Sam Elliott) is his manager, but the relationship has reached breaking point.
Yet Cooper doesn’t make the mistake of spelling things out or pressing too hard on the melodramatic implications of this backstory: he has a real confidence in the ability of the songs — and the performance of them — to do much of the work of narrative. This is one of the strongest and most poignant elements of the new version: Jackson and Ally can collaborate — for a time, at least — in a way that was unavailable to the characters in previous incarnations.
A Star is Born opens on Thursday.