Overview
A Star Is Born has been remade three times in 1954, 1976, and 2018, the latest of which is still in the memory of contemporary pop culture as a musical. The original was not a musical though, and instead was centrally inspired on a 1932 film called What Price Hollywood? that also featured a mentor in the show business industry whose decline from alcoholism coincides with a contrasting success from a young woman trying to break in as newfound talent.
Commentary
They say writers write what they know, which in the case of Hollywood results in an arguably narcissistic self-obsession with the revolving door of washed-up has-beens presiding over the ambition and naivety of fresh talent.
Frank Nugent, a contemporary critic who wrote a review for the film for the New York Times in 1937 1, wrote:
“‘A Star Is Born’ is a Hollywood story of, by and for its people. It has the usual preface, attesting to the fictional quality of the characters and incidents depicted, but it is nonetheless the most accurate mirror ever held before the glittering, tinseled, trivial, generous, cruel and ecstatic world that is Hollywood. That, in itself, guarantees its dramatic interest, for there is no place on this twentieth-century earth more fascinating-not even that enchanting make-believe republic which James Hilton called Shangri-La.”
I suppose the first few iterations of a film driven by the motif of holding up a mirror to the industry must have had a sheen of novelty, but watching the film now brings to mind the countless times that Hollywood has held a mirror up to itself since. Eventually, the proverbial mirror appears to be little more than the reflection of a simulacrum. The archetypal scrappy waitress hoping to entice a Pygmalion into crafting a Galatea out of her has been a cliche for decades.
Notable Quotes
“And the other, I caught her talking to a horse with a Swedish accent! / Well, sis, you’re only young once, you know… Now if it was spring, I’d say give her a good dose of sulfur and molasses.”
The 1930s certainly seems to have had different standards for what constitutes teenage rebellion and discipline.
“Oh yes, oh yes, you want to be somebody, but you want it to be easy. Oh, you modern girls give me a pain! When I wanted something better, I came across those planes in the prairies, with your grandfather. Oh, everyone laughed at us, like they did with the all other pioneers. They said this country will never be anything but a wilderness. We didn’t believe that. We were going to make a new country. Besides, we wanted to see our dreams come true… It was wonderful. But don’t you think for one single minute that it was easy, Esther Blodgett. We burned in summer and we froze in winter. But we kept right on going and we didn’t complain, because we were doing what we wanted to do. Can you understand that? Could you do it? Could you do it even if it broke your heart? Because, remember Esther, for every dream of yours you make come true, you pay the price in heartbreak. I know what I’m talking about.”
I always find it amusing that you can find instances of elderly people from basically any time period complaining that the children of their era are the ones who don’t want to work hard to make their dreams come true. You can go back to the 1600s and find older colonialist ministers complaining that the younger colonialists didn’t want to work as hard as the elders had to support the success of their expansionism. According to Esther’s grandma, you haven’t really tried to make your dreams come true until you get revenge on the man who murdered your husband while you’re colonizing his land.