[June 10th would have been Judy Garland’s 100th birthday. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Garland’s performances, leading up to a weekend post on LGBTQ icons.]
On two things
about Garland’s profound talents that her version of a much-told and -retold
story helps us appreciate.
I think this all
probably became common knowledge around the release of the much-acclaimed and
hugely successful 2018 version, but maybe not; I know this AmericanFilmStudier
wasn’t particularly aware of at least one of the films in question until
researching this post. So first things first: there have been four total films
entitled A Star is Born. The first was released in 1937
and starred Janet Gaynor and Fredric March; the third from 1976 starred
Barbara Streisand and Kris Kristofferson; and the fourth, that 2018 version,
starred Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper (who also made his directorial debut). And
in between, after a four-year hiatus from films, Judy Garland triumphantly
returned in 1954’s A Star is Born, starring alongside James
Mason and garnering a well-deserved Academy Award nomination (although she was
robbed of the award itself, at least if you ask
Groucho Marx) for her stunning, multi-layered performance as Esther
Blodgett.
That nomination and
performance alike can help us better remember and appreciate Garland’s talents
as an actress, and I don’t just mean as a child star. Perhaps because she’s
best known in terms of film performances for The Wizard of Oz (released when she was 17), and maybe second-best
for Meet Me in St. Louis (released
when she was 22), it seems to me that Garland is still often thought of as a
youthful talent; that’s the case even when we don’t consider the
Vaudeville career that she launched alongside her two older sisters when
she was only 6, which of course only adds to the child star aura when we do add
it into the story. She was indeed precociously talented from a young age, but
those talents only continued to grow and deepen for the rest of her career, and
no single performance better reflects her maturation as an actress than does A Star is Born (released when she was
32). Esther is a character who embodies just about every possible emotion
across this one story, often pitched to the extremes that can very easily slide
into full-on melodrama, and Garland keeps her quite
powerfully and affectingly
human throughout.
Esther is also a
musical performer, however—a singer and dancer as well as an actress. That wasn’t
the case with Janet Gaynor’s Esther from the 1937 film (she’s only an actress),
so this was a change for Garland’s version of the character and story (and one
that was of course kept for Streisand’s and Gaga’s subsequent takes). Because
of how those multiple remakes have unfolded, it might seem like a no-brainer to
make the character this kind of triple threat; but in truth, asking Garland to sing and perform so consistently throughout Star, all while giving that intensely
powerful acting performance, was to ask quite a lot. And she did ever respond—Time magazine called the film “just about
the greatest one-woman show in modern movie history,” and Newsweek wrote that its “best classified as a
thrilling personal triumph for Judy Garland…In more ways than one, the picture is
hers.” Few American performers have been as truly multi-talented as Judy
Garland, and perhaps no work better showcases that combination than does A Star is Born.
Next Garland
performance tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Garland works or moments you’d highlight?
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