LGM Film Club, Part 432: A Star is Born (1937)

I had never seen any version of A Star is Born, including the recent one with Lady Gaga. The story is well known–girl wants to be famous in the entertainment industry, things go poorly. famous but self-destructive man discovers here, they fall in love, she becomes famous, self-destructive man becomes even more of a disaster, and then some kind of conclusion and I am not sure if they all end the same way given that the original ends pretty harshly. I decided to watch the first version of the story, directed by William Wellman in 1937.

The truly amazing thing about this film is the second scene. In the first scene, Janet Gaynor (for whom this story was designed to restart her career as a superstar) is a young woman in her family’s farmhouse (North Dakota, as I recall). She’s really into the movies. Her parents are dead but her aunt and uncle who take care of her are disgusted. She has a little brother who makes fun of her. She runs off to her room, crying and dreaming of not being in that horrible farmhouse.

In the second scene, Grandma comes up to give Gaynor all her savings so that she can live her dreams in Hollywood. And then she frames what she needs her granddaughter to do. See, Grannie was a pioneer. Her husband was killed by the Injuns. But she pressed ahead and made it anyway. In a few minutes, Grannie tells Gaynor the history of courage, which is settler colonialism. Grannie had her dream, making it on the farms of North Dakota, getting rid of the savages, ripping a living out of the land, overcoming those dirty savages killing her husband, raising a family, and expanding western civilization. Now, Hollywood is the new Great Plains that need heroes of the West to carve a new future. And that’s what Janet Gaynor is to do and if she takes this money, she can’t come home because that would have been like Grannie going back to Indiana or wherever she was from.

Even knowing how ubiquitous these frontier narratives were in the 1930s across the political spectrum and very much by New Dealer leftists too, this was pretty in your face and amazing. I laughed. You might be disgusted. Either way, Gaynor (who is very good in the role since she could do intelligent and cute and sexy and vulnerable all at the same time) goes to Hollywood and Frederic March plays the disastrous aging actor and Adolphe Menjou is the studio exec and Lionel Stander (later blacklisted) as the sleazebag studio press agent. I didn’t love the film, but it maintains a relative watchability 90 years later.

Whole thing is available on YouTube, so here you go.