LITTLE ROCK — Audiences don’t usually jump out of their chairs and cheer when a movie star’s name is projected on the big screen - especially when the movie is 56 years old and the star has been dead more than four decades.
Judy Garland got a minutes-long standing ovation when Warner Bros. recently unveiled a restored print of her 1954 big-screen comeback, A Star Is Born, on opening night of the first TCM Classic Film Festival at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Los Angeles.
“It’s not just a movie.There’s nothing like it,” says George Feltenstein, a Warner Home Video executive. “At the Chinese screening, the title came on the screen, and I was in a wash of tears. Here we were in a theater 56 years later with people applauding and screaming.”
Now Garland fans can carry on at home, thanks to Warner’s release last week of the high-definition A Star Is Born restoration on Blu-ray ($35) and DVD ($21).
A movie legend at 17 in 1939 when she starred in The Wizard of Oz, Garland was fired by MGM in 1950 following a series of illnesses and breakdowns. A year later, she made big stage comebacks at the London Palladium and Palace Theatre on Broadway. She won a special Tony Award in 1952.
She then signed with Warner Bros. to make A Star Is Born, in which she first sang Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin’s “The Man That Got Away.” The movie, produced by Garland’s third husband, Sid Luft, cost $6 million and was filmed in early stereophonicsound, one-strip Technicolor and CinemaScope.
The 1954 Hollywood premiere was broadcast live on national television. Stars in attendance included Garland, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Clark Gable, Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. A complete 30-minute kinescope of the TV special is part of the Blu-ray/DVD set, along with soundtrack prerecordings and other extras, including eight takes of “The Man That Got Away.”
A Star Is Born arguably was Garland’s finest hour. Three hours, actually, until Warner Bros. haphazardly cut the musical tearjerker to 154 minutes - for more daily showings - and discarded the trimmed footage.
Director George Cukor disowned the edited version. Three decades later, A Star Is Born was reassembled by Ronald Haver, director of film at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
The junked footage had been presumed lost for nearly 30 years. Haver, who died in 1993, spent months creeping through the vaults at Warner Bros. studios, looking inside hundreds of cans of film. Eventually, he found the film’s complete soundtrack and most of its lost footage. For visual scenes that couldn’t be recovered, he substituted still pictures of Garland and co-star James Mason.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences helped finance the 1983 restoration, which had an old-fashioned premiere at Radio City Music Hall, attended by Mason, Garland’s daughters (Liza Minnelli and Lorna Luft), and 6,000 movie fans.
The Haver restoration isthe version Warner Home Video released last week.
“The unrestored film was always a grimy, mousy brown,” says Feltenstein, Warner’s senior vice president for theatrical catalog marketing. “Now it looks great.”
Garland’s performance as Esther Blodgett (aka Mrs. Norman Maine), whose show-biz career skyrockets while her movie-star husband’s collapses, earned an Oscar nomination. Her unexpected loss to Grace Kelly in The Country Girl prompted Groucho Marx to call it “the biggest robbery since Brinks.”
The film, written by Moss Hart, is based on two earlier movies, What Price Hollywood? (made in 1932) and A Star Is Born, a 1937 early-Technicolor drama starring Janet Gaynor and Fredric March.Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson remade it in 1976 and there’s talk that Beyonce and Russell Crowe will remake it once again in 2012.
Still, it’s Garland’s version that endures.
“It doesn’t date, the bare honesty and truth of its screenplay. The characters are believable and honest in a way that movies of that era are not,” says Feltenstein, an unabashed Garland fan. “If you had to pick one film to explain why she was so great, this would be it.”
Style, Pages 54 on 06/27/2010