100/100
Fourth viewing, last seen 2010. Even back in 1991, the first time, I watched the reconstructed three-hour cut with montages of production stills standing in for lost footage (entire soundtrack survived, so you can always at least hear the actual movie), and can't imagine the film having remotely the same power in its shorter form—Esther's rise to stardom has no meaning if she's simply recognized as a great singer and immediately given a studio contract, as most 1954 audiences experienced it. What's deeply moving, even with Garland's performance in those scenes rotting in a Burbank landfill*, is that Esther assumes Norman has blown her off and was probably spouting drunken nonsense and she keeps trying anyway. Because his words had an impact that his subsequent absence doesn't alter. Cutting that was ruinous, and I'm now surprised that Warner didn't also get rid of another scene I love that at least theoretically could be perceived as expendable: Norman stopping by the Cocoanut Grove, discovering that Esther and her band have already left, and then spending a couple of minutes exploring various female alternatives who are in the Ambassador nightclub, continuing his search for Esther only when none of them seem appealing to him. ("Too young," he says of one woman. "I had a very young week last week.") That's decidedly not the behavior of a sympathetic leading man, which is part of what makes A Star Is Born so remarkably rich in both of its first two incarnations. I very much like the 1937 original as well (74/100), and this remake wisely doesn't fix what wasn't broken.
Turning it into a musical, however, achieved transcendence. That's clear from the first strains of "Man That Got Away," the single greatest solo number ever filmed (only competitor's Garland singing "Over the Rainbow"); as usual, I got weepy right away just from the sheer beauty of it all—not just the song itself and Garland's voice, but Cukor shooting the entire thing in one shot (reminder: I do not mind that when it's not an excuse to show off elaborate-verging-on"impossible" camera moves), pushing Garland back and forth on the z-axis to go from intimacy to CinemaScope splendor (and then back to intimacy and then back to splendor). At one point she rushes the camera and the focus puller can't quite keep up but it doesn't matter, glorious nonetheless. How strong the temptation must have been to give Mason at least one astonished reaction shot! But there's a reason why we're watching this song performed to nobody (Esther has no idea Norman's there) at like 3 a.m. in a club that's all but closed, rather than for an appreciative audience at the Cocoanut Grove. She's singing for the love of singing; they're playing for the love of playing. Which is tied to the crucial sequence Warner idiotically removed, in which Esther keeps at her dream even after her apparent gravy train has been derailed. And that's just one number (albeit the most famous and important)—I could probably write an entire book chapter detailing the others' creativity, with each one uniquely behind the scenes: "Born in a Trunk" is part of a film-within-the-film; "Here's What I'm Here For" involves recorded chatter during a recording session (which turns out to be a marriage proposal); "Someone at Last" sees Esther re-enact a mammoth production number for Norman in their living room; etc. And then "Lose That Long Face," which also insanely got cut in 1954, turns on my waterworks again when Esther the trooper has to instantaneously shift from despair to elation for a retake and Garland pulls it off to the microsecond.
Truthfully, there's not a moment of this movie that I don't love. If tortured I might allow that it's absurd to imagine that Norman Maine was the first person to notice Hey that kid can really sing. But I look at friends' modest criticisms—"Born in a Trunk," added after Cukor moved on to his next project, bogs things down (maybe I'd feel that way were I not familiar with Garland's background and aware of how basically autobiographical it is, plus every piece of that medley is a blast); there's no heat between Esther and Norman (that's what the songs are for)—and find them irrelevant. Who cares about that, look at Cukor having Norman shepherd Esther through four separate locations in whatever club "Man That Got Away" is set at, finally pulling her out onto the street, in an attempt to find a quiet place where he can mansplain her talent to her. (Incidentally, thank god Cary Grant turned the role down. Much as I love him, he wasn't capable of tapping into the horror Mason evinces when Norman overhears Esther telling the studio head that she's going to curtail her career in order to help him get sober. Raw vulnerability wasn't in his range, which ironically is a huge part of why Notorious is so great.) Look at the lengthy sequence of Esther being whisked through multiple studio departments, including the small screening room where she "meets" Niles in the dark as footage from a cowboys-and-indians western plays over her blinking confused face, and then walks downstairs to discover that she's in the exact spot where she'd started, having completed a full circuit. Know anything at all about Garland and look at the makeup people trying to figure out what to do with Esther's face. (Also the resigned shrug with which Frances Gumm—sorry, Esther Blodgett—accepts "Vicki Lester." Great joke when we discover only at the wedding that Norman was born Ernest Gubbins, a detail that I believe wasn't in the '37 film, though it's been 20 years since my sole viewing.) A Star Is Born was terrific from conception. Music vaulted it heavenward.
* I'd always assumed that Warner destroyed the cut footage right away, but apparently they re-released the original version to theaters in New York and Los Angeles shortly after Garland died, in 1969. Which means that somebody tossed it in the mere dozen years between then and 1981, when Ronald Haver started searching for it in the vaults. Heartbreaking.