This week’s edition of The Film Experience’s Hit Me with Your Best Shot visits the oft-told story of A Star Is Born, in the form of the 1954 CinemaScope behemoth starring Judy Garland and James Mason that was the second of the (so-far) three films to bear that title. It’s certainly my favorite of the three (1932’s What Price Hollywood? – which was, like the ’54 film, directed by George Cukor – is the same property in all but name, and my actual favorite version, but it doesn’t “count”), owing in part to its opulence, and in part to its performances, and in part to being one of the first films to actually understand how to use CinemaScope as a compositional tool, though the technical end of things causes some problems for Cukor and cinematographer Sam Leavitt (a lot of drifting focus, a lot of weirdly stretched images).
Which made it a pretty great candidate for this series, and a real pleasure it was to hunt for something that would best meet my two main criteria for the shot I picked: it had to show off the super-wide frame and Garland’s performance, far and away the best acting of her entire career.
I found it a little less than one-sixth of the way through the garantuan picture, in the bravura long-take shot where Garland’s Esther Blodgett performs “The Man That Got Away” in a closed club to unwind with the musicians, as James Mason’s Norman Maine sits in the dark, watching and growing awfully damn impressed. Part of me wanted to go with the full take, with its very simple and very potent shifts of perspective and gradual pull back, but that’s at least somewhat bending the spirit of the game, and anyway, most of what I love about the take as a whole is summed up in its final position, and that is what I would present for your edification:
Three things, primarily, leap to my mind as I look at this frame. The obvious one, maybe, is Garland herself: nearly all of her movies, certainly by this point in her career, take on a certain meta-narrative quality, what we might call the “Judy Garland’s characters are haunted by the tragedy of Judy Garland’s life” effect. Or, more simply, look at her face. It’s a triumphant moment – she’s just knocked the song out of the park (it’s easily my favorite musical moment in the film, for what it’s worth) – and you can see a bit of that lingering in her posture and ever so slightly flushed skin, but her expression is distant, even unaware. There’s a distinct, quietly disturbing element of sadness in that expression, making a great, rousing moment just a little bittersweet.
The other two things are both more traditionally compositional: first, the use of lighting, which is pretty darn obvious, but not therefore worth ignoring. In a room full of talented people, the bright spot on Garland makes it virtually impossible to notice anything else besides her at first glance, and since this image is largely meant to mimic Norman’s captivated adoration of her talent, that’s a pretty perfect, if not entirely radical way to draw our attention to the place it belongs. Second, the way that Cukor and Leavitt full the extravagantly wide frame with detail and business: the lighting might say “look at Esther!” but the framing says “look at the many wonderful musicians responsible for that song, and while other individual frames in this long shot specifically isolate Garland, this one, arguably, situates her as part of the gang, and rather than stressing her loneliness (as the acting and lighting do), stresses the way that she is, at this stage of the story, part of a group; she has a place and a role in something bigger, and Norman’s influence is about to take that away from her. Since that’s what triggers the rest of the tragedy throughout the movie, this shot can be thought of as foreshadowing, of a sort: a sense of belonging and a sense of loss sharing space in one image. There’s no one frame that can sum up a movie this big, but I think that the conflicting emotions laid out here head quite a long way in that direction.