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Dana Dunbaugh Burnell

~ I write. I drift my gossamer way, eyes averted, through your keyboard. . . on my way to the refrigerator. Shall we make a pie, darling?

Dana Dunbaugh Burnell

Tag Archives: Judy Garland

A Star is Born, Again and Again

03 Sunday Oct 2021

Posted by Dana D. Burnell in Golden Age Hollywood, Uncategorized

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A Star Is Born, Frederic March, Irene Mayer, Judy Garland, Selznick

ScreenHunter_02 Feb. 10 18.13

Oh, autumn. I could howl from dread of winter’s approach. Evenings pull in as summer’s romantic dreams fade to sepia, then fall like brittle lace down to earth. Here in Manhattan it’s the season of tourists and torch songs, of ties worn but loosened in the lingering heat of the subway. Of stilettoed boots beating ambitious drumbeats against the pavement. Or it was before the wolf of COVID began to prowl the earth.

In this season of twilight the heart hungers for solace–and, brother, doesn’t Hollywood know it! Autumn’s the time for prestige pix, familiar weepies, and the gentling distance of nostalgia. If we’ve been very very lucky–and this year we are–we get a hum-fucking-dinger of a remake.

A Star is Born, 2018. 

That trailer went down like a swift shot of bourbon after dinner with the ex: you knew you wanted it, you just didn’t know how much. Reviews varied between delirious and effusive. Gaga’s the real deal (Screams rang through the air as Madonna twerks and weeps. . .) and Bradley Cooper pulled off a directorial debut that turns fox-eyed boys into legends.

I first saw the original version of A Star is Born when I was 20, visiting a boyfriend in Boston for Valentine’s weekend.  He had to work, so I slouched around his apartment and rustled my hangover up a meal before flicking on the tube. Rinky-dink music came through, then suddenly I was awash with the soft pastels of early technicolor and — with wonderful lack of fanfare — the 1937 version of A Star is Born began. (It’s marvelous, the abruptness with which 30s movies often begin and end: no goddamn esoteric images or bloated scrolls of laudatory credits. They just bloody well get on with it.)

Anyway, I settled down, plate of eggs and b. firmly on my lap, and for the next 90 minutes rinsed my psyche in those fairytale pastels, transmuting hangover into tears via the enviably simplicity, the inevitable cruelty, of this old, old story.

If you’re one of the twelve people on the planet who haven’t seen A Star is Born in one iteration or the other — there are two previous remakes*; the 1954 one into which Judy Garland sank her genius and her self-pity, and the 1976 crap-fest where Kris Kristofferson fell beneath the death-grip of  Streisand’s acrylics — start with the 1937 version. It’s grounded by the genius of Frederic March, a scabrous script by Dorothy Parker, and real insider events from the Hollywood of the time. This is early Selznick, when he was still capable of irony, before dexedrine and pomposity straitjacketed his abilities. In 1937 he was also still sumptuously married to Hollywood royalty Irene Mayer and Gone with the Wind was firmly in his future. (It would both deify and destroy him.)

You will find many who adore the ’54 Garland version of A Star is Born. Me, I find it almost agonizing to watch, due to Warner’s brutal cuts and Garland’s choice to play Blodgett as the most self-pitying codependent in cinematic history. At times this movie flickers into vivid life, however, the aching brilliance of what-might-have-been. And it does miraculously contain Garland’s and the American film musical’s greatest five minutes of song. This simply-staged number is sui generis and, like Garland herself, made of finer metal than Oscar’s gimcrack gleam any day.

Soon I’ll lay down a few little riffs on how A Star is Born came to be such a deliciously poisoned box of Hollywood bon-bons. But right now, darlings, it’s time for a few beauty treatments.

Janet Gaynor gettin' prettified.

*NOTE: There’s also a warm-up to the ASIB movie, 1932’s What Price Hollywood?–also Selznick produced, and well worth a gander.

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Judy Garland: The Blue Bird Has Flown

21 Monday Jun 2021

Posted by Dana D. Burnell in Drug Deaths, Golden Age Hollywood, Sex Symbols

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Celebrity Death, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Lana Turner, Overdose

Judy Garland Tribute

As a kid I watched her early movies—the cheesy faux-America Andy Hardy ones—on an old TV I stole from the attic. I had a special routine for watching Judy Garland (June 10, 1922-June 22, 1969): lying on my bed, propped up on my elbows and peeling a McIntosh apple with the rusted bean peeler from our kitchen. It was obvious that the pale, big-eyed girl was someone you like—compelling and astonishingly natural. No question that Andy Hardy’s other girls—Lana Turner and Esther Williams and the rest—were the sort that come and go, the ones a smart girl waits out. As Judy once said about Lana (in real life, after Lana married one of Judy’s crushes), “It’s like talking to a beautiful lamp.”

The non-Garland parts of the movies were unbearably cutesy. I’d wait for her while trying to peel my apple in one long string: If the McIntosh was too young, the tough red skin would break; if too old, it would crumble. In the final reel, Judy always got Mickey. Because if you had Judy Garland in your movie, you’d be an idiot not to have her voice be the last thing the audience hears. When the pale girl opened her mouth to sing, all that lace-curtained, smotheringly smug MGM crap fell by the wayside. It was an instrument for the ages—an infinitely flexible and sweet, sad soul massage.

And though Garland was tough, in the end she both broke and crumbled. Rotted a bit, too (self-pity marred her performances, from A Star is Born on). That astonishing core of talent saved her and damned her again and again. She went from being run out of small towns with her shamed father to joining the greatest studio in Hollywood, from skipping out on hotel bills to performing Carnegie Hall’s most legendary show ever. In her final weeks, she married a man no one much liked in a wedding no one showed up to (her daughter Liza promised, “I’ll go the next one, Mama”). Continue reading →

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Recent Posts

  • The Beauty of Your Youth: Clara Bow Receives a Kindness.
  • A Star is Born Part II: Backstory (& Foreshadowing)
  • A Star is Born, Again and Again
  • The Life of a Sex Zombie
  • Judy Garland: The Blue Bird Has Flown

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