LYCOS RETRIEVER 
George Cukor: Star Is Born
built 629 days ago
In the summer of l953, George Cukor enthusiastically accepted Sid Luft and Judy Garland's offer to direct their new musical version of "A Star Is Born." "A Star Is Born" would be Cukor's first musical and ... his first picture in color. The tale of a doomed Hollywood couple, she on the way up while he on the way down, was a remake of the l937 film with Fredric March and Janet Gaynor, and it also resembled Cukor's "What Price Hollywood?" Cukor used his comedic skills to add some lightness to the story's more tragic elements.
Source:
In creating these different worlds, Cukor's style has the great virtue of rightness in relation to its subject, and he brought a strong but subtle freshness to existing genres. During the 50s, the adventurous location work on his New York movies (ADAM'S RIB, PAT AND MIKE, THE MARRYING KIND, IT SHOULD HAPPEN TO YOU) went almost unnoticed by reviewers. PAT AND MIKE and THE MARRYING KIND ... crossbreed fantasy and reality in a very original way but so unadvertised, like the location work, that hardly anyone commented on it. Again, in A STAR IS BORN, Cukor's dramatic use of CinemaScope (the only truly successful approach to that unfortunate shape), the hand-held camera scenes and quick, nervous against-the-rules cutting, were too naturally effective to be singled out for praise at the time. "Technique," Jean Renoir once said, "that's a terrible word in art! You have to have it, but so completely that you know how to disguise it."
Source:
Assigned to a new film project, Bhowani Junction, Cukor couldn't attend the premiere of "A Star Is Born." Hollywood has never seen anything like it: traffic blocked off for several streets on either side of the Pantages. The streets crawled with police officers and the sidewalks with spectators. On the roof of the Pantages, six enormous searchlights converged at a center, their beams forming an immense star that could be seen miles away. With more stars in attendance than in any other premiere, Cukor's absence was deeply felt.
Source:
In spite of his devotion to the dream and the dreamer, Cukor was realist enough to know that such liaisons are rare and fleeting. In A Star Is Born, the relationship of two larger-than-life actors--here played by James Mason and Judy Garland, in her best performance--begins in triumph but ends in abuse and finally suicide.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Star Is Born