Word: esther
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Star Is Born (United Artists) starts by making the point that one girl in a hundred thousand who go to Hollywood to be stars becomes one. It then examines the career of the exception-Esther Victoria Blodgett (Janet Gaynor) who, the day she arrives on the Coast, financed by her grandmother's nest egg, tiptoes into the outer lobby of Grauman's Chinese Theatre and stands tremulously in the cement footprints of her favorite actor, Norman Maine. From this point on, the story of A Star Is Born does not differ in superficial outline from the story that...
...does differ-as Esther Blodgett is supposed to differ from her competitors-in essentials. Trenchantly directed by William Wellman who, with Robert Carson, conceived the story from which Carson, Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell wrote the screen play, handsomely photographed in the Technicolor which its producer, David Oliver Selznick, is pioneering with increasingly fortunate results, it emerges as a brilliant, honest and unfailingly exciting picture which, in the welter of verbiage about Hollywood heretofore contributed by stage and screen, stands as the last word and the best...
...until, with three weeks rent due at her boardinghouse, she gets a job as waitress at a party given by Producer Oliver Niles (Adolphe Menjou), does Esther encounter her hero in the flesh. By this time, like the rest of Hollywood, she is aware that Norman Maine (Fredric March) is an habitual drunkard whose dipsomaniac pranks are an intolerable nuisance or an aspect of his charm, depending on the point of view. To Esther, whom Maine accosts in the kitchen, escorts home and brings to the studio for a screen test, they are presumably the latter. To Niles...
Maine's elopement with Esther, by this time rechristened Vicki Lester, is the prelude to an ecstatic honeymoon in a trailer...
...pressagent at Santa Anita race track, are related with superlative detachment. They lead up to the climactic scene in which sunset on the Pacific-a magnificent shot which is possibly the best individual justification of Technicolor yet seen on the screen-tempts Maine to an appropriately exhibitionistic suicide, leaving Esther to a Hollywood funeral in which an admirer steals her veil...