Word: esther
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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...
...THIRTEENTH BED IN THE BALLROOM-Esther Haven Fonseca-Doubleday, Dor an ($2). An old Southern mansion makes a charming dormitory for young business women, but crystal chandeliers and romantic balconies lose their charm when two girls are found dead in the same ballroom...