Judy Garland @ 100: "A Star Is Born"

Team Experience is revisiting nine Judy Garland movies for her Centennial. Here's Cláudio Alves on the star's first Oscar nomination.

A Star Is Born is Hollywood's favorite legend about itself, a mythic middle point between propaganda and self-critique filmed four different times from the 1930s to the 2010s. Five, if one considers George Cukor's What Price Hollywood? since that was likely the basis for the '37 version. Though flexible, the story remains mostly unchanged throughout its interpretations. Norman Maine, an alcoholic star on the decline, meets Esther Blodgett and immediately falls in love, with the woman and her undeniable talent. Opening doors for her in the entertainment industry, he watches as she's rebaptized Vicki Lester and rises to the top, far surpassing him. After their wedding and an awards night, whereupon Norman ruins Vicki's moment, she considers giving up her career to take care of him. Realizing this, he kills himself, intent on saving his beloved from his downfall. 

Though every A Star Is Born has its merits, the 1954 musical tends to be the consensus pick for the best iteration in no small part due to Judy Garland's performance in the titular role…

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Judy Garland @ 100: "Summer Stock"

Team Experience is revisiting nine Judy Garland pictures for her Centennial. Here's Nathaniel R on a troubled moment in time...

Judy Garland's enduring legend comes not just from her rightful title as "The World's Greatest Entertainer" but for her troubled offscreen life. It's not that sadness, addictions, tragedy, and/or an early demise should fascinate the public more than the work itself but the fact is that they often do (see also Clift, Monroe, Ledger, Dean, Leigh, and many other stars throughout history). Judy's struggles only make her incredibly transcendent work in concert halls and movie screens more jaw-dropping; you rarely see anything other than megawatt talent and professional magic. That isn't quite the case with Summer Stock (1950) which makes it an anomaly in her filmography. It's a rare curious glimpse at Garland in-and-out of her magic, like a flickering but gorgeous light. For a time it even threatened to be her final picture...

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Judy Garland @ 100: "The Pirate"

Team Experience is revisiting a dozen Judy Garland movies for her Centennial. Here’s Baby Clyde on her most infamous picture... 

Get Judy and Gene at the peak of their movie star appeal, allow Vincente Minnelli to go as ‘Vincente Minelli’ as he pleases, hire the world’s greatest songwriter to provide the tunes, script by the same team behind The Thin Man and It’s A Wonderful Life, sets by Cedric Gibbons, costumes by Irene, all presided over by the fabled Freed Unit. What could possibly go wrong?

The Pirate, that’s what. A great big glorious, Technicolor mess. And I love it...

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Judy Garland @ 100: 'Easter Parade'

Team Experience is revisiting a dozen Judy Garland movies for her Centennial. Here’s Mark Brinkerhoff on one of her most popular pictures...   

Judy Garland: physical comedienne. This may not be the descriptor that comes to mind when it comes to the one, the only, The Voice. But as superlatives go, it’s the one that fits like a dainty, sturdy little glove on the hand of a one-of-a-kind talent in her very prime.

At 26 (and newly a first-time mom to then-baby Liza), Garland, less than a decade removed from her superstar-making performance in The Wizard of Oz, was reemerging in MGM musicals with a proto-Barbra-Streisand-as-Fanny-Brice performance in what would become her second biggest hit of the ‘40s (following mega-musical, Meet Me in St Louis, four years earlier). Easter Parade is a Funny Girl period-adjacent set tale of a novice singer-dancer plucked from obscurity by a storied showman...

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Judy Garland @ 100: "Babes on Broadway"

Team Experience is revisiting a dozen Judy Garland movies for her Centennial. Here's Nathaniel R...

A behind the scenes shot of Judy's first scene in "Babes on Broadway". She's a fountain of tears in the scene but laughing between takes.

History has a way of shifting truth from facts to a more universally agreed upon fiction. Though The Wizard of Oz is now the movie most associated with Judy Garland, it was not as universally beloved in 1939 when it first premiered. Though it was ostensibly "a hit," the sixth highest grosser of Hollywood's most mythic year, it also carried the whiff of failure since its large budget prevented initial profits. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayor got a much much bigger immediate return on their Garland investment through her other 1939 musical. Babes in Arms (1939) opened just two months after Oz and proved a slightly bigger hit (again "at the time"). The Wizard of Oz proved that Judy could carry a massive picture all on her own but as follow up, the studio didn't get ambitious but reverted to the easier sell -- more "Mickey & Judy!'; Andy Hardy Meets Debutante (1940), Strike Up the Band (1940), Life Begins for Andy Hardy (1941) and today's topic Babes on Broadway (1942) followed... 

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