A Star Is Born

A farm girl named Esther Blodgett comes to Hollywood, takes the name Vicki Lester, and rises just as the matinee idol who discovered her, Norman Maine, begins to fall. William A. Wellman’s 1937 original — the first and still the leanest of the four major A Star Is Born films — is a Technicolor fable about fame eating its own. Wellman, who a decade earlier had won the first Best Picture Oscar with Wings and then hardened into the director of The Public Enemy and Wild Boys of the Road, here turns his unsentimental eye on the factory that made stars. Janet Gaynor (already a silent-era legend from Sunrise) and Fredric March play the couple with surprising tenderness; the premiere, the radio broadcast, and Maine’s walk into the surf became instant Hollywood myth. Wellman and Robert Carson won the Oscar for Original Story. A studio picture with a reporter’s bite.