GarnettTeenage The film was still a fun one that will make you laugh and have you leaving the theater feeling like you just stole something valuable and got away with it.

FrogGlace In other words,this film is a surreal ride.

Micah Lloyd Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Janae Milner Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

jc-osms A star is reborn as Judy Garland returns to Hollywood after a four year absence for this headlining role where you can clearly see the woman in her replacing the young girl whose career started so spectacularly in "The Wizard Of Oz" some 15 years earlier. Yes we all know the story about the falling star coming into the orbit of the rising comet but played as convincingly as it is here and with marvellous song production numbers to boot, this really is almost a last hurrah for golden age Hollywood and all it stood for but at the same time it's adult themes of alcoholism and disintegrating marriage point forward to more a modern, sophisticated realism.We're properly introduced to Garland when she sings perhaps the ultimate torch song "The Man Who Got Away", with a powerhouse delivery which still doesn't overpower the song and immediately ensnares the ing ear of Hollywood legend Norman Maine, played with understated and underrated elan by James Mason. Yes, the movie plays Mason's alcoholism less like the disease we nowadays understand it to be today and more like an almost wilful career-choice done almost to attract attention by a fading yesterday man such as Maine.Wonderfully staged and sympathetically directed by George Cukor, Garland's musical numbers are vivacious and heartwarming apart from a hackneyed Vaudevillian medley of over-heard Jolson songs, the best of them for my money probably being Judy putting on a one-woman show for Norman in her own living room.Both leads you feel get right into their roles only very occasionally teetering into florid melodrama. Jack Carson and Ronald Bickford also deserve praise for their ing turns, the former as Maine's long suffering press agent who eventually has his day and the latter as the ive, nurturing film producer caught between both camps.Sure the ending is maybe slightly over the top as Maine makes the ultimate sacrifice for his wife but you'd have to be made of stone not to be affected by the final scene with Garland in close-up delivering one of the classic final lines you'll ever hear in any movie.This is a musical good enough to stand as a drama without its songs and with songs good enough to carry any other straight movie with even the flimsiest of story-lines. Put both these aspects together, mix in with convincing performances by the leading actors and a fine soundtrack and you really do have one of the very best musicals, indeed calling it just a musical is to somehow miss the point of a brave, ambitious and greatly rewarding film.

Smoreni Zmaj I have nothing against musicals. Story can be told by regular acting or through singing and dancing and both ways have their own charm. But when you make regular 90 minutes movie and then add same length of musical numbers that contribute to story only by extending the movie twice, you end up with 3 hours of agony. Although movie is great, I barely held until the end. It is remake of the 1937. movie of the same name with added musical numbers and if we cut out all of them it would have no impact on the story, but we would be deprived of fantastic singing. So, in my opinion, they should have interpreted the original story through singing and dancing instead of adding musical numbers to regular movie. They should have made 90 minutes or real musical that would keep our attention from beginning to the end. Like Moulin Rouge was done, for example...

kols The "restored" 1983 version is, well, I'll leave as a question mark.But not for myself - it doesn't work, adding little and destroying the pacing of the movie. By the time Mason headed for the Pacific I had my scissors out and did the same thing to 'Star' that Jefferson did to the Gospels. My version came in at well under two hours as I deleted all of the redundant scenes - like the three distinct reaction scenes to Mason's suicide. I cut from Mason striding into the ocean to Garland sitting, near hysterics while trying to come to with it.I'd always thought that even the 154 min. version was overlong so I made one to my taste, emphasizing the Mason/Garland relationship and, especially, Garland's knock-out performance.That's where the question mark comes in - my concept of the movie was based on many viewings of the 1954 version which I already considered over-long so, when I finally saw the 'restored' version on TCM a couple of days ago, most of the additional material seemed little more than pointless filler.At the same time I being excited about that 'restoration' when I first heard about it way back when. Never expected it to take 30 years to finally see it and have no idea how I would had reacted back in 1983.Bottom line, it's up to less prejudiced viewers to judge which, if either, is superior to the other. Or if they're co-equal.

Jeffrey Donahue Taken as a whole, this film is definitely not the classic that it is reputed to be. On the plus side, James Mason gives what may be the finest performance of his career, and that makes this film watchable. He effortlessly succeeds as a movie star playing a movie star, which is considerably more difficult than one might expect. If you don't believe me, watch Jack Palance play a movie star in The Big Knife. The story of A Star Is Born is excellent, although clumsily executed. The Technicolor cinematography is good, and Jean Louis does his usual excellent job of costume design. Judy Garland gives a fine performance and shows herself to be a strong singer, which leads us to the minus side. Judy does her best with the songs but the music score is flat, to put it mildly. There is no Rogers and Hammerstein or Andrew Lloyd Webber quality material here. The Roger Edens and Conrad Sallinger score for Meet Me in St. Louis completely blows the score for A Star Is Born away. If you enjoy hearing Judy sing, watch Meet Me in St. Louis or The Harvey Girls as those films showcases what she can do with good material. The other major defect of this film is poor artistic design. Being a big Hitchcock fan myself, I appreciate good sets and this film does not have them. The weak music score and poor sets for a musical are most likely the result of this film having been made at Warner Bros. instead of MGM. Warner simply did not have the right mix of talent necessary to do musicals; another excellent example of a Warner musical flop is Night and Day, where even Cole Porter songs can't save it. Warner could not pull off making a musical any more than MGM could ever pull off making a film noir. A Star is Born is still watchable. James Mason saw to that, but Judy Garland's performance is wasted by having forced her to sing poor music.