SID & JUDY - BFI London Film Festival 2019

SID & JUDY is a masterfully edited and constructed documentary about the latter half of Judy Garland's career, as seen through the autobiography of her third husband Sid Luft.  He meets and marries her shortly after her ignominious sacking from MGM, addicted to pills, with a reputation of being unreliable.  So young to be seemingly on the scrapheap, Luft masterminds her return to the big screen in the Warner Brothers funded remake of A STAR IS BORN (reviewed here).  It's so iconic now that it's easy to forget that it was a financial failure, and Garland famously didn't win the Oscar for it.  The wonder of this film is to show us how talented Judy was, despite the fact that Luft continued to enable her with drugs.  The director, Stephen Kijak, contrasts the various versions of its most famous number - recorded multiple times over many months because Warners switched to Cinemascope mid-way through the shoot. You see Judy's stamina - her ability to hit her mark - but also her subtle versatility in performance. You also get to know and admire Sid's honesty and sardonic wit. He's scathing about his own willingness to enable her drug use to get the film done, and it's so sad to realise how much he really did love her, and try to get her off drugs. At his wits end, he pretends to leave her - she calls the press, and the lawyers tell him to take the way out - but he tells us they don't realise he's in love with her.

After the STAR flop, Luft reinvents Judy as a touring extravaganza, with sell-out shows in Carnegie Hall and the London Palladium and every great venue in between, and finally gets her the CBS TV show. But by this time, she's being manipulated and defrauded by her new agents, and Sid is cut out of her life.  The story continues through the highs and lows of her TV show to her death. Even then you feel Sid still loved her. You also feel the tragedy of her life - her scathing self-mockery, her anger, her desperation to be more than just Dorothy, or the Man That Got Away, or The Trolley Song, for people. I was truly chilled by the denouement.

That I should feel so completely invested in this documentary is down to the skill of the director in recreating her story in a way that felt so vivid and immersive. He cleverly intercuts TV and film footage from the time, so we hear a lot of Judy herself in interviews. But we also get a really superb set of  voice performances from Jon Hamm and Jennifer Jason Leigh as Sid and Judy respectively. Indeed, it's ironic that as Renee Zellweger is doing lots of PR for her new take on Judy, it's probably Jason Leigh who gets the closest to this brilliant, fragile, angry, funny, complicated woman.

SID & JUDY has a running time of 95 minutes. It will be shown on US TV on October 18th. It will play the BFI London Film Festival, but it does not yet have a commercial release date for the UK.

A STAR IS BORN (1954)

The second version of the 1954 is also my second favourite - but almost by average. Inside this sprawling 154 minute song and dance extravaganza there's a beautifully acted tragic drama of around 90 minutes of equal quality and perhaps greater satirical scorn than the 1937 original. James Mason as the alcoholic jaded star Norman Maine is just as tragic as Fredric March's original, and perhaps moreso - there's just something particular in the hang-dog way he carries himself in the iconic awards ceremony scene that's utterly heartbreaking.  This film also goes far further in satirising the Hollywood machine.  There's a scene in which Judy Garland is made over by the press department - told her face is all wrong - which must have cut very close to the bone for an actress who struggled with her self-image and weight and fed pills since she was a teenager to keep her weight in check. 

The problem is that surrounding all this drama are a handful of Judy Garland song-and-dance numbers. This is an interesting break with the original where we occasionally saw the renamed Vicky Lester act, but sort of took her breathtaking talent as read.  In this version, we are very much invited to indulge in the talent of Judy Garland playing herself.  the problem is that, for me at least, the numbers by Arlan and Gershwin just don't hold up.   "The Man That Got Away" remains an absolute heart-breaker of a torchsong but the other setpieces just aren't memorable. You watch one to remind yourself of just how good Garland is, but after that - well, I'm sorry to say I hit the fast forward button - especially during a 15 minute medley that finishes the first half of the film.

The result is a film that doesn't hold up as well as the original because the music and format date it - hold up the story we actually care about - and distract from the central tragedy of Norman Maine.  It's a film desperately in need of an edit and I am thoroughly unsurprised that the studio tried to hack it down, and that it proved a commercial flop on its initial release. That said, if you find the right scenes, does make an emotional impact, and hues very close to the original, with many lines transposed directly from one to the other.  James Mason deserved an Oscar.  

THE 1954 VERSION OF A STAR IS BORN HAS A RUNNING TIME OF 154 MINUTES.