WHAT PRICE HOLLYWOOD (1932)

With a reborn STAR IS BORN out, here’s a look at the original iteration, a sort of proto-STAR IS BORN with Constance Bennett as the fast-rising star (discovered while waitressing at Hollywood’s Brown Derby restaurant) and the role of fast-fading alcoholic/ romantic partner split in two for Lowell Sherman, superb as her doomed mentor/director, and Neil Hamilton, given little to do as a polo playing millionaire/lover who resents coming second to her career. Dividing this role makes everything less melodramatic, but also leaves less at stake. Conceptually, there’s something smart in having Bennett’s fall come out of public gossip on decent behavior toward a desperate friend. And the suicide itself is a remarkable bit of film legerdemain. (Apparently the work of montage whiz Slavko Vorkapich.) Technically, the whole film remains wonderfully alive, a first pairing for still new R.K.O. Production Head David O. Selznick & director George Cukor, fresh from Paramount. And Cukor comes thru, supported by Charles Rosher's cinematography, with his first film to feel freed from the stage floor. Bennett, usually glamorous & artificial, is very good here, but it’s Sherman’s pic. Funny, in a saturnine manner for the first half, he’s even more powerful in decline. And heartbreaking as he confesses to Bennett that there’s nothing left to save. Meanwhile, out in the real world, alcoholism leading him in two years to a premature death from pneumonia at 46. The film, even in its failings, is real deal Hollywood.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: The story, largely from top Hearst news reporter Adela Rogers St. John, still has people guessing who it’s based on. So much drunk talent in Hollywood! Was it Mary Pickford director Marshall Neilan, just fired from her last film, SECRETS? Or John McCormick, producer/husband of hoydenesque silent star Colleen Moore. She’s the one who’d answer the phone ‘This is Mrs. John McCormick,’ giving A STAR IS BORN it’s famous last line. Ironically, McCormick's last credit, FOOTLIGHTS AND FOOLS/’29, co-starred Moore with a young Fredric March who would play the McCormick inspired fading star in 1937's A STAR IS BORN. And, of course, there’s Lowell Sherman himself . . . or his equally alcoholic brother-in-law John Barrymore to figure in. (Barrymore’s great friend, and eventual biographer, Gene Fowler co-wrote the screenplay.) Even this film’s blandly handsome romantic lead, Neil Hamilton, nearly drank himself out of a career long before finding new popularity in the ‘60s as Commissioner Gordon in the campy BATMAN tv series.

DOUBLE-BILL: Never been much of a fan of A STAR IS BORN 1937, but Cukor’s 1954 remake with Judy Garland, James Mason and those Arlen/Gershwin songs is, in spite of obvious flaws, a legit legend for all sorts of reasons.