 Starring: Judy Holliday, William Holden, Broderick Crawford
Director: George Cukor
Year Of Release: 1950
Plot: Multi-millionaire scrap dealer Harry Brock arrives in Washington determined to buy himself some influence in Congress. He brings along his long-suffering fiancée, Billie, a woman he has little respect for, other than wanting her to look pretty and unwittingly hold most of his wealth in her name so he can avoid tax. However when Harry hires journalist Paul to try and stop Billie being so dumb when she’s in company, he gets far more than he bargained for. |
1950's Born Yesterday is from the golden age of the romantic comedy, when they weren’t just about people you’d quite like to punch in the face, who aren’t able to get it together because they’re too stupid to be allowed to live. Back in the 40s and 50s, romantic comedies were about something. So you had Adam’s Rib, about sexual equality, or Mr Smith Goes To Washington and Born Yesterday, both of which are as much about Washington corruption as anything else.
Born Yesterday is a great film, largely because of Judy Holliday’s fantastic performance as dumb blonde Billie Dawn. Playing brainless broads was Holliday’s speciality, and as she was fond of saying, it takes a smart person to play dumb and keep it interesting, and she certainly shows that in Born Yesterday. Indeed Holliday won the Best Actress Oscar for the film.
However, while it’s just about possible you may have seen her in Born Yesterday (although it’s not half as widely viewed as it ought to be), and maybe in her supporting role in Adam’s Rib - both of which were directed by the wonderful George Cukor - other than that Judy Holliday is almost completely forgotten (although if you’re a full on classic movie fan, you may have seen It Should Happen To You or Bells Are Ringing, although I’d be impressed if you had).
Unlike some other actresses, Holliday’s lack of other classic roles isn’t really her fault, as she was a rather tragic figure. Only a couple of years after she shot to Hollywood fame with Adam's Rib and Born Yesterday, she was made the subject of a secret FBI investigation and was then called before Joseph McCarthy’s House On Unamerican Activities Committee as part of the Communist witch-hunts of the 50s. She was asked to name Commies in showbuiness and about any organisations she was a member of or had affiliations with. While unlike many others she managed to avoid being completely blacklisted – and a later investigation found her blameless of any ties to Communism – after she’d been called to testify, most people in Hollywood didn’t want to touch her, and she made very few more movies.
While she continued to work on the Broadway stage, and won the Tony Award for Best Actress (Musical) for Bells Are Ringing in 1957, her film career was pretty much curtailed due to guilt by association (her final movie was recreating her Bells Are Ringing stage role in a 1960 screen version, but it was one of only six movies she got to make after her Oscar winning turn in Born Yesterday).
If it wasn’t bad enough being unfairly targeted by Joseph McCarthy and made a pariah due to the Senator’s obsession with destroying civil liberties because he thought he saw communists everywhere he looked, Holliday’s life then took an even more tragic turn. (I promise I’ll do a Movie-A-Day on the Communist witch-hunts one day, although it’s probably best to wait for an Elia Kazan film for that, as it’s with him that things got really interesting).
In 1960 she was diagnosed with cancer, and then spent the next five years very slowly losing her battle against the disease. To compound that, many of her plays in her final years were flops and she was involved in an unhappy romance with a musician. She died in 1965 at the age of only 44. It really is a horribly tragic story for an actress who showed so much promise but has now been largely forgotten.
However while Holliday’s story is one of a great talent battered into the ground, she’s part of a relatively long list of actresses who were once very famous but have now either been virtually forgotten, or their names remain well known but nobody watches their films. For example, far more people nowadays remember Rita Hayworth as a poster on Andy Dufresne’s wall in the Shawshank Redemption than because they’ve seen Gilda or Cover Girl. Similarly, if you ask people who Lana Turner is, more people will probably be able to tell you that hookers got cut to look like her in LA Confidential than that she was the star of the original The Postman Always Rings Twice and The Bad and the Beautiful.
Likewise, Mae West has become a series of saucy witticisms rather than one of the most trailblazing women of the 20th Century, who conquered both Broadway and Hollywood, writing her own plays and films, and challenging society on all fronts, particularly in regards to female sexual emancipation. Her films are credited with single-handedly saving the debt-ridden Paramount in the early 30s, but how many people nowadays have seen She Done Him Wrong, My Little Chickadee or I’m No Angel?
That said, if you’re gonna be remembered for saucy witticisms, at least she had some good ones, such as “A hard man is good to find,” “When I'm good, I'm very good. But when I'm bad, I'm better”, and “Marriage is a great institution. I'm not ready for an institution”. She also originated the oft-paraphrased quip, “Is that a pistol in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?". However her career was foreshortened by the introduction of the Production Code (see the Movie-A-Day articles on The Blue Angel and Born To Be Bad for more info on how that effected Hollywood).
When the Code was enforced in the mid-30s, it stamped down on anything sexually forthright, which was of course what West had made a career out of. After a few years where she milked the controversy around her films for all it was worth, she got fed up with having to tone herself down for the screen and made very few films after the late 30s. As she said, “It's hard to be funny when you have to be clean.”
Other actresses like Rosalind Russell, Greer Garson, Dorothy Dandridge, Joan Fontaine, Norma Shearer, Loretta Young and Carole Lombard were also once incredibly famous, but have now been virtually forgotten. Even someone as lengendary as Greta Garbo is more likely to be known to people nowadays from photographs and because of the quote “I vant to be alone”, than because they’ve seen any of her films (the quote comes from 1932’s Grand Hotel, but it later became shorthand for the fact that she completely turned her back on Hollywood in the early 1940s and rarely made public appearances again). However, at least the likes of the wonderful Ninotchka, Queen Christina and Camille show up on TV every so often.
I do find it surprising how many actresses who were once incredibly famous can go through their entire career and not make a movie that’s an unabashed classic which is still watched widely today (and I’m sure there are many men for whom the same thing can be said, and there are a lot more classic Hollywood actresses whose fame currently rests on only one or two movies that have stood the test of time). It just makes you wonder who of today’s A-list will suffer the same fate.
If you think it won’t happen to today’s crop, just think of Goldie Hawn, who was one of the biggest female stars of the 70s and 80s. Can you really imagine that any of her movies will be widely watched in another 20 or 30 years, considering how much they’ve faded from view already? And how about Melanie Griffith (before the giant lips), who even starred in a remake of Born Yesterday in 1992 opposite John Goodman and Don Johnson, but whose films have mostly fallen from view already? Even Angelina Jolie is still waiting for a role that will win her lasting fame, as I’ll put money on the fact nobody’s going to be watching Tomb Raider or Wanted in 2050.
While Hollywood history is littered with actresses who have either been almost completely forgotten or who are now known as a name only rather than because many people watch their films, few can be as tragic as poor Judy Holliday. However as most of these actresses’ films deserve to be watched by far more people, I salute them all.
TIM ISAAC
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