A Star is Born (1976)

I saw this movie in a theater 40 years ago when it was new. I didn’t remember much about it. I saw the original March - Gaynor more recently a couple of times. It’s a good story which is why it keeps getting remade. I’ve never watched the Judy Garland movie. And now Lady Gaga has one in the can about to be released. One for every generation I guess.
But this Kris Kristofferson - Barbra Streisand version showed up on Netflix and I decided to give it a go because I had not recalled anything negative about it. I’m glad I watched it again.

First off, all the singing in this movie is live. The audio of the voice is recorded at the same time as the picture. This adds enormous depth to the singer’s performance as opposed to the industry standard of pre-recording and lip sync on screen. I don’t like lip sync at all. It always looks fake to me. How can the performer really express showing physical emotion coming from their body if they are mostly attempting to move their lips in time with a recording they made sometime before? This is the worst thing that the movies have done with singing performers. It just makes them look foolish and pathetic, not powerful and present as they should.

It makes singing performers look ridiculous. It is a cheap insult to the audience to since it never really had to be done that way, it’s just easier.

(An example of how bad music and lip syncing can be in a movie can be seen in a movie of a couple years before this one with songs written by a contributor to this movie. That is The Phantom of the Paradise. It a pretty bad campy movie to begin with directed by a third stringer, but the very sloppy lip syncing is the worst I have ever seen. It’s like they don’t even try. Too busy doing lines of cocaine I guess. I never watched this movie before about a year ago. It is not at all good. It’s not even bad-good.)

But here we have a really well done version of the old Hollywood story and the power of Streisand’s live singing at the peak of her abilities makes it a very good movie. The singing in the movie is not like a conventional musical where the characters can’t help but sing. The story is about professional performers so the songs are on stage or in scenes in which one is playing a new song to another.
The Kris Kristofferson - Barbra Streisand relationship is believable because that both are appealing and sexy. Kris Kristofferson looks the part of a rock star even if his music doesn’t quite fit. The melodramatic aspects of the story are not at all overplayed.

The style of the movie is not far from the New Hollywood cinema of the post Easy Rider period. A Star is Born comes of as a New Hollywood musical complete with one of the period’s major directors, Paul Mazursky, in an acting role. It is not at all overly glamorous and this adds to the believability of the show.

This is a really well done movie.