Garson Kanin wrote and directed the play to great acclaim. He would also write the screenplay which George Cukor would direct after the property was purchased by Harry Cohn for his Columbia Pictures. The two desperately wanted Holliday to repeat her role but the tyrannical Cohn was adamantly opposed to hiring Holliday to repeat her role, saying he would not have some fat ass like her headlining so prestigious a movie. Of course, he favored his cash cow, Rita Hayworth, as Billie.
To level the playing field here for a moment, Holliday was an unproven movie talent. She had appeared in three films for 20th Century Fox in the mid-40s. Two had no dialogue and none caused any momentum in her movie career so she returned to Broadway.
Cukor and Kanin were at MGM about to begin Adam's Rib (1949) with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. The secondary female role, that of an attempted murderess, had not been filled when they decided to cast Holliday. Their hope was that she would be so good and attract so much attention that Cohn would have little choice but to cast her in Born Yesterday. As it turned out, she was more than simply good in the role and attracted much attention but not so much from Cohn.
What no one had anticipated was that Hepburn would pick up Holliday's cause. She, too, was a great friend of Cukor and Kanin's and she thought Holliday was a brilliant comedienne. Hepburn went to work on Cohn, got him to watch Adam's Rib and we know how this all worked out.
Cohn was, however, immovable about casting Broderick Crawford
as Harry Brock. Not only was he under contract to Columbia but he had just won a best actor Oscar for All the King's Men for the studio, with the picture winning as well. Cohn's thinking was quite logical here although I think Paul Douglas would have been better. Though the Harry Brock character barks orders, is impatient, demeans everyone around him, gets physical and is an uneducated slob, Crawford hadn't a scintilla of humor in him. Douglas would have been better because, although he had some of the same brutish ways that Crawford had, Douglas always had a ready wink... and this was a comedy, right?
William Holden was also under contract to Columbia (and Paramount, as well, in an unusual dual deal) and came cheap. He had appeared in a slew of light romantic comedies and westerns in the 1940's but was just being taken more seriously by Born Yesterday's release in 1950. As Paul Verrall, his tutoring Billie to be a sophisticate had unforeseen results for Brock when Billie and Paul fall in love. And of course Paul is firm that Billie should walk out on the abusive Brock.
Before that happens and after Brock slaps her around, Billie delivers her ultimate counter punch. Billie and Brock had some legal arrangement whereby all his financial holdings were listed as hers. Anytime he wanted big money, Billie would have to sign a release for the funds. No longer the uneducated ex-chorus girl, Billie knew she had the power to tame Brock if not ruin him.
As an avid card player myself, I dearly loved the gin rummy scene between Holliday and Crawford, clearly the funniest in the film. The lady was absolutely hysterical. I had another good laugh when Holliday, upon meeting Holden, asks him if he's a gigolo. The fun is that in the actor's other big film the same year, Sunset Blvd., that's exactly what he was.
When the Broadway show was so successful and there was talk of Hollywood wanting to buy the film, Harry Cohn's name came up the most. Kanin was known to have said I wouldn't sell it to that s.o.b. for a million dollars. And yet that is exactly the amount it cost Cohn for the rights... at the time the highest sum Hollywood ever paid for a Broadway production. Cohn came to love the film, praising it to the heavens, and never realizing that Kanin based the Harry Brock character on him.
More fame would come to the film at Oscar time. Holliday would be nominated for best actress as would Gloria Swanson in Sunset Blvd, and Bette Davis for All About Eve. All three were considered giant performances and Oscar couldn't believe its good fortune in one year. As it turned out, Holliday and Swanson (and Kanin) were watching the show together in New York. I have never particularly shared the celebrated view of Sunset Blvd. because I thought Swanson was so over-the-top, despite the fact, mind you, that her character is supposed to be over-the-top. I thought it was a hammy performance played by a silent screen actress who was still using her training and tricks from that long-ago time.
Conversely, to this day I regard Davis' performance of Margo Channing in All About Eve was one of the best female performances EVER, and she was robbed of her third Oscar. Holliday came away the winner, largely judged as one of Oscar's greatest upsets. She was, however, divine.
Surprisingly not bad I remember reading once about this 1993 remake and that was my assessment as well. I could even add that I rather enjoyed it. It's far from perfect, mind you, but it was better than a helluva lot of remakes. It also stars three actors who filled their roles most effectively. What is surprising, at least to me, is that it took 43 years to do a remake of such a hit movie.
By and large this film stuck pretty close to the original. Some differences are the Brock is no long in the junk business but rather the construction business. Whereas the first film takes place entirely in a large hotel suite, this one is opened up more and action takes place outside of that one set. While doing so, we are introduced to more characters in the form of those political hacks that Brock wants to impress. And of course, being 1993, there's a whole lot of cursing.
I think it was remade because (then) husband and wife team, Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson, were looking for another project they could do together after the touching family drama, Paradise, in 1991.
Like Holden before him, Johnson dons a pair of glasses and looks handsome and sexy. Goodman lends a bit more versatility to Brock than one-note Crawford did. He still plays the lout because that's what the part requires but he also seemed to remember he was making a comedy.
Griffith was brave to take a role that is so identified with another actress and one who nabbed an Oscar for it. Still, I don't think it was a stretch for Griffith to inhabit an airhead role since she had done it a number of times before. Holliday played Billie with that shrill voice that sounds like she's auditioning for a Damon Runyon play. Griffith brings her standard breathy schoolgirl to the piece. Isn't this role a precursor to Working Girl in some ways... ditzy or ordinary girl smartens up and makes good? The critics love to makes mincemeat of this actress but I've always enjoyed her.
Obviously, if one only had a chance to see one of these two versions, the 1950 one is the way to go.
Next posting:
50's beefcake
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