TCM at 12:30am: George Cukors BORN YESTERDAY (1950). The fable of a kept chorus girl who blossoms into a feminist intellectual within the shadows of congressional Washington never quite achieved the stature of a national myth, but it is a captivating enough entertainment to have served as a prophetic precursor to the 70s ERA movement. As Henry Higgins to Judy Hollidays Pygmalion, William Holden is a key catalyst as a civilized cynic who infiltrates a menagerie every bit as wild and wooly as that of the same years SUNSET BOULEVARD. He also admirably underplays within a direction that is extraordinarily broad for Cukor. Holliday and Broderick Crawfords scrap-metal magnate scream at each other just a shade too stridently in roles that she and Paul Douglas reportedly conveyed more feelingly on the stage. Judy, nonetheless, is flagrantly fetching in the kind of outsized role that wins Oscars and did so in this case. She was the star in a melodrama that was equally a democratic thesis engendered by bitterness toward entrepreneurs who benefitted from World War II, but she was more of a subtle and moving actress when modulating Ruth Gordon joined the Cukor and Garson Kanin team for ADAMS RIB and THE MARRYING KIND.
Posted on: Sun, 01 Jun 2014 01:15:24 +0000
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