Female success and male decline: what A Star Is Born tells us about fame, fear and feminism

Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper lead the latest incarnation of the films that have, since 1937, told a simple yet resonant story of life in the impossible spotlight

A man stands on the stage. The sun is setting on his career but he is – for now – still in the spotlight. He suddenly reaches out into the shadows and plucks a woman from the crowd. She takes the spotlight from him, and he self-destructs into oblivion.

Hollywood is built on remakes and reinventions, but the most interesting and certainly the longest-running of these first emerged more than a decade before the first Superman movie. A Star Is Born, which gets its fourth outing next week after months of ecstatic hype, is now 81 years old and has starred, in its various incarnations, increasingly improbable pairings: Janet Gaynor and Fredric March in the 1937 original; Judy Garland and James Mason in the 1954 remake; Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson in the 1976 version; and now Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga. Often described as a Pygmalion story, A Star Is Born is more like Cinderella, with the leading man playing not just the fairy godmother who gives the woman a makeover, but the prince who marries her and finally the wicked stepmother who needs to be destroyed so the woman can live happily ever after.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2xVdQuw