Born Yesterday

[domino harvey]

From one of the truly legendary directors of the Hollywood’s golden era, George Cukor (My Fair Lady, The Philadelphia Story), comes the beloved comedy-classic Born Yesterday...

Judy Holliday (Bells Are Ringing) gives an unforgettable, Oscar-winning performance as Billie Dawn, the ‘dumb blonde’ girlfriend of corrupt millionaire junkyard tycoon Harry Brock (Broderick Crawford, All The Kings Men). A man with social ambitions, Harry is embarrassed by Billie’s uncouth behaviour and lack of social refinement, so he sends her on on a crash course in culture with young journalist Paul Verrall (William Holden, Network, The Bridge on the River Kwai). Billie proves to be an able student in lessons of life and love, whilst also becoming all too aware of her partners crooked business dealings. Emboldened by her new education, she stands up to Harry and his bad ways.

Acclaimed for its delectably witty screenplay (based on Garson Kanin's smash-hit Broadway production) Born Yesterday is a tour de force of comic acting, which boasts sizzling performances from its main players and pitch-perfect direction from Cukor. The film is presented here for the first time in stunning High Definition, with a selection of informative and entertaining extras.

SPECIAL EDITION CONTENTS

• High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) presentation transferred from original film elements

• Uncompressed Mono 1.0 PCM audio soundtrack

• Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• Yesterday Today, a newly-filmed video appreciation by film critic Geoff Andrew

• Remembering Judy Holliday, the academic Richard Dyer celebrates the Oscar-winning actress

• Da na na... BUH-BOOM!, a new video essay on the film by critic David Cairns

• Image gallery

• Original trailer

• Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Ignatius Fitzpatrick

FIRST PRESSING ONLY: Illustrated collector's booklet featuring new writing on the film by author Pamela Hutchinson

[Ribs]

I’m very happy I sold off my TT assuming Indicator would put this out! Were we aware Arrow’s got access to the Columbia library now too?

[domino harvey]

Yep, Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice

[rapta]

Yep, Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice

And Gas Food Lodging.

[domino harvey]

Based on the crickets here, I’m guessing no one bothered to pick this up and it has since gone quietly out of print like so many other Arrow titles. I revisited the film as a supplement to my greatly enjoyable journey through Foster Hirsch’s recent magnum opus on Hollywood cinema of the 50s (I highly recommend the audio book version, read by Hirsch himself, which clocks in at nearly 40 hours) and was a bit surprised to discover that while the Arrow boasts over an hour worth of newly commissioned extras, all three pieces essentially recycle the same information over and over (and, it’s worth noting, I’d already just heard all of this and more from Hirsch going in)! I don’t blame Arrow for still including all three extras since they paid for them, but this audience member wishes that once the first extra was completed, it was shared with the other two critics to ensure reduced redundancy. Also, while his work on the star system is without peer and I am sympathetic to Dyer’s free associative approach to discussing the film (one which I’m often guilty of myself), his interview often veers into ramble territory and badly needed an editor

[Drucker]

I did pick it up, but it's actually one of the very few films I sold off. I did not like this film at all, and I think excepting Sylvia Scarlett, I'm not sure there's any Cukor film I've really loved. I found Judy Holliday's performance extremely grating, and I don't remember laughing at all. I liked how it ended I suppose and it was somewhat uplifting, but I just found the film to be mostly annoying and not very funny.

[domino harvey]

I would say my revisit affirmed my memory, which is to say that I moderately enjoy the film for what it is-- but there's no possible way to enjoy it if you don't like Holliday, as that's what it is. Holden is just there to be a himbo (an allegedly scholarly one, but his grasp or understanding of intelligence seems to be wholly derived from an Intro to Civics course) and Crawford does what he can to make his burly lout believable and more than a caricature but the film pushes too far and any complexity or audience generosity can never recover from the moment he beats the shit out of Holliday (though the film also later states he murdered someone years before the actions of the narrative and he doesn't get caught or punished for it by the film's end, so I'm not sure how they got away with that one) and the script isn't really particularly funny

[Dr Amicus]

Have you seen the remake with Melanie Griffith, Don Johnson and John Goodman? It's years since I saw either version but remember it being quite pleasant, and (unlike our view of horror films) generally agree with Domino about the original. And I'm a Cukor fan.

[Randall Maysin Again]

In my admittedly limited experience, I can't stand Judy Holliday, at least in a starring role (I remember having a positive response to her in Adam's Rib, however.) And above all, Judy in It Should Happen to You, at least the part of that film I managed to watch, is truly intolerable. I know she's supposed to be delightful and her IQ in real life is like 200 or something but she is the personification of obnoxious inanity in that film, and the film itself is exactly the kind of puttering-around, taking-it-easy, inane "satire" that is extremely low, perhaps utterly bereft, of wit or actual charm or anything a comedic film might use to justify its existence, and that matches Judy's grating self-indulgent dullness only too perfectly. Are all of her starring vehicles like that?

[domino harvey]

She's charming as a switchboard operator in her last film, Bells Are Ringing. Haven't seen Cukor's the Marrying Kind but Bogdanovich thought it was her best work

Dr Amicus: I haven't. On paper, John Goodman as the loutish junk magnate boyfriend sounds like good casting, but Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith inspire far less optimism in me!

[Drucker]

Given the activity in this thread, maybe we should bump up 2 or 3 releases a week but only discs that have been out for over four years, which is about how long it takes to get to them given the kevips we all have.

[therewillbeblus]

Holliday is great in Richard Quine's The Solid Gold Cadillac but I think even those repelled by her screen presence might enjoy her here, since the film's central conceit plays up how her offbeat characteristics are at-odds with everyone around her!

[senseabove]

With the caveat, I guess, that I love Holliday, that picking a top three and only three Cukor would be an impossible task for me, and that I could fill a top 10 with movies I unabashedly love and still have leftovers... The Marrying Kind is certainly a less broad performance (and one of Cukor's most underrated or at least underseen films, imo). While still playing into the situational comedy of early marriage's frustrated expectations, it takes a pretty dark turn, allowing Holliday the space for a more nuanced, comparatively naturalistic performance that doesn't hang entirely on the comedy of her unique—for better or for worse—delivery. Born Yesterday is probably my least-favorite of her Cukor collaborations, fwiw—wouldn't even be a leftover on that hypothetical top 10, though I do remember genuinely enjoying it. Also a fan of Cadillac, though it's another it's been too long since I've seen.

[JakeStewart]

I remember thinking it was okay, not great, and curiously lacking in feeling for a Cukor film. Holliday is great as always, but Holden is dull and Crawford completely over-the-top. I much prefer the later Cukor-Holliday pairing It Should Happen to You.

[therewillbeblus]

Cukor's The Women doesn't get mentioned enough. It's his best film after Holiday

[senseabove]

And half of his 50s work would be ahead of it for me! The run from A Life of Her Own to Heller in Pink Tights has some tragically underseen gems—even as I recognize some of them, like Les Girls, are only going to work if you're, like me, already in the bag—and hopefully one day I'll be able to stop boosting The Model and the Marriage Broker as, like The Marrying Kind, an underappreciated Cukor, with a great central, leading performance from Thelma Ritter. It apparently did get a restoration that screened at TCM Fest, iirc, but it'll never have a reputation significant enough for Criterion to claw it from the Disney vaults, them being the only label that can.

[Red Screamer]

For me, the fault in this film lies primarily with Garson Kanin, surely one of the more unpleasant figures in this era of Hollywood to have a signature on multiple something-like classics. Both here and in It Should Happen to You, he does his best to ruin whatever pleasure one might get from Holliday’s freewheeling goofiness with condescension, supplying her with lectures from a male intellectual who’s trying to fix her. The lack of tonal control, as domino mentioned, and lame caricatures are also well on display in his similarly unfunny The Awful Truth retread My Favorite Wife. And since his only Cukor collaborations I really like, The Marrying Kind and Adam’s Rib—creative genre hybrids that work and show a sweetness incompatible with his other writing—were co-written with Ruth Gordon, I’d attribute some heavy lifting to her there (though I never got the love Haskell, Bogdanovich, et al. have for Pat and Mike).

[domino harvey]

I’ll third the Solid Gold Cadillac too, but more for the incredible array of That Guys serving on the board in the film than Holliday in particular. And I’ll share the displeasure of Pat and Mike, an unpleasant and unfunny comedy that is easily be the worst of the famous Hepburn/Tracy pairings.

Fun fact about It Should Happen to You: it was one of Chabrol’s favorite films (and he named it the best film of 1954, over Cahiers favorites like Touchez pas au grisbi, El, the Blue Gardenia, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, among others!)— I see I gave it three stars on Letterboxd but I must confess I remember nothing about it!

[Randall Maysin Again]

Wow, that tidbit of yours...corresponds with absolutely nothing I've ever seen, read, watched, know, or heard about Claude Chabrol! Maybe I should finish that film to try to find out what the heck he liked about it, but I just found it insipid and witless to the point of being intolerable. What a strange mystery.