Born Yesterday ***** (1950, Judy Holliday, Broderick Crawford, William Holden) – Classic Movie Review 1307

Director George Cukor’s 1950 comedy classic stars the scintillating Judy Holliday, who won a Best Actress Oscar as Billie Dawn, the delightfully ditzy showgirl mistress of brash and boorish millionaire junk-metal dealer Harry Brock (Broderick Crawford) .

He brings her to Washington DC, where he tries to bribe a Congressman into passing legislation that will allow his business to make even more money. When Billie’s ignorance becomes a liability to Brock’s business dealings, he hires handsome journalist Paul Verrall (William Holden) to give her speech and grammar tuition.

She soon falls in love with her bookish teacher, learns just how corrupt the tycoon is and eventually proves herself the genuinely clever one when she outwits him in his plans to bribe the Congressman.

Cukor brings Garson Kanin’s delightfully witty stage play to the screen intact and Holliday is sensational re-creating her Broadway role as the quintessential screen dumb blonde. Crawford and Holden are outclassed but they are entirely solid, and admittedly they have the rough end of the deal as the piece’s focus is entirely on the woman.

The movie has stayed fresh and funny over the years. Certainly it is far, far more of a treat than director Luis Mandoki’s 1993 watchable but misconceived remake with Melanie Griffith, Don Johnson and John Goodman.

Holliday also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture Actress – Musical or Comedy. There were four other Oscar nominations for Best Costume Design – Black-and-White, Best Director, Best Picture and Best Screenplay.

The film is produced and released by Columbia Pictures, who wanted their big star Rita Hayworth to replace Holliday in the part but Cukor held out for Holliday, though the studio did succeed in replacing the play’s original theatre stars Paul Douglas and Gary Merrill with Crawford and Holden.

The play opened on February 4 1946 on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre where it ran till November 6 1948. It  transferred to Henry Miller’s Theatre on November 9 1948 and closed on December 31 1949, after a total of 1642 performances. A Broadway revival in 1989 with Edward Asner and Madeline Kahn ran only 153 performances. A second Broadway revival with Jim Belushi as Harry Brock, Nina Arianda as Billie Dawn and Robert Sean Leonard as Paul Verrall opened at the Cort Theatre for previews 31 March 2011 and ran for only 28 previews and 73 performances.

The screenplay is credited to Albert Mannheimer but Kanin’s autobiography says that Cukor thought Mannheimer’s screenplay lost much of the play’s value, so he got Kanin to re-write it though, because of legal issues, Kanin could not receive screen credit. Kanin also originally directed the play on stage.

Apparently, Columbia’s production chief Harry Cohn knew that Kanin had based the uncouth junk dealer Harry Brock on him but was not bothered by it.

British film magazine Picturegoer awarded the film its Seal of Merit, but warned its readers that Holliday’s character is ‘from New York’s East Side, and speaks in a baby Bronx voice that is like the tinkling of many tiny, tuneless cymbals.’

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1307

Link to Derek Winnert’s home page for more film reviews: http://derekwinnert.com/

The White House Sightseeing bus as seen in the film.

Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon.

Kanin was married to the actress Ruth Gordon. Here they are in 1946.