BORN YESTERDAY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 662, 14 March 1952, Page 14

BORN YESTERDAY

(Columbia) HIS is the film which won an Academy Award for Judy Holliday but, when you come to think of it} it would have been a lot more remarkable if it hadn’t. Miss Holliday, who has the figure of an odalisque-and a stage voice like a buzz-saw-rasped her way into the hearts of the critics on the evening of February 4, 1946, when this Garson -Kanin comedy first opened in New York. It ran for something over 1600 performances, and so far as I have been able to discover Miss Holliday ran the course with it, so you might say she not merely created the role of the guileless blonde Billie Dawn; for all practical purposes she monopolised it. Anyone else in the part would have been the sheerest ersatz. Practice makes perfect, of course, up to a point, and laying one hand solemnly on my heart (and the other carefully on my good ear), I can swear that to the best of my knowledge and belief Judy Holliday has not passed that point yet. | Five years of overwork have not dulled | the serrated edges of her accent or im- | paired the stridency of her delivery. Her first line-the monosyllable "Wha-a-a-at?" complete with supersonics-will set your eardrums ringing and the vibrations will not subside to anything like normal frequency so long as she is within earshot. Indeed, so far as her interpretation of the part’ goes, Miss Holliday is a little bit too true to be good-for a New Zealand audience at any rate. The dialect of New York’s East Side is, for us, half way to a foreign language and when you > get it in a shrill fortissimo you are bound to lose a little of the sensehowever funny’ the total effect may be. And since this is a careful reproduction of a stage-play, in which dialogue plays an unusually important part, you can’t afford to lose much. By careful listening I got almost all of it, but one or two good lines (including ‘one that .reminds most people of Eliza Doolittle’s classic boner in Pygmalion) were quite obscured by Judy’s atmospherics. For those who are unfamiliar with the plot, the principal characters are the dizzy blonde Billie (I cannot bring myself to call her dumb), an uncouth and unscrupulous millionaire junkman (Broderick Crawford) whose mistress she is, and’ a Washington journalist (William Holden). Harry the junkman has come to Washington to put pressure on a Senator and conscious of Billie’s inadequacies as a hostess he foolishly hands her over to the journalist for some intellectual grooming. And education just goes to her head. A trip to the Capitol Building, a glance at the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, and she is all set to lead a new crusade for social justice ("This country belongs to the people who inhibit it"), with Harry as the target. Since she is nominal-and legal--owner of much of Harry’s empire, she has all the weapons she needs for his discomfiture, and as the curtain falls she elopes with the journalist while Harry

is left among the ruins of his hopes. Born Yesterday is not pure comedy, in any sense of the word-there are two scenes which are anything but funnybut it has telling dialogue, well polished with long use, and the acting in the upper bracket is capital. Broderick Crawford, int particular, gave a performance that was only just bettered by the star. In general the film follows the play very closely, but Hollywood has grafted on its own sentimental ending. Since, however, I thought the original tailpiece even more mawkish, the change did not unduly disturb me.