George Cukor's remake of the 1937 David O. Selznick's A Star Is Born stands on its own as a masterpiece of the '50s musical, surpassing the traditional backstage-story, musical-about-musicals plot with its complex and realistic portrayal of the world of show business. Judy Garland made a triumphant return to the screen as both singer and dramatic actress in the role of a band singer who is discovered by an ex-matinée idol (James Mason) now on a drunken decline. Mason gives a sensitive and versatile performance, and Garland's renditions of “The Man that Got Away” and “Born in a Trunk,” literally “show stoppers” in terms of their unusual integration into the plot, are justifiably famous in themselves.
Gary Carey, in “Cukor and Company,” calls A Star Is Born “the first film to use the wide screen with fluidity and imagination and to recapture the sense of intimacy that the first of the 'Scope films had lost.... Cukor has said that his use of the new format was inspired by the fragments of paintings reproduced in art books: ‘You're used to seeing the whole of a thing - then suddenly you see a section, arbitrarily, not composed.... And I thought why not do that in a movie?... especially when Judy Garland sang ‘The Man that Got Away.' In a little night club after hours the camera followed her always in front... sometimes she went to the side and almost disappeared out of the frame... she was rarely right in the middle.'” (JB)