Judy Holliday won an Oscar for her portrayal of the phenomenally ignorant showgirl, Billie Dawn, in this adaptation of a Garson Kanin play. She and her nouveau-riche gangster boyfriend, Broderick Crawford, are one of the screen's most brilliantly abusive couples as they lunge and shout about their elegant Washington, D.C. hotel suite. When William Holden, the tutor hired to smooth out Billie's rough edges, instructs her in the rudiments of diction and democracy, we witness the dawn of a new Billie. Although Born Yesterday was picketed as communistic on its release in 1950, this says more about the times than the film, which clearly extols the virtues of American democracy, lambasting political corruption and proclaiming the emancipation of women along the way.