#4 (chronologically) in Mike D'Angelo's list of twelve films to which he would give a score of 100 out of 100.

Evaluation
I was dreading this one, because I had no desire to spend three hours listening to Judy Garland belting out showtunes. However, I was pleased to find that skipping over the songs still leaves a movie that's my favorite of the D'Angelo Dozen so far. (Which admittedly isn't saying much.)

Commentary (spoilers)
A graph of this movie would be pretty simple. Judy Garland's character would be a line with a slope of 1 and James Mason's would be a line with a slope of -1. At first, she's an unknown and he plucks her from obscurity; when the lines cross, they marry; then she's a big star and he's out of work. For a while I thought that A Star Is Born was going to go the route of Sister Carrie and have the ingenue leave her sponsor after he's spent enough time schlepping around the house is his bathrobe. But no — she has no qualms about supporting him, as she both genuinely loves him and feels she owes him her career. So everything would be fine if not for the fact that he can't handle the idea of people looking down on him for living off his wife and therefore offs himself. Even so, the last line of the movie is Judy Garland's character telling a packed house, "This is Mrs. Norman Maine," followed by thunderous applause.

Did people in the 1950s really not realize how twisted this is? I mean, what exactly is the message here? "Hooray! You've completely subordinated your identity to that of your husband! He may be a dead alcoholic, but he's male, and therefore as a woman you will never be anything but his shadow! And yet you're proud of that! We've trained you well! Hooray!" I mean, okay, yes, you can't really expect stories to routinely transcend the backward ideologies of the cultures that produce them. And this movie was made in a time when men were expected to be breadwinners and women were expected to consider themselves Mrs. Dudesfirstname Dudeslastname. But, but— we've just seen this ideology kill the leading man! Now we're supposed to clap for it?

I was interested to read that, for the first time, women in their 20s who work full time in some major American cities (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Dallas, et al.) now have higher median incomes than men in the same age range. (Note that this statistic involves no small amount of cherrypicking.) The articles about this tend to be accompanied by interviews in which (cherrypicked) female yuppies complain about how they can't date guys who make less money than they do, because either the guys freak out about it, or else they are fine with it and thereby prove themselves to be losers. Apparently there's a lot of cultural baggage mixed up with the question of who should pay for things. They should do what I do and date someone who lives in a foreign country. Then you always know who should pay: the one whose money works.

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