Born Yesterday (1950)

Directed by George Cukor. Starring Judy Holliday, Broderick Crawford, William Holden, Howard St. John, Frank Otto, Larry Oliver, Barbara Brown, Grandon Rhodes.

Adaptation of the same-named stage play of lawless, uncultivated scrapyard tycoon Crawford enlisting erudite reporter Holden to teach class, manners, and culture to his brainless blonde girlfriend (Holliday, reprising her theater role). Charmless comedy made audiences swoon in its day, but it’s actually an intolerable piffle with dated political content, long stretches between halfhearted laughs, an utterly unbelievable “turnaround” in Holliday’s acuity, and chemistry that’s only a step or two above the kind shared by a terrier and a fire hydrant. Holden’s too wishy-washy, Crawford is doing just one of his dozen-plus reruns of his loud, blustery All the King’s Men turn, and Holliday essays a relentlessly unappealing creature that makes it torture to sit through the whole thing in one sitting—it’s bad enough that she’s so proud to be worthless (“I’m stupid and I like it…I get everything I want”), but what really defeats this one is her excruciating, strangled-goose voice. What Holden sees in her can’t possibly be rationally explained (or accepted), and the second-rate teacher-student relationship is never for a minute believable—Pygmalion, it ain’t (heck, it ain’t even My Fair Lady). Holliday’s Oscar win still rates as one of the most inexcusable acting-field choices ever made in the Academy’s history. To be fair, if her character had been used sparingly in a different comedic story and been the target of good-natured derision, it might have been a manageable affair, but as the lead that’s supposed to be inspiring giggles, sympathy, and affection? No, no, no, I wasn’t born yesterday. Remade in 1993.

28/100