Beauty is not enough

On Swansea Bay TV, I caught the end of A Star is Born, the 1937 version with Fredric March and Janet Gaynor. The "print" was poor, clearly coming from the early days of transfer from film to broadcast media, but the quality of writing (by the husband and wife team of Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell) and production shone through. It is a tribute to the quality of the 1954 remake with Judy Garland that it loses nothing in comparison with the original - a rare feat. (Subsequent versions fall a long way short.) Indeed, I prefer James Mason's performance to that of March which I found rather cool and stagy. Moss Hart and George Cukor did well not to mess too much with the original.

Anyway, as I often do, I scanned down the cast list on IMDb and came across a name which rang a faint bell: Carole Landis. It soon transpired that it was for a melancholy reason: she was one of Hollywood's casualties. She committed suicide aged only twenty-nine, seventy years ago. One wonders how someone with good looks and a singing voice could fail to make progress. Perhaps her ample figure told against her and there was room for only one Lana Turner in Tinseltown.