As is, John's bombastic art rock plays like a hack Hollywood songwriter's imitation of that kind of music. There's really only one song, repeated ad nauseam, "Watch Closely Now," which sounds like a lost musical parody from Carol Burnett's old variety show ("Your eyes are like fingers/They're touching my body and arousing my soul").
The numbers that Esther performs feel only slightly less patched together, including the future Oscar winner "Evergreen," which starts, "Love/Soft as an easy chair" and grows its lapels wider by the second. Streisand was more about show tunes and standards, at least early in her career. She was seven years removed from winning a Best Actress Oscar for "Funny Girl" when this picture began production. She often seems awkward performing the film's original music (credited to seven people, including Streisand and Paul Williams). She's always technically on-point, of course, being Babs, and her high notes could shatter aluminum, but she doesn't seem to be really feeling any of it except at the very end, a stunning seven-minute unbroken closeup of Esther debuting her late husband's final original song, ""With One More Look at You" followed by one more reprise of "Look Closely Now," in case anybody felt they needed one.
On the plus side, however the leads felt about each other during filming, they seem to enjoy each other on camera most of the time. That's a lucky break for the audience, because they're onscreen for most of the two hour, nineteen minute running time of "A Star is Born." The moments when Streisand laughs raucously at Kristofferson's rustic clowning or paints his face with makeup in a bathtub that's lit by candles stuck in empty beer cans have an authentic, seedy-sexy flavor, and they compensate for the fact that, by the time John meets Esther, she seems so poised and confident that you have to wonder how badly she needed him for anything, including a career jump-start (there's never any doubt what he saw in her, however: rejuvenating brilliance). John's violent temper and tendency to prankishly destroy things will set off alarm bells in modern viewers, but they're consistent with mid-20th century portraits of masculinity in American film, which critiqued men's social conditioning but also felt the need to show charismatic tough guys lighting up the screen with rage and despair and glamorizing their implosions. The big tearjerking scene at the very end might remind film history conscious viewers of another 1976 hit, the remake of "King Kong," which likewise concerned a lovestruck hairball who declined after being removed from his comfort zone.
The script for this "Star" passed through the hands of many writers, including the married team of John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion. Dunne and Didion would revisit the story again two decades later, unofficially, in 1996's "Up Close and Personal," starring Michelle Pfieffer as a TV reporter mentored by Robert Redford's news producer. This film's eventual director, Frank Pierson, originally signed on to for a last-minute rewrite (he was just coming off a classic, "Dog Day Afternoon"). He was so unhappy with what he perceived as the rampant narcissism of Streisand and her executive producer and then-husband Jon Peters—a former Hollywood hairdresser who was the model for Warren Beatty's character in "Shampoo"—that he would go on to write a scathing account of the shoot that was published in two magazines, New West and New York. This earned him the enmity of Streisand and Peters, who considered it an unprecedented betrayal (in some ways it was; it was rare for a director to trash his own film prior to release verbally, let alone twice in print). In a lot of ways, this is still the least of all the "Star" films, more interesting to read about than watch. But as a glimpse into a long-gone era, it remains tantalizing, especially if you're a fan of the main actors.
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