Fourth Time Around

Rating: 6/10 (13 January 2019)

I've recently watched both the 1937 non-musical version of this well-worn riches-to-rags / rags to riches story which starred Janet Gaynor and Fredric March and the first musical version with Judy Garland and James Mason from 1954 while the most recent Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristoffersson vehicle is also fairly strong in my memory. This version, directed by and starring Bradley Cooper as the ageing country-rock star whose career is about to hit the skids but who introduces current pop star Lady Gaga as the rising talent he accidentally runs into seems to very much be a remake of that Streisand showcase rather than the other two.
Like Kristoffersson, he is a bearded, grizzled rocker, with a more rock-oriented name of Jackson rather than Norman Maine and more drunken, drug-addled episodes it seems than sober ones, who when we first see him is out of his face at an arena gig but just about holding it together. After the gig he crashes in a bar where it's of all things, drag night, but the one true female singer is part time barmaid Ally, played by Gaga who naturally wows the crowd and in particular Maine with her solo spot. So they hook up afterwards, he finds she writes her own songs and invites her to sing one of them as an encore at his next gig. As you'd expect, she goes over big, they become a couple afterwards and the whole cycle of her inexorable rise crossing with his inevitable fall drives the rest of the film.
In all this and more, like the lovers' bath scene, it strongly resembles the 1976 version and obviously can't fail to include the bathetic scene where he drunkenly ruins her Grammy Award presentation night but makes a big mistake I feel in not ending on one of cinema's best ever finishing lines which served its three predecessors well enough, as here Gaga sings a heartfelt piano ballad he was working on before he died. I also missed the "Mr Ally" jibe from the earlier films which helped fuel Maine's self-destruction, not that I was expecting a scene by scene remake but in omitting it don't feel it was replaced by anything substantial, certainly not the hackneyed relationship between Maine and his brother.
Both leads are strong in their parts with Cooper displaying suitable rock star credentials and Gaga proving a natural, when speaking as well as singing her words. However, a fair bit of the dialogue fell on my ears as cliched and the songs themselves, though serviceable, don't scream out classic to me, certainly nothing to rival "The Man That Got Away" or even "Evergreen".
I know I keep returning to the three preceding versions but can't help myself and perhaps it would have been better if I hadn't seen them so recently. Anyway, to me it was about on a par with Streisand's version which ranks it below the first two versions. Wonder when the next remake will take place as it inevitably will?