Judy Garland reborn in high definition

Audiences don't usually jump out of their chairs and cheer when a movie star's name is projected on the big screen -- especially when the movie is 56 years old and the star has been dead more than four decades.

Judy Garland got a minutes-long standing ovation when Warner Bros. recently unveiled a restored print of her 1954 big-screen comeback, "A Star Is Born," on opening night of the first TCM Classic Film Festival at Grauman's Chinese Theater in Los Angeles.

"It's not just a movie. There's nothing like it," said George Feltenstein, a Warner Home Video executive. "At the Chinese screening, the title came on the screen, and I was in a wash of tears. ... Here we were in a theater 56 years later with people applauding and screaming."

Now, Garland fans can carry on at home: Warner has just released its high-definition restoration of "A Star Is Born" on Blu-ray ($35) and DVD ($21).

Garland -- born Frances Gumm in Grand Rapids, Minn., in 1922 -- became a movie legend at age 17 in 1939 when she starred as Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz."

"Because of 'Oz,' she will live forever. There will always be a new generation who will want to know more about Dorothy," Feltenstein said. "That is her link to immortality."

Her other films at MGM included a series of back-yard musicals with co-star Mickey Rooney and "Meet Me in St. Louis" in 1944, directed by Vincente Minnelli, who later became her second husband. After making more than 25 feature films in 13 years, the studio fired her in 1950 following a string of illnesses and breakdowns.

Garland then signed with Warner Bros. to make "A Star Is Born," in which she first sang Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin's "The Man That Got Away." The movie, produced by Garland's third husband, Sid Luft, cost $6 million and was filmed in early stereophonic sound, one-strip Technicolor and CinemaScope.

The 1954 Hollywood premiere was broadcast live on national television. Stars in attendance included Garland, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Clark Gable, Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. A complete 30-minute kinescope of the TV special is part of the Blu-ray/DVD set, along with soundtrack prerecordings and other extras, including eight takes of "The Man That Got Away."

"A Star Is Born" arguably was Garland's finest hour. Three hours, actually, until Warner Bros. haphazardly cut the musical tearjerker to 154 minutes -- for more daily showings -- and discarded the trimmed footage.

Director George Cukor disowned the edited version. Three decades later, "A Star Is Born" was reassembled by Ronald Haver, director of film at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The junked footage had been presumed lost for nearly 30 years. Haver, who died in 1993, spent months creeping through the vaults at Warner Bros., looking inside hundreds of cans of film. Eventually, he found the film's complete soundtrack and most of its lost footage. For visual scenes that couldn't be recovered, he substituted still pictures of Garland and co-star James Mason.

"The original negative was the source for the film transfer," says Feltenstein, Warner's senior vice president for theatrical catalog marketing. "The production design in the film is astounding. Gorgeous. The unrestored film was always a grimy, mousy brown. Now it looks great."

Garland's performance as Esther Blodgett (aka Mrs. Norman Maine), whose show-biz career skyrockets while her movie-star husband's collapses, earned an Oscar nomination. Her unexpected loss to Grace Kelly in "The Country Girl" prompted Groucho Marx to call it "the biggest robbery since Brinks."

The film, written by Moss Hart, is based on two earlier movies, "What Price Hollywood?" (made in 1932 and also directed by Cukor) and "A Star Is Born," a 1937 early-Technicolor drama starring Janet Gaynor and Fredric March. Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson remade it in 1976, and there's talk that Beyoncé and Russell Crowe will remake it once again.

Still, it's Garland's version that endures.