THE GLORIOUS CAREER OF COMEDIENNE JUDY HOLLIDAY IS CELEBRATED IN A COMPLETE NINE-FILM RETROSPECTIVE
Series Premieres New Prints of Born Yesterday and
The Marrying Kind Restored by The Department of Film and Video and
Sony Pictures.
Special Premiere Screening of Born Yesterday
Introduced in Person by Betty Comden on Monday, December 9, 1996, at 6:00
p.m.
Born Yesterday: The Films of Judy
Holliday
December 27, 1996January 4, 1997
Judy Holliday approached screen acting with extraordinary
intelligence and intuition, debuting in the World War II film Winged
Victory (1944) and giving outstanding comic performances in eight more
films from 1949 to 1960, when her career was cut short by illness.
Beginning December 27, 1996, The Museum of Modern Art presents Born
Yesterday: The Films of Judy Holliday, a complete retrospective of
Holliday's short but exhilarating career.
Holliday's experience working
with director George Cukor on Winged Victory led to a collaboration
with Cukor, Garson Kanin, and Kanin's wife Ruth Gordon, resulting in
Adam's Rib (1949), Born Yesterday (1950), The Marrying
Kind (1952), and It Should Happen To You (1952). She went on to
make Phffft (1954), The Solid Gold Cadillac (1956), Full
of Life (1956), and, for director Vincente Minnelli, Bells Are
Ringing (1960).
The Department of Film and Video and Sony Pictures
Entertainment are restoring the six films that Holliday made at Columbia
Pictures from 1950 to 1956. This series premieres the first two
restorations, Born Yesterday and The Marrying Kind.
A
special premiere screening of the newly restored print of Born
Yesterday will be held in advance of the series, on Monday, December 9,
1996. It will be introduced by Holliday's close friend and collaborator
Betty Comden.
Holliday began and ended her career with Betty Comden and
Adolph Green, her partners in The Revuers, the cabaret act that performed
in three films in 1944; Comden and Green scripted the musical comedy
Bells Are Ringing for Holliday on stage in 1956, and it was adapted
for her last screen performance, in 1960.
The series also features a new
print from the Library of Congress of Holliday's film debut, Winged
Victory, a World War II propaganda film adapted from the play by Moss
Hart, which features a number of future film stars in early roles. It will
be shown in a program that includes short excerpts from the Carmen Miranda
musicals in which Holliday had her first cameos: Greenwich Village
(1944), which features The Revuers in two party scenes, and Something
for the Boys (1944), in which Holliday appears briefly as a
defense-plant welder.
Born Yesterday: The Films of Judy Holliday
was organized by Mary Lea Bandy, Chief Curator, Department of Film and
Video. The program is made possible with support from United Airlines.
Special thanks to Sony Pictures Entertainment, Turner Entertainment Co.,
Twentieth Century-Fox, and the Library of Congress.
