Fred Cabral

The 1983 reissue of A Star Is Born attempted to reinstate the missing scenes with stills. When the movie was originally released, Warner Brothers (Jack Warner) thought it was too long and they would not get financial return on the film if was not cut so Warner brought in editors who had nothing to do with making the movie, they butchered it and destroyed a lot of the footage to bring the running time down to less than 2 hours. Some of the sound clips remain--that is why when reissued in 1983, they "restored" as much of the film as possible to its original length, hence the stills with sound clips. If you don't expect it, it can be jarring, but I think it is interesting to see how much of the original survived. Who knows--maybe some day the footage will be found. Garland is still at her best here as well as Mason and it is a geat tribute to their enomous talents.