Cinema: A Star Is Born

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She Who Gets Slapped. And from the moment Pascal saw her, unknown Deborah Kerr was in. In a flash, he perceived that Miss Kerr was the ideal Salvation Army lass to be slapped around by Robert Newton in Major Barbara. It was not much of a part, but Deborah slapped so photogenically that within the next year she suffered modified mayhem in four more pictures, of which the most memorable was Love on the Dole. Then came Powell & Pressburger's Colonel Blimp, the best of her films to date, and one of the two most fate-fraught in shaping her career.

Blimp's big moments left Deborah emotionally starved, but in range of type it was a feast. She played three archetypes of English womanhood—a governess in Berlin circa 1900; a county-family debutante of the early 1920s; a merry Motor Corps girl of World War II. And she played them in color. Miss Kerr's natural coloring would have reduced Renoir to a quivering jelly. It is so vivid that she faced the Technicolor cameras with little more than simple street makeup. She was dissolvingly lovely to look at; and she acted her modest roles with a quiet finish, shrewdness and grace which were already (she was then 21) unqualifiedly her own style. Ben Goetz of Metro British, as soon as he saw Blimp, determined to snatch Miss Kerr away from Pascal at once.

Luckily, Pascal was short of funds (since Major Barbara he had merely farmed Deborah out to other studios, in Selznick fashion). Goetz bought half of Pascal's contract with Deborah and decided to use her opposite Robert Donat in Alexander Korda's war film, Perfect Strangers (U.S. translation: Vacation from Marriage). In the first part of Vacation from Marriage Deborah played mousiness right down to the bottom of the mousehole, then, transfigured by the experience of war, she devoted the closing reels to looking a little more beautiful and vibrant than unmartial mortals can ever hope to look.

It was quite a pleasant little picture and, in the U.S., quite a solid little flop. Nevertheless, it was Vacation which landed Cinemactress Kerr on that planet-girdling conveyor belt which ends, implacably, in Hollywood.

Delayed Dogfight. A Hollywood screening of Blimp did not provoke Cinemagnate Louis B. ("L.B.") Mayer and his paladins to a joyful dogfight for a full Kerr contract. It served, rather, as a come-on, by planting Miss Kerr so fruitfully in the M-G-M unconscious that when these unimpulsive executives assembled, some time later, to see Vacation from Marriage, they were most pleasantly disposed to watch her work again. Vacation from Marriage bored them to tears. But Deborah Kerr did not bore them a bit. In fact, L.B., without a moment's hesitation, uttered the flat pronouncement: "That girl is a star."