Sometimes luminous and enchanting, at other times banal and phony, Born Yesterday is like many of Cukor's films in that it teeters between its seriousness and its silliness. Here both elements are well pulled off (Holliday's big emotional scene and her cutesy mannerisms hardly qualify her for the Oscar she stole from Swanson and Davis, however) but the result is a chaotic attempt by Cukor to keep pace with Billy Wilder. Its "sophistication" is also a fake, and anybody who has read the papers or lived in Washington knows that this film's species of forced naivete is good for little more than a good laugh.
Review of Born Yesterday
