[For part I of this post, click here; for part II, click here.]

The final movie-in-movie scene in A Star Is Born is a doozy, naturally. Norman and Vicki Maine (James Mason and Judy Garland) are throwing a party. Hollywood being Hollywood, Vicki circulates among the guests, asking, “Would you like to see a movie? We’re going to run one.” Lights go down, curtains automatically close, a screen rises from the floor and a modern painting retracts to reveal a projector. A (fake) newsreel begins.

Presently, studio chief Oliver Niles (Charles Bickford) sidles away to another room, turns on a television set, and fiddles with the remote, just as Norman walks in on him. What appears to be a ballroom scene of an antebellum costume drama is on.

I wish I knew what the movie is — it’s not listed in IMDB connections or in filmsinfilms, or mentioned anywhere else I can find. It looks like Gone with the Wind, and I hope it is, because that would make the most monumental and cosmic in-joke in the history of movies. Why? Because George Cukor, director of A Star Is Born, was supposed to helm GWTW but was fired by producer David O. Selznick.

Things get amazinger. Oliver switches to a boxing match but through a window we get glimpses of the movie the rest of the guests are watching. That makes two movies-in-movie in one scene, which is a record (except I guess for shots of multiple TVs in appliance-store windows in films like Diner and The Shape of Water).

Again, I can’t tell what the movie is. It appears to be some sort of jungle epic, and judging by the credits, I believe it’s fake. And by the way, the credit in the shot above is another great in-joke. The “star” appears to be “Roy Webb.” There is no such star or actor by that name. However, Roy Webb was a contemporary Hollywood composer of the first rank, having scored such films as Notorious and Out of the Past.

A couple of other notes on A Star is Born. First, it counts as a “double-dip”: Charge at Feather River is seen in A Star Is Born, and Star is Born seen in three different movies — Twister, Hearts in Atlantis, and P.S. I Love You. And Twister, as previously noted, is the end of another chain — Now, Voyager; Summer of ’42; and The Shining.

All eight of the movies mentioned in the previous paragraph were from the Warner Brothers studio — an indication of directors economizing by going in-house when it comes to their movie-in-movie choices. It’s a tendency that I’ve just started to notice and really should quantify. Watch out for a future post.