Holliday’s most famous movie is “Born Yesterday,” which like “Bells Are Ringing” was a starring vehicle for her on Broadway before she made the movie. The role of a gangster”dumb blonde moll who turns out to be not so dumb after all won her an Oscar just as it had won her a Tony on Broadway. Nevertheless, if you want to get a full measure of how great Judy Holliday was, “Bells Are Ringing” is the ticket.

It is a tour de force for her, showing off her acting chops, Judy’s comic ability, her physical comedy skills and her versatile singing and dancing. As a director, I was especially taken with her fluid facial expressions and the pure intelligence of her choices, always surprising, never routine. Holliday’s screen presence is miraculous; Dean Martin plays the romantic lead, and Dean was a pro. She blows him away. Her intelligence radiates so powerfully in her performance as the answering service operator who can’t stop empathizing with the private lives of her clients that on a hunch, I went to Google to see if there was any record of her intellect. Judy Holliday’s IQ was determined to be 172 as a child. I believe it. In my experience, intelligence saturates every aspect of great performing.

“Bells Are Ringing” itself is ridiculous and meant to be. The Comden and Green plot makes “Guys and Dolls” look like “Moby Dick.” It doesn’t matter, or didn’t to me last night. I was watching a once-in-a- century talent in her final recorded performance. Attention should be paid. During the show’s famous “11 o’clock” number, Judy’s solo “I’m Going Back Where I Can Be Me,” I felt that I was watching one of the two or three greatest film performances of any song, right up there with Liza’s rendition of “Cabaret” to end that movie, and Judy Garland’s “The Man Who Got Away” in “A Star is Born.”

Frequent readers here know that I deeply feel the tragedies of great creative talents whose lives were cut short: Buddy Holly, John Belushi, Karen Carpenter and others. Some of these had enough of a body of work that their legacy survives; certainly Liza’s mother is in that category. Judy Holliday is not. She could project vulnerability, wit, a rainbow of emotions and character across footlights or a movie house proscenium, but her career took a long time getting started and had many interruptions (she had to fight off blacklisting during the House UnAmerican Activities Hollywood investigations). She had named roles in only eight films. Her more extensive stage work, of course, is lost to posterity.

So she’s forgotten now. So many people have never experienced this marvelous talent. I wanted to introduce this post with a video of her big solo at the end of “Bells Are Ringing,” and there isn’t one.

It’s so unfair.