After last week’s foray into the weird and wonderful world of Kwaidan we’re back into more familiar territory this week with classic Hollywood drama The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) . Like a few of the films I’ve written about this one has a very familar name but it may still be a film you haven’t seen, and perhaps one you should.
In some ways this is simply Citizen Kane-lite, ten years after the original with less of the artistic or technical flair and more of the MGM gloss, courtesy of director Vincente Minelli and MGM’s resident designer Cedric Gibbons. It is told almost exclusively in flashback by 3 people (a writer a director and an actress), talking with some venom about producer Jonathan Shields (a blinding performance by Kirk Douglas). But unlike Kane, these flashbacks do not intertwine, they are purely linear and each tell a different story about the same man. Although they each contribute to our image of the man, they do not really go together to tell a single story. So in some ways (like Kwaidan) The bad and the Beautiful is a portmanteau film.
It’s starting to sound like I don’t like the film (which I saw for the first time this week) but if you compare most films to Citizen Kane they are likely to come up short, and it’s only because the influence is so striking that I have done so. The film’s top billed star is Lana Turner, who tells the middle story, and is the ‘wronged woman’. Turner was always more of a star than an actress, but her climactic break down in a speeding car is far and away the best performance of hers I have ever seen, and more than makes up for any lack of nuance in the rest of her acting. The fact that she is one of the most beautiful actresses ever doesn’t hurt.
The third story is told by the writer, played by Dick Powell, who is very good but almost wholly overshadowed by Gloria Grahame playing his southern belle wife. Grahame won a well deserved best supporting actress oscar and is wonderful in the role, equalling and perhaps even surpassing Douglas’s career-best turn as the ubiquitous and magnetic producer.
But it’s the first story that really steals the show. Barry Sullivan is fine as the director, Fred Amiel, whom Shields’s cheats, but it’s the story that engages you. Perhaps it’s because I have such an interest in Hollywood history but this section had me on the edge of my seat and with them all the way.
And that is where this film really scores; it is a ‘Hollywood’ film, that means so much more to any with a knowledge of the old town. Shields is clearly based on David O Selznick, both had producer father’s treated badly by the rest of the industry (Lewis Selznick was a hugely successful silent producer who was left on the outisde when his compnay went bust). The studio head (played by Walter Pidgeon) is surely based on Columbia’s ill-tempered Harry Cohn. While the studio itself seems like RKO. Gilbert Roland’s Gaucho is an actor based on a number of womanising lead actors.
A more knowledgeable cinephile than me could pick out many more such connections and references. It is a film about film that deserves to be mentionned, if not in the same breath as Sunset Boulevard or The Player, then at least within a few breaths. It bottles out on Kane’s bleak ending, but it is a Hollywood film, the least you can expect is a Hollywood ending.
