The Bad and the Beautiful
Vincente Minnelli (1952)
The career of one-time big-time movie producer Jonathan Shields has gone down the tubes. He calls from Paris, trying to interest three people he once worked with – Fred Amiel (a director), Georgia Lorrison (an actress) and James Lee Bartlow (a screenwriter) – in a comeback project. The first two aren’t even speaking to him. Bartlow says, ‘Get lost’ before putting the phone down. Another of Shields’s former associates, producer Harry Pebbel, wants to help his old sparring partner and invites the trio to his office to try and persuade them to think again. The Bad and the Beautiful tells the story of Shields’s relationship with each of Amiel, Lorrison and Bartlow in succession – how he exploited and made implacable enemies of them. As each memoir is completed, Pebbel reminds the enemy concerned that her or his association with Shields was the start of something big: Amiel is a successful filmmaker; Lorrison is an enduring star; Bartlow, originally an academic, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood. So will they work again with Shields? At the end of the interview with Pebbel, all three still say no. But, as they’re leaving, Georgia Lorrison becomes curious and the two men quickly follow suit. They want to know what Shields is saying on the other end of the line and listen in on a phone in Pebbel’s outer office. The film ends with the three edging closer and closer to the receiver to hear more.
The film – which I’d expected to be an exuberant, melodramatic skewering of industry egos and machinations with lots of lively, bitchy wit – gets to be surprisingly dull. The three stories are told at some length. There’s no ingenious connection between them (and very little surprise or suspense within them). When the director, the star and the writer are lured irresistibly back to Shields’s pitch, this is surely meant to say something essential about the addictive mixture of ambition and masochism at the heart of Hollywood but the three actors line up for the closing shots with little conviction – they seem to be intrigued only because that’s what the script says. The Bad and the Beautiful is historically interesting as one of that generation of pictures made when Hollywood was getting old enough to examine itself – and around the same time as the public examination of its un-American activities by Senator McCarthy et al. But the picture has none of the self-lacerating force of Sunset Boulevard or the vibrant comic satire of Singin’ In the Rain.
An interview with the producer, John Houseman, which comprised the BFI programme note, lists some of the sequences in The Bad and the Beautiful which feature caricatures based on real film people – all of which had passed me by. (While inside jokes won’t necessarily add substance to a piece, you naturally tend to enjoy things more if you get the references.) Some of the jokes which don’t rely on this kind of recognition are good enough: Shields’s father was also a hated producer – so hated that, at his funeral, the son has to hire and pay extras to make up a crowd of mourners. Except for the first, intentionally amusing scene between Dick Powell (as Bartlow) and Gloria Grahame (as his Southern belle wife), the sequence I found funniest was immediately after the story of Georgia Lorrison’s relationship with Shields ends, and Walter Pidgeon (as Harry Pebbel) embarks on a clumsy, extended exposition of what happened next. But I did like the ways in which that Minnelli and the cinematographer Robert Surtees visualise the artificiality of the film’s world. This occurs mostly in the filmmaking-within-the-film sequences. The recording equipment is revealed at either the beginning or the end of these sequences, as Surtees’ camera zooms down onto or pulls back up from the action being filmed. But there’s also a striking moment when we’re made to assume that we’re watching a studio scene being shot then realise we’re being shown ‘reality’.
Most of the main characters come across as either dreary or animated only at the level of stereotypes. With the first group, the fault is probably a combination of the script (by Charles Schnee, from a short story by George Bradshaw) and the dull actors in the roles in question (Pidgeon, Barry Sullivan as Amiel). Kirk Douglas is far from dull. As Jonathan Shields, he’s forceful and assured but the unscrupulous Shields is an idea rather than a character. Douglas tends to suppress his charm here; there’s something controlled and eventually desiccated about his performance. When Shields tells Georgia Lorrison that her test was lousy in technical respects but that ‘When you’re on screen people can’t take their eyes off you’, he might be describing the strengths and weaknesses of Lana Turner, who plays Georgia. In her early scenes, Turner’s presence is essence-of-screen-goddess incandescent (talk about the camera loving someone) but the effort of acting gradually diminishes her. Dick Powell is really witty as the writer for as long as Bartlow is a dry, semi-detached observer on the action; the individuality of the character disappears once he gets emotionally subsumed in the melodrama. On her arrival on the scene as Bartlow’s wife Rosemary, Gloria Grahame gives the film an immediate lift. Rosemary too is a caricature but at least she’s a caricature from a world beyond the film industry. Grahame has a lovely blend of flightiness and shrewdness and she plays the role to the hilt. (Given how thin it is, though, it’s probably as well that Rosemary is killed off before the performance starts to grate.)
The Bad and the Beautiful won no less than five Academy Awards (Supporting Actress (Grahame), screenplay, and black-and-white cinematography, art direction and costume design). This just about emulates the number of Oscars lined up in Harry Pebbel’s office. Perhaps the Academy liked it because the subject was Hollywood (and because the exposé of the soul of Hollywood is too clumsy to do much damage). And maybe the ingratiating credit at the end – grateful thanks for permission to feature the statuettes in the picture – went down well. (Released in the same year, Singin’ In the Rain, notoriously, didn’t win a solitary Oscar.)
6 November 2009