The “shocking” conclusion you come to after watching Kirk Douglas, Lana Turner, Dick Powell, and Barry Sullivan cavort around in one of these typically self-loathing movies about the movies is that no matter how bad someone hosed you in the past, if there’s a hit picture to be made with them again, no professional or personal vendetta you have against him or her is so great that it couldn’t be put aside for at least the duration of shooting.
As Kirk’s reviled producer John Shields tells Dick’s author James Bartlow, some of the best movies have been made by people that hate each other. That’s a fascinating concept and must make for some fun days at work, but I’m not sure that it adds up to much of anything beyond the film industry’s obsession with itself.
That’s not to say that the all-star cast doesn’t get the job done because they do. Everyone involved performs admirably and Kirk and Lana in particular stand out, especially in their scenes together.
The story, as far it goes, is well presented and gives us an interesting (and often times unsentimental and riveting) mosaic of how one producer’s career intersects at various times with a variety of people, particularly, the aspiring director, the aspiring starlet, and the writer who’s a Hollywood novice.
It’s just that it ultimately doesn’t come together to any kind of satisfying conclusion. I felt like I was waiting for a third act where someone either gets redeemed or their ultimate downfall is dramatized.
Instead, the redemption (and that’s actually probably too strong a word – it’s more like some people doing a guy a favor at the urging of Walter Pidgeon. How can you say no to Walter Pidgeon?) is only hinted at as the movie ends and I was left wondering what it all meant.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the movies are as much a product of the personalities involved as much as with the ideas or craftsmanship of the various professions that go into a movie’s creation. This brought to mind a movie that at least on the surface seemed to plow similar ground, The Carpetbaggers.
Coming ten years after this one, The Carpetbaggers focused on Jonas Cord, a business tycoon who ended up in the movie business and cared for nothing except making his movies.
Haunted by his screwed up relationship with his father, Cord was so devoid of emotion that he wasn’t remotely human, becoming a caricature of the character he started out as. The result of all this was that you had a two-plus hour movie built around a person you just wished would be hit by a bus and a tacked on happy ending that was so abrupt and jarring it should have come with air bags.
The Bad And The Beautiful though realizes that for the audience to invest a couple of hours in submersing itself in a business as well as a person, that these folks should at least have recognizable human qualities.
John Shields could easily have been a presence devoid of a soul as Jonas Cord was, but while you may have been disgusted with the way he treated the people who weren’t just his co-workers, but were supposed to be his friends, you never felt like he was doing it for any other reason than to make a great film.
The distinction between these is perfectly encapsulated in similar scenes from their respective films. In each movie, there comes a time when they’re producing a motion picture and they think the director is doing a crappy job. Solution in both cases? If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself! Both men get rid of the directors and assume the directing chores themselves.
When the movies are finished, Jonas’ film makes his stepmom a star, while John screens his film and quickly realizes that it stinks and he should have never directed the thing in the first place. In spite of the fact that it will ruin him, he orders the movie shelved because he refuses to release a movie he knows is a dud with his name attached to it.
For Jonas, moviemaking was merely another avenue to impose his will on the world, while John never lost his producer’s eye even as he reviewed his own work. There’s a certain purity in that that softens (though by no means completely negates) his reckless disregard for the people in his life.
I go through all this pseudo-analytical blather as a way to explain why in spite of the movie’s quality, it still left me wanting. The Carpetbaggers is entertaining despite its completely horrid ending precisely because of the fact that the rest of the movie is equally horrid. If you’re going to fail, you should do so with as much panache as possible and that’s exactly what that movie did.
The Bad And The Beautiful though seemed to be building to something as the story of John Shields was parceled out by three other characters in a series of well structured and well paced flashbacks. And after it was all said and done, what had it amounted to? That Turner’s, Powell’s, and Sullivan’s characters might work with him again? That’s not really much of a payoff.
The movie is as good looking as the stars and the cinematography deservedly won an Oscar, though director Vincente Minnelli wasn’t even nominated, an unpardonable snub considering the way he was able to balance scenes of the organized chaos of a Hollywood set with the more personal encounters between the actors so that the movie never dragged on either front.
At it’s heart, this is Kirk and Lana’s movie, but they’re surrounded by a great supporting cast from the smaller parts (it’s Beaver Cleaver’s mom as a costume designer!) up to the parts like Dick Powell’s doomed wife (Gloria Graham, who won an Oscar as the other blonde in this movie). Still, quibbles over the flat ending aside, fans of films about the movie industry and just of great drama will find themselves gladly lost for two hours in old Hollywood.
© 2011 MonsterHunter
