"The Bad and the Beautiful" is not just the title of this picture, it's a description of the major studios' business plan in the 1950s. To compete with that horrid little box that was infesting the living rooms and emptying the movie theaters of America, the big screen had to offer what television couldn't: sex (ooh, bad!) and high production values (ooh, beautiful!). "B&B" offers as much adultery and sumptuous sets as the censors and budgets will allow while it traces the rise and fall of an amoral film producer (Kirk Douglas) as he destroys a director (Barry Sullivan), actress (Lana Turner) and writer (Dick Powell) in pursuit of cinematic immortality. Not sure if Charles Schnee (writer) and Vincent Minelli (director) meant for this movie to be quite that metafictional, but they come awfully close. Particularly postmodern is the characters' penchant for criticizing Lana Turner's performance: "wooden," "terrible," "even when you're awful, you're all the audience sees." (Indeed, that rack of hers literally and figuratively obscured many a movie set.) As Hollywood self-laceration goes, "The Bad and the Beautiful" presages "The Player" by forty years, and manages to be a far better film by upping the melodrama and burying the self-referential cleverness.
Douglas' character,Jonathan Shields, is the son of some dead, disgraced studio exec who sets out to avenge his father's humiliation. The film sets a tone of gleeful cynicism by having young Shields pay complete strangers $11.00 to mourn at his father's funeral. One of the grievers-for-hire, Barry Sullivan, makes snotty comments about the dear departed but apologizes to Shields, also letting him know he's an aspiring director. Shields lures him into a filmmaking partnership, then destroys him. In the course of setting up Sullivan, he encounters Lana Turner as second-generation starlet Gloria Lorrison. She insults him, so later on he builds a big picture around her, seduces her, and destroys her. Just for fun, Shields also ruins the life of a Southern writer (Dick Powell) who rebuffs his first offer to collaborate on a movie. To its eternal credit, the movie never asks us to hate Shields -- he's a pure sociopath who barely masks his manipulations and, when discovered, doesn't even pretend he's sorry, he just tells his victims they had it coming. (And, to a certain extent, yes, they did.) "B&B" is also helped by Vincent Minelli's ridiculously competent filmmaking -- lovely tracking shots, beautifully evocative lighting, heart-rending orchestral swells, all the elements of great, glossy soap opera. He couldn't do much with Lana, but then again, she's not much more than a special effect and he uses her that way. Her "breakdown" scene while driving away from Kirk's house is so hysterically horrible that Minelli doesn't cut away to scenes of her out-of-control car careening around corners, since anything even remotely realistic would detract from the giddy unreality of her performance. Faring much better is Gloria Grahame as the writer's nympho wife, perhaps because all she's asked to do is act sexy and maintain a Southern accent. She manages both, and was rewarded with an Oscar.
Douglas' character,Jonathan Shields, is the son of some dead, disgraced studio exec who sets out to avenge his father's humiliation. The film sets a tone of gleeful cynicism by having young Shields pay complete strangers $11.00 to mourn at his father's funeral. One of the grievers-for-hire, Barry Sullivan, makes snotty comments about the dear departed but apologizes to Shields, also letting him know he's an aspiring director. Shields lures him into a filmmaking partnership, then destroys him. In the course of setting up Sullivan, he encounters Lana Turner as second-generation starlet Gloria Lorrison. She insults him, so later on he builds a big picture around her, seduces her, and destroys her. Just for fun, Shields also ruins the life of a Southern writer (Dick Powell) who rebuffs his first offer to collaborate on a movie. To its eternal credit, the movie never asks us to hate Shields -- he's a pure sociopath who barely masks his manipulations and, when discovered, doesn't even pretend he's sorry, he just tells his victims they had it coming. (And, to a certain extent, yes, they did.) "B&B" is also helped by Vincent Minelli's ridiculously competent filmmaking -- lovely tracking shots, beautifully evocative lighting, heart-rending orchestral swells, all the elements of great, glossy soap opera. He couldn't do much with Lana, but then again, she's not much more than a special effect and he uses her that way. Her "breakdown" scene while driving away from Kirk's house is so hysterically horrible that Minelli doesn't cut away to scenes of her out-of-control car careening around corners, since anything even remotely realistic would detract from the giddy unreality of her performance. Faring much better is Gloria Grahame as the writer's nympho wife, perhaps because all she's asked to do is act sexy and maintain a Southern accent. She manages both, and was rewarded with an Oscar.