The Bad and the Beautiful

viewed October 10, 1999 on video

For full information about this film, click here

Vincente Minnelli's movies can teeter towards the didactic, when his characters do too much verbal explaining of his themes (see Lust for Life).  His movies are both imbued and tarnished with a self-importance that would be Wellesian if their ideas weren't so neatly laid out for the mass audience they target.  However, his chutzpah, the same thing that fills his characters batty with banter, is also what drives his technical achievements to breathtaking heights.  The opening shot, of a camera that moves from a wide shot of a set to a close up of a woman's face, matches the movement of the camera that is on camera precisely, as if it were filming a mirror.  The camerawork is the constant star throughout the movie.  Such cinematography, in addition to the lavish production design and multi-perspective narrative, reveal aspirations of Citizen Kane dimensions.  It's gaudy ambition, rendered a little too neatly to be inspiring, but it's beautiful.  The opening segment (in which ruthless producer Kirk Douglas manipulates his best friend director) is clearly the most believable and even informative of the three Hollywood immorality tales (Douglas manipulating Lana Turner as his girlfriend/actress is conventional soap opera; Douglas manipulating blocked writer Dick Powell is ludicrous).  As for the acting: Douglas' emphatic self-assertions seem to mirror Minnelli's ego, gauche and charismatic at once.  This is my first Lana Turner movie, and she doesn't quite live up to the hype.  Devastating neither in looks nor talent, she is perhaps too much deconstructed by her role. 

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