Movie Details
| Title: | The Bad and the Beautiful | |
| Director: | Vincente Minnelli | |
| Year: | 1952 | |
| Genre: | Movie About Movies | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 04.04.23 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (0)
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 04.04.23 | Internet | The second half of a movies-about-movies double feature in reaction to watching Babylon. I started this the same night but kept falling asleep so I'm kind of stretching the definition of "double feature" but it's there in spirit. This is a Hollywood studio movie about itself with Kurt Douglas (the Bad) playing an ambitious producer and Lana Turner (the Beautiful), Dick Powell, and Barry Sullivan playing successful figures in the business who refuse to work with him again. The movie is a series of flashbacks explaining each character's history with Douglas, how they came to know him, how he helped them develop a career, and what he did to piss them off. I saw this is pretty similar to the progression of Babylon's main characters although now that I watch this again it's not an exact 1:1 relationship although the fact that each of these characters are loosely sourced from real people is still similar enough to bear comparison. I learned of this movie because of... I want to say one of the Martin Scorsese documentaries about movies that came out around the same time as AFI started putting out lists. He included the scene where Kirk Douglas is basically channeling Val Lewton in designing Cat People to not show the shoddy costumes but instead play on the psychology of the unknown. Douglas' character is not 100% Lewton in this (I think most people consider him to mostly be pulling from David O Selznick) but in that scene he is and you can imagine it playing out in real life not too dissimilarly. This one's interesting because it was made at the height of the studio system so us watching today get to double dip in a way, both in how the seeing fictional films getting made using the same equipment as the film itself was made. Lots of crew characters strongly resemble real people filling that role at that time. It's nowhere near as meta as a film like Adaptation, but I imagine for its day it was quite novel. The movie itself I thought was very good, but good in a classic Hollywood way. The ending feels false, most if not all of the scenes are shot on soundstages, the script is very polished and convenient, and the music, while good, is pretty heavy-handed. But those things are not necessarily a negative depending on how much you might enjoy the experience of a classic hollywood picture. So this is nowhere near as graphic or frenetic or pessimistic as Babylon, but I do feel like it covers somewhat similar ground through a much different implementation, and the aspects of Babylon which I found confusing are presented in a totally clear way here. I do want to note, there's a scene with Lana Turner driving in the rain where she spins out that's shot in some kind of crazy rear projection rig that I found very effective. You can definitely still tell that it's rear-projection, but the way the camera moves and her performance really evoke something that normal process shots don't. Pretty cool shot. So anyway, I don't think I LOVE loved this, but I did enjoy watching it again after so long and I think it holds up with the qualifiers mentioned above. |
