The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)

The Bad and the Beautiful
Directed by Vicente Minnelli
Written by Charles Schnee, story by George Bradshaw
1952/USA
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Repeat viewing/Amazon Instant
#257 of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die

[box] James Lee Bartlow: Yes, this is James Lee Bartlow… Paris?… Mr. Shields!… is Mr. Shields paying for this call?… All right, put him on… Hello, Jonathan? Drop dead.[/box]

Classic Hollywood certainly wasn’t afraid to show its dark side.  This is a lot of fun and contains probably my favorite performance from Dick Powell.

The film is framed by sequences in which studio head Harry Pebbel tries to sell a director, actress, and screenwriter who have all been shafted by broke producer Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas) on working on his next project. The story begins with the funeral of Jonathan’s father.  He has taken his father’s last ten cents to hire mourners.  Nobody loves a producer in Hollywood when his luck turns bad it seems.  One of the mourners is Fred Arniel (Barry Sullivan), who has been making a precarious living as the assistant director of B-films.  The two men bond.  Jonathan is determined to follow his father’s footsteps straight to the top and invites Fred to come along.

The first thing Jonathan does is to visit the mansion formerly owned by a deceased actor. He discovers his teenage daughter, Georgia Lorrison (Lana Turner), has set up residence in the attic.  Georgia has been following her own father’s footsteps in the drinking department. The next stop for Jonathan is the office of Harry Pebbel (Walter Pidgeon), the penny pinching producer of B-movies.  He gives Jonathan a job producing such low-budget flicks as “The Cat Men” with Fred as director.  This last film (a la Val Lewton’s Cat People) shows that a critical and box-office success can be made of a horror film. When he gets only projects such as “Return of the Cat Men”as a reward, Jonathan quits the studio, taking Harry with him.

Fred has long had a dream project which he has shopped around town with no success. Jonathan decides to champion this.  He manages to get the big budget he wants for the film, but only by hiring an established director.  Disgusted, Fred breaks with him but goes on to become a famous director himself.

He decides to give Georgia Lorrison, now working as an extra, a screen test for a part in one of his movies  He sees star quality and hires her as his picture’s leading lady.  Things get off to a rocky start.  Then Georgia reveals she is in love with Jonathan and he romances her into giving a star-making performances.  But on the night of the premier, Georgia discovers Jonathan’s ruse.  She is heartbroken but goes on to be a big star.

For his next project, Jonathan tackles a best-selling novel.  He gets at the author James Lee Bartlow (Powell) through his star-struck wife Rosemary (Gloria Grahame) and convinces him to come to Hollywood to write a treatment for the film.  But Bartlow cannot concentrate on his writing assignment with his sexy, flighty wife’s constant interruptions.  So Jonathan secretly sets her up with aging Latin lover “Gaucho” (Gilbert Roland) and spirits Bartlow away to an isolated writing retreat.  This maneuver ends in tragedy but gets Jonathan his screenplay.  Bartlow cannot forgive Jonathan but goes on to write a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel based on his wife’s fate.

As the movie ends, Harry is explaining to Jonathan’s former friends how he actually made their careers for them.  The outcome of the sales talk is left open.

If one is not familiar with Hollywood lore, this will probably come off as a grand melodrama.   For those familiar with their film history and celebrities, the story will be deliciously funny as well as melodramatic.  Minnelli and the studio spared no expense in providing us with the most lavish and glamorous settings and costumes they could come up with.  The acting is all very good and Douglas is magnetic as the unscrupulous boy-genius Jonathan.

The Bad and the Beautiful won Academy Awards in the following categories:  Best Supporting Actress (Grahame); Best Writing, Screenplay; Best Cinematography, Black-and-White; Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black-and-White; and Best Costume Design, Black-and-White.  Kirk Douglas was nominated for Best Actor. The film holds the record for most Academy Awards won by a film not nominated for Best Picture.

Trailer