Word: aldriches
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Particularly in those films which Hollywood has produced to help fortify its own mystique. Some of the most exuberant and entertaining movies of the past two decades-Stanley Donen's Singing in the Rain, Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard and Robert Aldrich's Legend of Lylah Clare -have been about Hollywood and the strange brand of people who make it tick. The latter two of these pictures are being offered by the Currier House Film Society this week, and, if you love American movies and are in some way obsessed by the factory that made them, you simply cannot miss...
Indeed this may be one of your only chances to see Lylah Clare, even though this picture dates back only to 1968. Robert Aldrich (What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte) financed this film from the profits of his immensely successful Dirty Dozen, probably because no studio would put up the money; MGM finally distributed the movie-but Lylah died a quick critical and box-office death, thereby insuring its banishment to quadruple bill drive-ins during leap years. It's a shame, for this saga of Hollywood is one of the most personal and intriguing American...
...ALDRICH'S project springs from a brilliant premise. Louis Zarkin (Peter Finch) is a has-been film director, remembered only for his hit movies made with one star, Lylah Clare. Zarkin's career died with the mysterious death of his leading lady, which occurred the night he married her. Now, a couple of decades later, he finds a Lylah-look-alike (Kim Novak) and decides to make a comeback by putting her in a film about the Lylah legend...
...this is merely an excuse (and an ingenious excuse) for Aldrich's larger concerns. For Lylah is not only a film about movies-it is a film about the making of a film about movies. The possibilities for fun within such a conception are endless-and I don't think Aldrich fails to exploit a single one of them...
Among the "classics" canonized in Confessions of a Cultist are Aldrich's Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns, Hitchcock's The Birds, Preminger's Advise and Consent. All are auteur genre items; Sarris rarely has the flexibility of such British auteurists as Raymond Durgnat to admit that non-auteurs can produce great films. Each has raw narrative material of questionable significance, and a blatant commercial bent which made the few respectable critics feel rotten and cheated the morning after, unless trash was all they expected...