Word: hollywoodized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...been to Los Angles in the past few years, you may have noticed that the last Great American Dream Machine, Hollywood, has fallen into disuse and disrepair. Many of the big film lots have closed, studios are auctioning off their sets and costumes, the large vulgar marquees of the glamorous film palaces have been dismantled. And so it goes. But, like every other legend the West has given us, the peculiar and fascinating mythos of the movie capital will live on-in books, in songs, and, of course, in the movies themselves...
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...
...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 films of the past three years...
...film is shot in gaudy studio sets, colored with vulgar purples and red-oranges. It is peopled with studio bosses, agents, wardrobe women, and sycophants. The action unfolds in Hollywood mansions, Sunset Strip restaurants, film studios and tacky hotels with flashing neon signs, concluding with a premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theatre. To satisfy the Nathaniel West fans, Aldrich has also thrown in a perverse and crippled gossip columnist (Coral Browne), a lusty Mexican, and a heroin-addicted lesbian...
...Hollywood legend that drove Aldrich to finance this rather special film out of his own pocket-and which also served as a basis for its companion piece, Wilder's classic about a has-been movie star (Gloria Swanson) and her old director (Erich von Stroheim)-may indeed be made of tinsel. But, like the Mafia and major-league baseball, the movie industry undeniably has its own special fascination. Don't pass up Lylah Clare and Sunset Boulevard just because they give largely irrelevant views of the human condition; rather, see them because they come very close to making kitsch look...