Word: hollywoodized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...drawn face of Powell recalled that of Monroe Stahr, the Hollywood producer in The Last Tycoon (played by Robert De Niro in the movie) who presided over a cosmos of exploding egos in order to produce celluloid fantasies. Powell was beset by a nervous President, a clamorous diplomatic gallery, shouting reporters, Israelis, Arabs and the usual indignities of just being in Gotham...
...cast does little to help pick up the slack. Making a comeback on the screen for the first time since the days of An American in Paris, Leslie Caron plays a middle-aged Russian star on the decline, who dreams of sharing top billing with the new sensation of Hollywood. Her performance betrays the length of her absence from movies; in a role that calls for an eccentric sort, Caron fails to discriminate between the passionate and the hammy. Her performance deteriorates into a caricature of The Beautiful People of that period. Michelle Phillips passes for the leading lady...
Perhaps the single most important quality that sold America on Rudolph Valentino was the romantic figure he cut during his short-lived heyday. He challenged the power wielded by Hollywood's biggest moguls over scripts and salaries, always standing by an almost quixotic sense of honor in an epoch sorely lacking men of principle. Although his career suffered accordingly, the legend that lingers only profits from this irrepressible streak. But in the film this trait is largely neglected until the concluding portion, when Russell decides to end the film with a famous boxing exhibition between a tubercular Valentino...
...character who gives the story its driving force, just as booming industry pushed America through the '20s. Fast creates many rich, three-dimensional personalities in his book--the powerful bankers, the fishermen, the couple who decide to leave the city to operate a vineyard, the girl who leaves for Hollywood in search of stardom, the man who swindles...
...course, but Fritz Lang's 1923 murder story M. stands in tribute to the visual sweep and eloquence of silent film. Lang and Lubitsch made the German film industry in the 1920's the most technically brilliant and intellectually stimulating of any in the world; Lang's later Hollywood efforts were mostly cliched and dull. The movie stars the young Peter Lorre, not the simpering caricature of the Bogart films, but Lorre when he was young an thin, and very pale, and very convincing as a psychopath who murders children. The scene where a young girl is murdered...