Word: lylah
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
What follows is a bizarre and Gothic tale. Zarkin's new star becomes Lylah not only in appearance but in personality, thereby causing the director to make the same emotional errors in handling the new Lylah as he had with the original. Of course, these personal conflicts between Zarkin and his star-lover turn out to have more than a little to do with the original Lylah's strange death-and, unsurprisingly, history repeats itself...
...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...
...Aldrich; it involves a somewhat disconcerting dog-food TV commercial. Aldrich also never loses sight of the fact that the legend he is simultaneously destroying and recreating in this work may not be long for this world. It is not surprising, then, that death is a central motif of Lylah Clare. Every character is self-destructive in the extreme; in some cases, this is also combined with terminal cancer or a fondness for playing recklessly with guns and cars...
...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 like...