Word: scripting
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...theme of The Star which lacks luster, for similar stories of a fading actress were presented sharply and adroitly in All About Eve and Sunset Boulevard. Nor is Bette Davis disappointing: she shrieks, she bellows, she rolls her prodigious eyes. But this time the script is as aged as its heroine, and The Star, with a lack of biting satire, can only gum its way through a dim Hollywood adventure...
Adapting Gigi from Colette's novel, Anita Loos has weighted a delicate story a bit too heavily with farce, and the cast scurries through the lines as though intent on catching the 10:35 out of town. Due perhaps to an over-familiarity with the script after a year on Broadway and on tour, the pace is regrettable because the delightful characters of Gigi warrant a longer acquaintanceship...
...course, Jack Kirkland's script did not land here intact. Moral mutilation by the Boston censor cut some choice lines but did not truly serve the ends of prudery. Sacrificing a good show for a bawdy one, the actors uniformly overplayed their parts, accenting suggestive leers, to turn a fairly mature comedy into a long smutty joke...
Paramount gave her a screen test, coldly classified her appearance as "unprepossessing but took a high shine to her etching voice. After a breaking-in period she was funneled into a script called The Mars Are Singing that had aging Heldentenor Lauritz Melchior, youthful Soprano Anna Maria Alberghetti (TIME, May 8, 1950) and a performing dog to recommend it, but little else. To Rosemary the director parceled out a couple of routine songs, Haven't Got a Worry and Lovely Weather for Ducks, and a reprise of Come On-a My House; it began to look...
Because Hollywood is seldom objective about itself, The Bad and the Beautiful feints more than it punches. The moral of the film, spelled out in the script, reveals more about Hollywood than the entire picture. Though Shields has wronged them, the director, star, and author are now successful because of him. They are obligated, film executive Walter Pidgeon insists, to forgive Shields. Pidgeon assures the author that his recent Pulitzer Prize more than compensates for the loss of his wife. Since his wife is Miss Grahame, this reasoning is doubly faulty...