Word: sunsets
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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...
...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...
There are also references to Cahiers de Cinema, various aspects of the nitty-gritty of the film industry, and other movies (among them Sunset Boulevard ). The picture climaxes with an idiosyncratic image that resolves everything in the picture and could come only from 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...
...remainder of the book is pure John Wayne. The ending is suitably devastating, as bits of everyone, wind-borne, ride off into the sunset...
...explosion sent showers of pyrotechnic sparks into the air." On the airport road. Cloud saw "panic-stricken refugees, clutching children and personal possessions, streaming away from the holocaust. In a field a few hundred yards from the airport, hundreds of them huddled in the predawn darkness while the false sunset of the fire blazed before them. They watched the sky as if it were some huge motion-picture screen...