A Film Canon

Like many Westerns, Seven Men From Now depicts a series of representative figures thrown together over the course of a journey - the seven criminals responsible for robbing a Wells Fargo office; the ex-sheriff, whose wife was killed in the proceedings (Randolph Scott); the businessman that he befriends, and travels with, in his pursuit of the criminals (Walter Reed); the businessman's wife (Gail Lewis); and, finally, the criminal that tags along, hoping to appropriate the cash at the last moment (Lee Marvin). However, Boetticher and screenwriter Burt Kennedy complicate the relationship between these figures to an unprecedented extent; or, alternatively, use them as the pretext for introducing the 'twist' to the Western, such that the ultimate impression is not merely of their complete inextricability, but of their radiation from the sheriff, who seems to contain them all. This produces a mildly hallucinatory quality, encapsulated in Boetticher's fondness for the surreal Lone Pine landscape, and the preponderance of wet, lightning-lit night scenes (especially the spectacular opening), both of which simultaneously introduce a primeval dimension that relegates the characters to a long-shot, insect-like agility, or even to the first creatures to emerge from the primordial mud. It's also worth mentioning the sheer elegance and economy of the dialogue and cinematography, epitomised by its conflation of masculinity and morality, such that the sheriff's profound moral ambiguity becomes synonymous with his ability to strategically adopt the various masculine personae of the organised criminal, the maverick criminal, the sheriff, the businessman, and the businessman's wife - or, rather his own wife, who appropriated his masculinity by working after he was voted out from sheriff's office, and haunts the film more than any other figure.

The Wrong Man distills one of Hitchcock's archetypal narratives - the man accused of a crime he didn't commit - into the residual noir impulse that haunts his work. As a result, it feels more - and looks less - summative than virtually any other film in his career. Whereas his wrongfully accused protagonists normally find their predicament goes some way towards clarifying the structures that constellate around them, musician 'Manny' Balestrero (Henry Fonda) finds himself trapped in a bureaucratic machine of such overwhelming, Kafkaesque proportions ("a landslide of fear and guilt...a maze of terror") that it takes nothing less than a miracle to escape it. This clarifies paranoia, in its broadest sense, as Hitchcock's pathology of choice; the feeling that every object, however apparently minor or incidental, plays an instrumental role in the state of things, and is therefore capable of acting as a synecdoche for them. However, instead of enlivening the inanimate world, Hitchcock strips it of any local agency, producing an omniscient, threatening opacity that encompasses stark, abstracted sets; Fonda's flat, motionless resignation (which, at times, approaches Bresson's replacement of actor with 'model'); a narrative structure predicated on unecessary, inexplicable repetitions and circumlocutions; a detached, semi-documentary style; and, most spectacularly, Robert Burk's exquisite black-and-white cinematography, which embodies the nervous breakdown that leads to Manny's wife's institutionalisation: "At the moment, her mind is in an eclipse...a frightening landscape that could be on the dark side of the moon." It makes sense, then, that the 'double' should be a more literal figure than in any of Hitchcock's films to date, as if to evoke a world in which individuals have become completely subsumed into demographics, cinematography into surveillance, and surveillance into self-surveillance; screen as mirror.

Around The World In Eighty Days stretches the screen to an unprecedented extent, imbuing every frame with the curvature of the earth's surface, and creating a proto-IMAX aesthetic that justifies producer Michael Todd's opening summary - and invocation - of cinema as a canon of technological innovations, extending from Melies' experiments with the fade, to the most recent examples of aerial photography. This enables a surprisingly sophisticated engagement with the past, as Anderson resists both straightforward identification and exotic detachment in favour of a technological genealogy, thereby ensuring that Phileas Fogg's (David Niven) eighty-day journey already contains the imminent satellite orbit of the earth, collapsing - and defamiliarising - retrospection and projection. Unfortunately, the overwhelming breadth of Todd's vision outweighs this directorial flourish - particularly clear in the astonishing travel segments, which seem keen to revive both the 'phantom rides' of silent cinema, and the painted panoramas of Verne's time - resulting in overwhelmingly one-dimensional characterisation, both of the handful of leads and completely token cameos, and of the various countries encountered, all reduced to so many sacrificial rites.

The Ten Commandments conflates Jewish exclusivity, Christian inclusivity and American egalitarianism, transforming Moses into the original American, American history into a third testament, and the Ten Commandments into a typological anticipation of the Declaration of Independence. This produces a deeper, more pervasive sense of anachronism than the various factual inaccuracies and inconsistencies, as well as a slightly awkward attempt to summarise the American ethos in terms of the divinely sanctioned liberation of slaves. Not only does this ring poorly with the opening claim to reconcile Josephus, Philo, Eusebius, the Midrash and the Bible, but it doesn't even serve a particularly sophisticated spectacular imperative. Certainly, DeMille succeeds in completely transforming speech into so many enunciatory, rhetorical spectacles ("So it is written. So it shall be done"), as well as nicely updating the breathless gravitas that accompanied the earliest cinematic depictions of biblical material. However, with the exception of the astonishing Red Sea sequence, and the four plagues DeMille chooses to depict, the spectacle is merely quantitative; a sheer proliferation of figures, props and mise-en-scenes that continually gestures towards the infernal ingenuity of Griffith but never quite reaches it - with the possible exception of the penultimate scene, in which the condensation of the film's preoccupation with glittering, multicoloured dervishes (responsible, among other things, for an incongruous depiction of Joseph's coat) around the construction of the Golden Calf presents the heterodox Israelites, rather than the Egyptians, as the film's most compelling vision of evil. In the end, the most enduring moments remain those on-location sequences in which Moses simply wanders through the desert wilderness; a vast, epic silence that prefigures God's presence at Sinai. 

Written On The Wind plays like a sequel to the oil western, extending its profusion of grotesque, infantile wealth into hallucinatory melodrama, and its nostalgia for patriarchal sublimity into a barely concealed longing for the phallic potency that the prosperous Hadleys - diminutive father Jasper (Robert Keith), infertile, alcoholic son Kyle (Robert Stack), nymphomaniacal daughter Marylee (Dorothy Malone), and daughter-in-law Lucy (Lauren Bacall) - milk from old family friend Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson), "a small rancher, great hunter and throwback to Daniel Boone". To this end, Sirk coyly identifies the audience with Marylee's orgasmic gaze - which, by the film's conclusion, has felt this phallic absence most acutely and literally - allowing Russell Metty to find in it an embodiment of his own lurid cinematography: "You know, for a beautiful girl, you can look real ugly sometimes." This may explain the relatively contained cinematographic palette, which replaces All That Heaven Allows' endless, fractal-like reticulation of the distinction between inside and outside, with a fairly sharp, consistent dialectic between the pinks, reds and vermillions that accrue around Marylee (her car, clothes, bedroom decor, makeup), and the deep blues and purples that suffuse the oil fields, rendering them continuous with outer space, and transforming their suggestive derricks into perhaps the most poetic, self-parodic instance of 1950s domestic melodrama's claims to an extravagant, cosmic import. 

Giant formulates its attempt to bridge the classical and neo-westerns as a new, transitional (and for that reason relatively rare) subgenre: the oil western. On the one hand, the spectacle of oil takes the sublimity of the classical western to its logical conclusion - and, more specifically, provides a vertical counterpart to Stevens' overwhelming taste for the unbroken horizon, and those horizontal trajectories (of cars, cattle, trains) that act as its surrogate. It also translates that sublimity into a technological register that culminates Stevens' presentation of the Texan ranch inhabited by Bick Benedict (Rock Hudson), his wife (Elizabeth Taylor), sister (Mercedes McCambridge), and nemesis (James Dean), as a "state of mind", "another country" and, finally, a surreal, lunar landscape that recalls the lurid romanticism of Shane. That said, this technological register simultaneously exhausts the film's sublime aesthetic, replacing it with a proliferation of grotesque, infantile, even carnivalesque wealth that culminates with an extended, claustrophobic interior sequence, and informs the extraordinary bathos with which the film concludes: "You wound up on the floor, on your back, in the middle of the salad, and I said to myself 'Well, after one hundred years, the Benedict family is a real big success.'" This aligns Benedict with the sublime, and his nemesis with the ridiculous, in such a way as to belie the  surprisingly calm, elegaic resignation with which he inevitably succumbs to a series of hyperbolic affronts to 'tradition', suggesting that the film's progressive issue about matters of race, sex and lineage - or, alternatively, its deflection of the legacy of the Civil War into the difference between East and West, and the ongoing dispossession of Mexican slaves - is a mere pretext for a deeper, more atavistic nostalgia, and disgust with the post-war present.

This astonishing film condenses the French Resistance to a series of disembodied, collaborative hands, and Andre Devigny's prison escape to his manual literacy; that is, his ability to make his hands 'speak', whether to those around him, or to the inanimate topography of the prison itself, which he caresses into submission. Not only are his most compelling friendships formed by 'knocking' to prisoners in adjoining cells, but his circulation of covert letters culminates with pencils being targeted as the prison's most dangerous, precious commodity. Concomitantly, Bresson strips non-professional actor Francois Leterrier's face - and faces in general - of any tangible content, evoking a world in which "the death of the friend I had never seen left me distraught", and breaking down the distinctions between animate and inanimate, physical and noumenal: "I tried to tell from their faces what kind of men they were. I looked at the walls too." Similarly, verbal articulation is reduced to so much threatening, distorted noise - from the outbursts of German and artillery fire that open the narrative, to the recurrent echoes of the prison corridors, to the tiny sounds that nuance the final escape - an exquisitely tense sequence on its own terms, and redolent of The Wages Of Fear in its ability to bring the entire weight of the universe to bear on a few physical variables. All these factors ensure that the escape takes on a more general signficance, which might be described as both existentialist and Christian - a search for meaning or an act of faith - as if to clarify the common denominator between the two as a staunch commitment to the apparently impossible: "Why are you doing this?" "To fight - fight against the walls, against myself, and my door."

A much more understated engagement with Japan's 1956 Anti-Prostitution Bill than Street Of Shame, Flowing takes place in a geisha brokering-house, rather than a brothel. By replacing the act of consummation with anticipation and preparation, Naruse creates a stronger identification of geisha and prostitute, part of a more pervasive nostalgia for traditional Japanese aesthetics ("Our costumes, our hairstyles, our artistry...all these special things about a geisha are disappearing.") At the same time, the focus on brokerage brings business into the foreground, such that the ultimate collision is between geisha and commerce, rather than prostitute and commerce, as occurs in Mizoguchi's version. The virtual absence of men also allows the dynamics between the geishas - who are a much more symbiotic, integrated group than in Street Of Shame - to become a cipher for post-war anxieties about the demise of the traditional family. Virtually every exchange turns on a thwarted parental, filial or romantic impulse - or, alternatively, clarifies geishas as figures who have to be mother, sister and lover to their clients, preventing them fulfilling those roles satisfactorily in their personal lives - culminating with the stark opposition between the serene, Ozu-like maid (a conspicuously peripheral character, somehow exempt from the rules of the house), and the dismal prospects facing one of the youngest characters: "It feels like I'm only a half-geisha. I don't know what I am... and marriage is just a dream."

Whereas earlier films construe the heist as a sustained act of craftsmanship, The Killing presents it as a sustained act of co-ordination, fully collapsing aesthetics and logistics. Not only does an omniscient narrator provide a minute-by-minute account of the events leading up to the raid on a racetrack, but the point at which the various strands coalesce is continually postponed, in order to return to the trajectories of each participant. This indefinite postponement largely precludes the need for the conventional, centripetal third act, as well as imbuing the heist with an aura of unknowability that gestures towards the sublimity of Kubrick's later works: "You know of the Siberian goat herder who tried to discover the true nature of the sun? He stared up at the heavenly body until it made him blind. There are many things of this sort, including love, death and my business today." That said, this sublimity is largely deflected into the contrast between inky, engulfing blackness, and pinpoints of almost unbearably bright light - an aesthetic that is all the more noticeable for encompassing spaces that are not typically associated with noir. This structural ingenuity is nuanced by Jim Thompson's brilliant script, which succeeds in suggesting that "none of these men are criminals in the usual sense", as well as a series of idiosyncratic camera movements, including a short, repeated pan that gradually lengthens into tracking-shots, and conflates the tandem movements of participants and racehorses.

This extraordinary film translates the polarities of manic depression into the tension between cavernous, agoraphobic sets and abrasive, claustrophobic noise - depth of field and breadth of sound - in an effort to identify it with the parameters of the suburban home. As a result, struggling schoolteacher Ed Avery's (James Mason) symptoms seem less a product of his cortisone addiction than of his dismay at the drabness of suburban life, encapsulated in cinematographer Joseph MacDonald's circumscribed palette. This produces a radical identification between Avery and his home that both takes the right-wing fantasy of suburban insularity to its logical conclusion, and aestheticises it. Not only does Ray continually draw poetic parallels between Avery and his home (such as his first blackout, which takes place after he has turned off every light in the house), but gradually exploits the distortive power of CinemaScope in such a way as to suggest that neither is capable of being contained within the ambit of a single gaze, or shot. Throughout the third act, Avery is continually elevated to a threatening distance from the camera that, combined with increasingly grotesque lighting, contributes to his status as a perverse, hyperbolic law-giver ("I will not tolerate your attempts to undermine my program") - a conflation of God and Abraham that corresponds to the conflation of doctor and patient bound up in his self-medication, transforms his staircase into a mountainous altar, and over-compensates for the drastic disorientations of his covert job as an impoverished taxi pick-up co-ordinator; a fantasy of a suburban house so ideologically pure that it is cleansed of its very inhabitants.

On the one hand, Street Of Shame culminates the social realist trend in Mizoguchi's body of work. Originally intended to be a semidocumentary take on Tokyo's red light district - the literal translation of the title - the narrative turns on a series of frank, straightforward depictions and discussions of the financial straits that have driven four women into prostitution, and their various attempts to escape. This documentary quality is enhanced by the topical backdrop of Japan's first Anti-Prostitution Bill - and Mizoguchi's sympathies are encapsulated in the most pervasive identification of prostitution with business in his career (or, alternatively, disassociation of prostitution from the aestheticised geisha). Nevertheless, his fascination with female suffering as an aesthetic experience simultaneously culminates his fantastic proclivities, particularly in his Expressionist delineation of the brothel 'Dreamland', and its surrounding alleyways; a lurid, tipsy, hallucinatory world whose threatening ambience precludes the need for his characteristic tracking-shot, and ultimately becomes continuous with the horror of lost virginity. The common denominator between these two modes is an exquisite deep-focus that continually relegates figures to the middle distance, with ominous darkness or blackness intervening. 

Early Spring relocates Ozu's tension between tradition and modernity from marriage to the workplace, presenting the transition from craftsmanship to "the fate of the salaried worker" as the most enduring scar of the war. In place of the extended families of the Noriko trilogy, Ozu elaborates a mass-produced line of office workers - at desks, in bars, in parks, in front of bathroom mirrors - that tends to preclude his characteristic 360° conversational editing, as well as his use of the stationary, low-level tatami shot, both of which are reserved for the fleeting domestic intimacy of the central couple. At the same time, he ruptures his minimalistic aesthetic with a rare use of the mobile camera, an elaborate imprisonment of long-shot characters within domestic and corporate architecture, and a marked increase in his depictions of the exterior world, which start to resemble conventional establishing shots, rather than the exquisite abstractions of his earlier works. This produces an unusually visceral tone, encompassing broad, bawdy comedy, overt displays of sexuality, and frequent depictions of drunkenness, and perhaps reflecting the Western demographic opened up by the international success of Tokyo Story. As a result, the film doesn't quite manage to transform its narrative preoccupation with mono no aware into the sublime melancholy of Ozu's earlier works, although this may in itself be a deliberate response to the banality of the subject matter. Certainly, the final sequence manages to imbue a brick factory, and the lonely, meditative community that surrounds it, with the grandeur of a Buddhist temple, while qualifying it with the subsidiary melancholy of the fact that Tokyo is only a day's journey away by the omnipresent trains, as to offer a wry, final link between working life and Ozu's earlier familial preoccupations.

As a musical adaptation of The Philadelphia Story, High Society translates Tracy Samantha Lord's (Grace Kelly) brittleness into an unwillingness to sing, or be sung to, thereby distinguishing her fiancee George Kittredge (John Lund), who is unable, or unwilling, to sing, from her ex-husband C.K. Dexter-Haven (Bing Crosby), whose artful fusion of speech and song imbues conversation with a relaxed musicality that clarifies its distance from Cukor's frenzied screwball original. Similarly, intrusive reporter Mike Connor's (Frank Sinatra) role as Dexter's romantic surrogate is nicely clarified by their roughly equal division of musical labour, as well as Sinatra's more overt, less conversational, sensuality. That said, the sensual potential of music is fairly pervasive, thanks to the backdrop of the Newport Jazz Festival, personified by Louis Armstrong and his band who, despite being formerly introduced in the memorable "Now You Has Jazz", lurk around the edges of the film, in a largely ambient, atmospheric manner. The result is an unusually tight trajectory of musical numbers, especially those that relate to Tracy - "True Love", "I Love You, Samantha", "You're Sensational" and "Mind If I Make Love To You" - which take on a delightfully cumulative quality, each invoking and being inflected through the number that has preceded it, as she gradually discards her supposedly repellent, unwomanly attributes.

Not since D.W. Griffith has melodrama been raised to the irrealistic, hallucinatory register that it takes in this film, which describes the objections from family and community that confront widow Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) when she decides to marry Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson), her younger gardener. At one level, this simply involves the rehearsal of tropes endemic to 1950s 'women's pictures', albeit with a particularly eloquent, sustained plea for a woman's right to choose her romantic and sexual partner (and concomitant refusal of the empty rhetoric of self-sacrifice, responsibility and tradition), as well as a peculiarly chilling portrayal of the transformation of children into so many cruel, neglectful, idiotic neighbours. Yet Sirk and cinematographer Russell Metty suffuse this generic scenario with an extraordinary wealth of colour that intensifies and defamiliarises it. This is structured around an opposition between cool exteriors and warm interiors, whose axis is gradually generalised from the wall of the house, to the walls between rooms, and, in turn, to the various separations that exist within rooms - as if to suggest that the issue of inside and outside, so precious to Griffith, has either become burdensome, or is simply no longer relevant, suburbia having naturalised itself in such a way as to break down all distinction between nature and culture. At the same time, this lurid aestheticism provides a startling evocation of the "different drummer" within Cary and Ron's breasts; a mode of perception unavailable to the figures that surround them. From this perspective, the film's Waldenesque fantasy is curiously qualified by the implication that Walden is as much a gaze as a place, as Sirk enjoins suburban housewives to turn away from their television sets, but only for the sake of projecting his Technicolor transcendentalism onto their lives.

Guys And Dolls builds on the anti-noir aesthetic of Gene Kelly's musicals, neutralising a series of motifs (gambling, organised crime, misogyny, social decay) that, a decade before, would have been noir staples and, two decades before, would have been gangster staples. To this end, Mankiewicz tacitly reduces organised morality to a straw man, in the guise of a Salvation Army outfit conducted like any other business, and headed by Sergeant Sarah Brown (Jean Simmons), whose sense of vocation is little more than a defence against her own proclivity to sin. The dubiousness of this establishment is further enhanced by its emasculating vision of an army of women and old men - a shrewd retention of noir's underlying fears - albeit never shorn of its familial warmth, as if Christianity had been entirely reduced to the institutions of marriage and parenthood. Hence the striking conclusion, in which a sermon ("Follow the fold, and stray no more") segues into a double wedding that takes place on the street, and encompasses all the characters and cast; a marriage of the disparate parts of an increasingly disorienting urban landscape. From this perspective, the contained staginess of Howard Bristol's exquisite set design is itself a defence mechanism, partaking of the heightened, deliberately regressive theatricality of the 1950s musical, but also justified by the self-consciously theatrical streetscape that it evokes: "Only on Times Square does the dawn get turned on by an electrician." In keeping with this turn away from realism, the 1930s and 1940s taste for song fragments is replaced by full-blown musical numbers (including such standards as "Sit Down, You're Rocking The Boat" and "Luck Be A Lady"), while the actor-singer is fragmented into the rapport between an actor (Marlon Brando) and a singer (Frank Sinatra), whose  clumsiness is embodied by their contrived, uncontracted, 'ethnic' register.

From one perspective, The Ladykillers is the most American of Ealing comedies, playing like a rough transplantation of Arsenic And Old Lace from Brooklyn to Kings Cross. Like Capra, Mackendrick attempts to squeeze the maximum number of bodies and sounds into a single house, producing a claustrophobic cacaphony that centres on the collision of civilised and uncivilised sound, music and noise, speech and drone, with the typically Capraesque revelation that all these dichotomies are ultimately false; a democracy of sound. This produces a pervasively physical comedy that is completely at odds with the restrained, exquisite irony of earlier Ealing efforts, as well as a series of hammy caricatures that don't so much depart from the studio's taste for one-dimensionality as caricature it, falling far short of the charming, nuanced array of types that populate Kind Hearts And Coronets or Whiskey Galore! That said, this cariacturisation paves the way for a Dickensian, industrial Gothic that represents a specifically English departure from both Capra and earlier Ealing efforts, extending the false dichotomy between organic and inorganic sound to one between organic and inorganic bodies. Not only does the eponymous gang of outlaws, headed by Faginesque 'Professor Marcus' (Alec Guinness), find landlady Louisa Wilberforce (Katie Johnson) unkillable, but their own deaths take place as a mere extrapolation of the railway yard that backs onto the house, their bodies gleefully disposed of by a constellation of steam, coal and steel. This gives the physicality of the comedy a distinctly unsettling edge, as if unveiling slapstick's roots in industrial subjugation, and is exacerbated by the dark-palletted cinematography, which creates the impression of a storm cloud perpetually hanging over everything, on the verge of bursting.

Rebel Without A Cause stands in relation to cinema as The Catcher In The Rye does to literature, introducing the adolescent as a new species, replete with its own vocabulary, rituals and sacrosanct spaces, all of which are attributed to a crisis in fatherhood's ability to achieve a satisfactory compromise between authority and affection, requiring a new combination of policeman and psychologist for proper diagnosis. On the one hand, Jim Stark's (James Dean) father only wants to be his friend, thereby forcing Jim to bear the burden of his emasculated shame, borne of constant submission to a wife and mother who have gradually fused into a single figure. On the other hand, Judy's (Natalie Wood) father refuses to let her kiss him after her sixteenth birthday, forcing her to take refuge in a whole host of surrogates, of whom Jim is the most compelling. Yet this respective embodiment of and search for a satisfactory father-figure is by no means restricted to relationships, as the intimate friendship between Jim and young 'Plato' (Sal Mineo) suggests - and, from this perspective, the film's romance is ultimately less enduring than its nascent vision of a new homosociality, extrapolated from its nascent vision of high school as a subversion of suburbia. That said, suburbia is still very much the province of the action - and, like The Day The Earth Stood Still, the slight generic distance from melodrama allows Ray to both explicate its oscillation between the domestic and the cosmic, and to translate it into a more explicitly exisistential register, as evinced in the series of epic, sky-bound promontories around which the action revolves, as well as a trip to the local observatory that reminds the students of "the shortness of time between our planet's birth and demise".

This adaptation of John Steinbeck's epic novel does ample credit to its opening chapter, describing the Salinas Valley "Salad Bowl" in vivid, evocative detail. Kazan combines cinemascope, panoramic camera movement, and a series of rich, luscious tableaux to create a sensory richness that forms the common denominator with the visceral, bodily intensity of his earlier features, as does the expressionist, even Gothic, distortions of the first and third acts. Unfortunately, the subsequent narrative is less satisfactory, if only because a mere fragment of Steinbeck's magnum opus is depicted, albeit a fragment whose gravitas depends on a whole series of back-stories and associations that are omitted. This imbues the film with a curious emptiness, preventing its characters achieving the larger-than-life quality that might have contextualised their one-dimensionality, and leaving a great deal unresolved. It also ensures that Steinbeck's biblical analogies fail to fall just short of being heavy-handed, as occurs in the novel. The result is a compromise between two styles that defy interiority, or introspection - Steinbeck's epic, allegorical realism, and Kazan's behaviourist, method-inflected plasticity - but without the redeeming features of either. This compromise is embodied by James Dean's performance as ill-fated son Caleb, which oscillates between an echo of Kazan's Brando, and the elusiveness of Henry Fonda's Tom Joad, albeit occasionally capturing an emergent adolescent register that, while out of place in this film, is original in itself, anticipating Rebel Without A Cause.

This is effectively a single interior monologue, in which Richard Sherman (Tom Ewell) reflects on the minutiae of his surroundings, and his gradual entanglement with 'the girl' upstairs (Marilyn Monroe), over the course of his wife and son's annual summer holiday. On the one hand, this results in a stagy, occasionally hammy, monotony that betrays its origins in Georg Axelrod's three-act play, and could easily have been mitigated by the elaboration of some secondary characters. Yet the restriction of all introspection to Sherman simultaneously imbues the action that revolves around him, and the girl who prompts it, with a tipsy, hallucinatory quality that is only enhanced by the frequent recourse to imaginary interlocuturs and asides, which delighfully parody contemporary genres (noir, melodrama, the western), as well as by the dreamy score, extrapolated from a fantastic rendition of Rachmaninoff's second concerto. By the conclusion, the possibility remains that the girl has been a mere projection of his wandering, overheated mind, and his greatest crime has simply been drinking a little more than his wife prescribed. It's also worth mentioning Wilder's evocative portrait of the denuded metropolis, in which the sudden absence of wives and children brings a whole host of marginal eccentrics into relief, including vegetarians, nudists and the "two interior decorators" on the top floor, as well as suffusing the street with the hushed intimacy of the apartment complex within which most of the action takes place, its subway vents just a more effective source of air-conditioning.

On the one hand, The Bad And The Beautiful is the trashiest instance of 1950s Hollywood self-reflexivity, exuding gossip, revelling in scandal, and begging the audience to identify the various inspirations for actress Georgia Lorrison (Lana Turner), screenwriter James Lee Bartlow (Dick Powell), director Fred Amiel (Barry Sullivan), and tyrannical producer Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas), around whom they are clustered - if only because all four play slightly parodic versions of themselves. Yet, despite never quite achieving the grittiness of Sunset Blvd. or In A Lonely Place, Minelli manages to provide a series of relatively realistic insights into life behind the camera, particularly in terms of the complicated, frequently homosocial relationship between director, producer and executive producer, as well as the manner in which these different roles encourage, or even reveal, different parts of a single personality. At the same time, more practical considerations are nicely elaborated - from the unusually conspicuous presence of carpenters, costumers, mavericks, stuntmen and extras, to the laborious tasks and all-night shifts that typify backstage life on a B-picture. In the process, Shields achieves the mythical, larger- than-life quality of the late 1930s gangster - a 'bigshot', whose dubious behaviour is ultimately the mere index of a singularity of vision that has become a thing of the past, and whose charisma is superhuman, capable of quashing any personal or political impediment.