A Film Canon

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.