The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)

A washed up producer (Kirk Douglas) tries to get his former friends to make another picture to revive his career. The three, a director (Barry Sullivan), star (Lana Turner), and screenwriter (Dick Powell), recount their story of how they fell out with him.

Nominated for six academy awards and winning five, Hollywood is a sucker for stories about Hollywood, and apparently so am I. The three stories do not overlap much and illustrate the extent Douglas’ Jonathan is willing to go to further his interests. The now successful three must ask themselves if they can put their feelings aside to now help their former mentor. 

Gloria Grahame won an Oscar nine and a half minutes of a fair southern accent. It would be the shortest screen time for an acting Oscar at the time ... I'm happy to say. Leo G. Carroll has a brief role as a difficult director and Barbara Billingsley makes a blink-and-you’ll-miss-her appearance five years before becoming June Cleaver.

Many of the characters are thinly-veiled versions of real contemporary people. I will out David O. Selznick as a primary inspiration for our main character, but you can read the details for yourself. Selznick even contacted a lawyer to see if there were grounds to sue.

The Bad and the Beautiful is expert storytelling. The performances are excellent (Douglas uses his “angry Kirk” voice only once), the script is tight, and the story compelling. The film came highly recommended and I came to it very late. I should have believed it. AMRU 4.5.

Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)

The Smith family lives in idealistic 1903 St. Louis, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have problems. Serious problems like how can Ester (Judy Garland) get the boy next door to propose if they haven’t even been introduced? And can sister Rose get her boyfriend to propose over that new-fangled tele-phone contraption? Also, where has Tootie buried all of her dead dolls?

Meet Me in St. Louis is a nostalgic, feel-good, high production piece of fluff. Therefore, it was a huge success. The big song is Judy’s Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas which, unlike the others, has real meaning in the story. Here also is where The Trolly Song comes from, later made famous by the Sweeney Sisters.

The inciting incident comes past the halfway point. With a variety of personal issues in play, dad announces that they will move to New York City. Why live in a gorgeous Victorian in picturesque St. Louis when you can live in a Manhattan tenement? It’s a great opportunity, after all. Everyone must come to terms with this change while celebrating their last Christmas in St. Louis. This is the context of Judy’s song. Tootie doesn’t respond well.

Mary Astor plays Mom and she was hard to recognize, both in appearance and manner. Marjorie Main (Ma Kettle) played the maid. She wasn't hard to recognize. June Lockhart and Hugh Marlowe had tiny roles, but we must talk about Tootie.

Margaret O’Brien at 6 was already an established child star, so her momager decided the studio should pay her accordingly. The studio immediately responded by announcing that the part would go to the daughter of an electrician. The O’Brien’s held out and ended up with the contract they wanted. The electrician responded by dropping lighting equipment from a catwalk near where Margaret was standing. Hollywood is such a warm and inviting place.

The investment in O’Brien certainly paid off for the studio. She just about steals the show and was awarded a juvenile academy award. The same movie framed around her character would have been very interesting. The Halloween segment was, well, quite unexpected. The kids of the town are left to their own devices where they build a bonfire with stolen patio furniture, and throw flour in the face of adults they hate. The talk of hate and blood and murder from the youngest two Smith daughters was delightfully out of place.

But this is Judy’s film and a big hit for her, despite her hairstyle looking like she is hiding horns. And her acting ... wasn’t terrible. Perhaps the lack of gravity in her performance was masked by the mannered style of period costume dramas. The film has only slightly more realism than Oz. Her difficulty on set is an early example of the pill problem that would eventually take her life. At 22 the lines in her face were starting to appear. In the end she pulled out some pretty good performances and would go on to marry the ugly director, twice her age.

Meet Me in St. Louis is the kind of film that it is. Everything is perfectly lit, the colors supersaturated, and all characters, regardless of the circumstance, are impeccably costumed, styled, and made up. But the morbidity of the two youngest sisters is shockingly out of place. Out of place, but oddly not unwelcome. Were it all glitzy confection, it would have less appeal. As such, AMRU 4. It is a delightful piece of fluff.

“It'll take me at least a week to dig up all my dolls in the cemetery.”

Gigi (1958)

Gaston (Louis Jourdan), a fabulously wealthy man about town, is bored with the Parisian nightlife. He goes to fabulous parties with fabulous women (Eva Gabor) whom he showers with fabulous gifts, and is simply bored with it all. His creepy uncle (Maurice Chevalier) has no such problem. Thank heaven for little girls ...

He is friends with an older woman of Paris (Hermione Gingold) who is training her granddaughter (Leslie Caron) for the same … profession? As Gaston grows closer to Gigi, well, let’s just leave that here.

In a modern context, maybe Madame Alverez would be picked up by the FBI while Gaston would have been suicided in prison. But Gigi has a moral out. Set in 1900 Paris, the setting is distinctly not here and not now. This passes the judgement off to another culture. And as we are further from 1958 then 1958 was from 1900, another separation is in place. Should we judge the film harshly?

Leslie Caron was absolutely charming as the playful teen. The ripe old age of 26 while filming, she was entirely believable as a teenager. This is no small feat. Her body language was spot on. And this presents a problem. Is the character fifteen? They never say, but she is in the source material and seems every bit of it. So what we are left with is a budding romance between a teenaged girl and a rich, bored man pushing 40. And this is all ok because her grandmother (and great aunt) were training her to be a courtesan all along. It’s ok to feel dirty here.

Much of the descriptive dialog is intentionally vague, clipped and stilted to appease the production code. The audience is forced to make up our own mind what the situation is. Maybe Gigi is being groomed to be a proper lady rather than a woman who shares a rich man’s bed in exchange for lavash dinners and fancy jewelry. But, nope. The latter.

I find myself comparing this film with My Fair Lady, which has a similar theme of a old rich man grooming a too young girl. A big difference is that both characters here are more likable than in Lady. While Lady’s Higgins was unkind and lacked a proper character arc, Gaston was clearly a good person. He is looking for someone who is interesting and fun to be around. Someone who doesn't bore him. He is kind to Gigi and when he realizes his feelings, the moment is impactful.

I am somewhat embarrassed to say I enjoyed Gigi. I liked the characters and rooted for them. I can't side step the grooming of an underage girl aspect (and a family friend, no less), but my reaction is what it is. The musical numbers, while not super memorable, were much shorter than in Lady. AMRU 3.5.

Lust for Life (1956)

Young Vincent Van Gogh (Kirk Douglas) washes out as a pastor, is lonely, takes up painting, mooches off his brother, is lonely, cuts off his ear, then kills himself. And everyone lives happily ever after.

This expressive if sanitized version of Van Gogh’s life is visually impressive. Director Vincent Minnelli spray painted a field so that the colors would match Van Gogh’s pallet. The main beats of his life are touched upon but let’s face facts. The life of Van Gogh isn’t all that uplifting. He struggled with mental illness, was never appreciated during his time, was lonely, lived in poverty, and finally committed suicide. Did I mention he was lonely? No matter, the film covers that point. Maybe it says more about modern audiences that the tortured genius needs to have that moment of redemption, ala A Beautiful Mind, but the film ends up reading as “bad stuff happens to guy we care about”.

I’ve seen few Kirk Douglas films, and frequently I’ve confused him for Charlton Heston, but I wanted to give this legend his due. Upon his recent passing I looked for one of his films to watch. I couldn’t easily get my hands on Paths of Glory (for free) but TCM was running Lust for Life. It was a natural choice. The Bad and the Beautiful wasn’t going to happen.

I wanted to love Lust for Life, but couldn't. As mentioned it is a great looking film, and Douglas’ performance was impressive, if a little one-note, but I wasn’t drawn in. The story plodded along at times and characters entered and exited the story before we got to know them. Van Gogh was not a heroic character. We don't see a flawed character overcome his obstacles, and it was too sanitized to be a compelling biopic. AMRU 3.

The Clock (1945)

A serviceman (Robert Walker) in New York on a 48 hour leave bumbles into a young woman (Judy Garland) and coerces her into showing him around town. Despite her better judgement and a total lack of chemistry, he monopolizes all of her free time. Will love bloom?

Robert Walker is better known, to me at least, for his performance in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (Criss Cross), whose premiere he barely lived long enough to see. His hyper-innocent lost puppy dog character in The Clock was reminiscent of his upbeat psychopath on the Train.

Judy is a Hollywood legend, one I have yet to fully appreciate. Despite her legend status she appeared in only 34 feature films, nine with Mickey Rooney. I have a couple of her better films on my life list (this is the second of her films I have seen) but a movie-a-day calendar recommended The Clock. Primarily a singer, this is one of only three films where she does not sing. I’m not sure if that would have saved it. Like her co-star, Judy’s life was cut short by a toxic lifestyle. Our two leads would live to the ripe old age of 79, combined.

Prolific character actor James Gleason has a memorable scene with his real-life wife. A veteran of 135 films over thirty years, he has appeared in four films I’ve seen prior. Keenan Wynn had an amusing scene as a drunk. He has popped up in many movies.

I’m just going to come out and say it. Judy wasn’t much of an actress. She was charming and cute, but I don’t see any reason why her Alice would fall in love with Walker’s Joe. In fact there were more than enough red flags. If your relationship begins anything like how this film depicts, run. Fast.

The Clock is a somewhat amusing non-com romance that some will be charmed with, but not me. It drags in parts, lacks an emotional hook, and the leads have no chemistry. Maybe that’s because Judy was screwing the director. AMRU 2.5.

Kismet (1955)

A sharp-tongued poet (Howard Keel), who somehow made it to adulthood before learning you can’t make money from poetry, is mistaken for a beggar. He goes along with it. A notorious thief mistakes him for the man who put a curse on him that lost him his son, so he cons his way into being paid to release the curse. Things are going great but soon he is arrested by the Great and Mighty Wazir (Mr. French), his daughter (Ann Blyth) falls in love, and coincidences keep us all so very entertained.

Kismet is the forth and best remembered version of the 1911 play of the same name. Stylistically it falls in line with a great many musicals made around that time. Brightly colored, expansive sets, heavily rehearsed period pieces with family friendly stories that also border on the naughty. See Seven Brides, Kiss me Kate, Brigadoon. Grand spectacles, if you’re into that sort of thing.

If you’re vexed by all the honkies in Arabia remember that this is 1955 and suspension of disbelief rules the day. Particularly out of place is the Grand Caliph and teen heartthrob Vic Damone. Why he wasn’t in more films is wondered by nobody. But don’t judge him too harshly. He’s just a teenager in love.

Old friends Monty Woolley (The Man Who Came to Dinner), Jack Elam (Kansas City Confidential and just about every low budget western imaginable), and Jamie Farr make appearances. This is first film I’ve seen directed by the guy who gave Liza her last name.

Not a bad thing if you’re into the genre. I tolerated it well. I expected an “Oh, that’s where that song comes from” moment but there was none. People who whistle show tunes will be more familiar. But for me, AMRU 3.