[Row Three programming if we owned a Rep Cinema]

Washed Up Hollywood

In a Lonely Place – 8:00pm
The Bad and the Beautiful – 10:00pm
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane – Midnight

Hollywood has ever loved casting a cynical glance on itself, somehow managing to maintain its visage as the dream factory while also exposing the deep decay and corruption underneath. This surfaces especially in film noir, of which you could almost create a subgenre of “Hollywood Gothic.” All these films could fall under that subgenre, but they all also feature characters whose great success in show business has faded, leaving them in the unenviable position of trying to make a comeback against all odds. Sunset Boulevard is the obvious go-to film here, so I left it out. I’m ornery that way. The three films I have chosen depict a writer, a producer, and an actress all trying to reclaim their former glory while dealing with their own, sometimes severe, personal difficulties.

Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place gave Humphrey Bogart one of his best roles as troubled screenwriter Dixon Steele, who hasn’t written a hit film for several years. When his agent begs him to adapt a recent bestseller, Dix asks a coat check girl smitten with the book to come home with him and tell him about it – when she turns up dead after leaving his apartment, he’s the obvious suspect, and his history of short-temperedness and violence against previous girlfriends doesn’t do him any favors. But neighbor Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame) gives him an alibi and they start a relationship that may save Dix both personally and professionally. He’s like a new man and starts writing a new screenplay, with a poetic touch in lines like “I was born when she kissed me, I died when she left me, I lived a few weeks while she loved me” that could apply as well to Dix and Laurel’s relationship as it does to Dix’s screenplay. But this is Hollywood Gothic, and that rarely turns out well for the main characters. When the murder investigation turns back around it sours both his blossoming career aspirations and his relationship with Laurel, leading to an end quite bleak for the time in which it was made. There’s so much to love and respect about this film – the career-topping performances by Bogart and Grahame, the complexity of their characters, many editing and story decisions that set this apart from its noir-esque siblings. It’s a heartbreaking movie, all the more so because we see what Dix and Laurel could have had, what his career and his life could have been with her at his side, but yet it all almost inevitably breaks down.

The Bad and the Beautiful is an interesting entry on the theme of potential Hollywood comebacks, because producer Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas) doesn’t really appear in the present-day frame narrative at all, and it’s only through the three flashbacks told by former associates that we learn what he’s all about. At the film’s opening, a studio exec calls actress Georgia Lorrison (Lana Turner), director Fred Amiel (Barry Sullivan), and screenwriter James Lee Bartlow (Dick Powell) into his office to try to secure their help in bringing Shields back to Hollywood after an extended stay in Paris following a failed film. But as each of them tells about their experiences working with Shields, it becomes clear what a double-crossing type of individual he is, able to get his way only by alienated everyone around him – none of them are eager to work with him again. Yet, in true Hollywood self-cynical fashion, it’s pretty clear that none of these people would be where they are today without him – ruthless producers get results in a ruthless Hollywood. Vincente Minnelli is well-known for a series of top-quality lush musicals, but he’s equally at home in the world of drama (and melodrama), and this stands as one of his most incisive and entertaining dramas.

The other reason I left out Sunset Boulevard is that What Ever Happened to Baby Jane hits many of the same beats and I saw it more recently and want to talk about it. Baby Jane Hudson was a well-loved child star on the vaudeville circuit, but when vaudeville gave way to film, her less precocious sister Blanche turned out to be the grown-up star. Flash-forward and a car wreck (not quite an accident) cripples Blanche, with blame falling on a jealous Jane. Flash-forward even further, and Bette Davis is a slightly unhinged Jane caring for Joan Crawford’s wheelchair-bound Blanche in the loosest possible sense of the term “caring.” Jane wants to mount a comeback doing much the same act that she did as a child, while Blanche fears more and more that Jane’s delusions are a danger to both of them. Part psychological drama, part horror film, part Hollywood gothic, and part utter camp, I haven’t been this downright entertained by a film for quite a while. As with Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, the casting coup here means that not only do both Davis and Crawford have plenty of clips to pull on for the section set at the height of Blanche’s career, but there’s also a fantastic meta-level playing on the infamous decades-long rivalry between the two actresses (which was not at all mitigated by the time this film was made in 1962 – the on-set quarrels remain legendary). Crawford is unfortunately left with not too much to do as the rather meek Blanche, but this might actually be one of Davis’s very best roles – the scene where Jane snaps and essentially becomes Baby Jane fully for a few minutes is quite campy, sure, but also kind of terrifying.