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DVD The Bad and the Beautiful
In The Bad and the Beautiful, Kirk Douglas plays a tyrannical, manipulative producer fallen on hard times. To get back on his feet, he asks for help from three Hollywood giants whose careers he helped launch--a director (Barry Sullivan), an actress (Lana Turner), and a writer (Dick Powell). Unfortunately, they all hate him. Flashbacks explain why. Douglas had been close to all three at different points in his career: He and the director started out together making B-movies, he gave the wayward actress her first starring role, he turned the novelist into a successful screenwriter. Then in one way or another he stabbed each of them in the back, though not always deliberately. The script has a lot of backstage clichés, but Vincente Minnelli's sharp, energetic direction, the gorgeous black-and-white cinematography, and the topnotch performances--particularly Douglas and Gloria Grahame, who won an Oscar for her sweet role as the writer's cheerful Southern wife--flesh out the clichés with cutting details and convincing bile. Caustic, starry-eyed, and slyly funny, The Bad and the Beautiful is a strange and skillful blend of "If I can make it here, I can make it anywhere" pluck and poisonous cynicism, one of the great movies about making movies. --Bret Fetzer
An ambitious wanna-be producer walks all over everyone to get to the top and then needs their help when he hits the bottom. Kirk Douglas as Shields the producer is just fine. Those he uses and abuses include Lana Turner as a drunken tramp he turns into a star, William Powell as a homespun writer Shields gives the Hollywood treatment---inadvertantly causing the death of the writer's wife (a marvelous Gloria Grahame, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar) and Walter Pidgeon as a big time producer who gives Shields his first big break. The film is told in flashbacks as a now destitute Shields starts contacting these people looking for support. He made some of them what they are now---but at a costly price to their souls. Film ends with the question "will they or won't they?" Douglas plays Shields as a charming jerk who'll stab you in the back in a heartbeat to get what he wants. Turner is good and has a great scene where she completely freaks out behind the wheel of her car after discovering what a lowlife Shields really is, nearly killing herself and God knows who else. And Grahame is delightful as Powell's Southern fried wife who perhaps is a bit too helpful and winds up a victim of Shield's plot to keep Powell under his thumb. Supposedly a who's who of real life Hollywood stories, the film is just plain enjoyable for the performances and looks great on DVD.
"I've made a career out of playing SOB's"
Kirk Douglas once said this when remarking upon his movie career and in this film he portrays one to perfection the way only he can. "The Bad and the Beautiful" is a brutal, behind-the-scenes look at Hollywood's Golden Age in its portrayal of Tinseltown as a city full of backstabbing, betrayal and heartbreak but also one of magic, wonder and possibility. Douglas plays SOB extraordinaire Jonathan Shields, loosely based on movie mogul David O. Selznick. Like Selznick, Shield's once wildly successful--and widely hated--father died in bankrupt and movie studio-less disgrace, which left his son determined to restore his father's name and success at any costs. Lana Turner, Dick Powell, and Barry Sullivan give sterling performances as the three unfortunates who are left professionally successful but emotionally devastated by Jonathan's (sometimes unintended) treachery and ruthless ambition. In the role she should have been nominated for instead of "Peyton Place," Turner is cleverly cast as mediocre actress Georgia Lorrison, another character based on a real-life Hollywood counterpart, this being Diana Barrymore, daughter of the Great Profile. She gives a superb performance as the troubled, alcoholic tramp daughter of a great star who becomes one herself. Jonathan does this for his own ego and scars Georgia when she realizes their romance was just a ploy to get her through filming.
Dick Powell stars as James Lee Bartlow, bestselling novelist who has come to Hollywood to write a screenplay of his book with distracting wife Rosemary (played by vixenish Gloria Grahame) in tow. So James Lee can get to work, Jonathan whisks him away to a cabin the the woods while he arranges for flirtatious, star-struck Rosemary to go off with a latin movie idol; news comes of their deaths in a plane crash and James Lee becomes disillusioned when he discovers Jonathan's role in the affair, after which Jonathan has the bad sense to badmouth his dead wife! In this performance, along with his other 40's and 50's roles, Powell does a great job in a part he could truly sink his teeth into (unlike the 30's comic and light romance roles at Warner's). Barry Sullivan stars as Fred Amiel, a director who starts at the bottom with Jonathan making B-pictures. Fed's moment of truth comes when his chance to breakthrough by directing a big-budged film of a classic (the screenplay of which he has written, no less!) is denied him when Jonathan dumps him for a famed director. A mesmerizing must-see film about the inner workings of Hollywood in its heyday with flawless direction as usual by Vincente Minelli, gorgeous B&W cinematography, and what has got to be one of the most breathtakingly haunting movie scores in history!
Soapy, but entertaining
This is a slick and enjoyable wallow by Hollywood about Hollywood, which succeeds despite Lana Turner's performance (she was not a good actress and ended up trying much too hard as a result). Gloria Grahame specialized in creating vivid supporting characters but never got her full props -- if you're impressed with her work here, check her out as Ado Annie in Oklahoma or in any number of excellent films noirs, including her unforgettable role as Lee Marvin's girl in The Big Heat. Kirk Douglas was born to play nasty connivers; he could go over the top at times but in a movie like TBATB, that just adds to the fun. Also deserving of mention is the superb score by David Raksin, another of Hollywood's best who never got much recognition beyond Laura (the one score everyone knows). Raksin, unlike expat European classical musicians such as Korngold, Waxman, Herrmann et al. was a pure Hollywood product, cutting his teeth working on Charlie Chaplin shorts and helping to pioneer film scoring as an art form. Raksin's TBATB score perfectly sums up the emotional throughline of the story, and the gorgeous main theme stays with you long after the film's done.
Even under the heavy censorship of 1946 Hollywood, Lana Turner and John Garfield's libidinous desires burn up the screen in Tay Garnett's adaptation of James M. Cain's torrid crime melodrama. Platinum blond Turner is Cora, a restless sexpot stuck in a roadside diner married to mundane middle-aged fry cook Nick Smith (Cecil Kellaway) when handsome drifter Frank (Garfield) blows her way. It's lust at first sight, a rapacious desire that neither can break off, and before long they're plotting his demise--but in the wicked world of Cain nothing is that easy. Garnett's visual approach is subdued compared to the more expressionistic film noir of the period, but he's at no loss when he films the luminous Turner in her milky-white wardrobe. She radiates repressed sexuality and uncontrollable... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Lana Turner - John Garfield Director(s): Tay Garnett DVD Release Date: Released the 06 January 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Samuel Fuller's "Pickup on South Street" is easily one of his better films and as cynical and tough as crime dramas got in the 50's. Richard Widmark is excellent as a cocky pickpocket who swipes the wallet of sexy Jean Peters that contains microfilm of government secrets to be delivered to a Communist agency. Peters is unaware of the Communist angle and is only doing a "job" for her slimy ex-boyfriend Richard Kiley (who's also excellent). Getting mixed up in the mess to get back the microfilm is street peddler/police informant Thelma Ritter who sells information to whoever wants to buy it. The film is gritty and unsentimental and none of the characters are saints. New York City is depicted as a tough place to survive especially on the dirty waterfront where Skip McCoy (Widmark) lives and... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Richard Widmark - Jean Peters Director(s): Samuel Fuller DVD Release Date: Released the 17 February 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Yes, it's true: you can virtually see Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall falling for each other in this Howard Hawks variation on Casablanca but adapted from--as legend has it--Ernest Hemingway's self-declared "worst novel." (The story goes that Hawks told Hemingway he could make a movie of the author's least work, and Hemingway gave him the rights to this story.) The script by William Faulkner and Jules Furthman actually makes this one of Hawks's and Bogart's most interesting and often exciting films. Bogart plays a boat captain who reluctantly agrees to help the French Resistance while wooing chanteuse Bacall. Hoagy Carmichael, wry at the piano, adds a delicious accent to an already wonderful mood. --Tom KeoghMore Info about this DVD Actor(s): Humphrey Bogart - Lauren Bacall Director(s): Howard Hawks DVD Release Date: Released the 04 November 2003 Usually ships in 24 hours
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The most famous and sublime treatment of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, John Ford's My Darling Clementine is by any measure one of the most classically perfect Westerns ever made. Henry Fonda plays a hard, serious Wyatt Earp leading a cattle drive west with his brothers when a stopover in the wild town of Tombstone ends in the murder of his youngest brother. Wyatt takes up the badge he had turned down earlier and tames the wide-open town with his brothers (Ward Bond and Tim Holt), all the while waiting for the wild Clantons (led by Walter Brennan's ruthless Old Man Clanton) to make a mistake. Victor Mature delivers perhaps his finest performance as the tubercular gambler Doc Holliday, an alcoholic Eastern doctor escaping civilization in the Wild West. Ford takes great liberties... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Henry Fonda - Linda Darnell Director(s): John Ford DVD Release Date: Released the 06 January 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Billy Wilder's noir-comic classic about death and decay in Hollywood remains as pungent as ever in its power to provoke shock, laughter, and gasps of astonishment. Joe Gillis (William Holden), a broke and cynical young screenwriter, is attempting to ditch a pair of repo men late one afternoon when he pulls off L.A.'s storied Sunset Boulevard and into the driveway of a seedy mansion belonging to Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), a forgotten silent movie luminary whose brilliant acting career withered with the coming of talkies. The demented old movie queen lives in the past, assisted by her devoted (but intimidating) butler, Max (played by Erich von Stroheim, the legendary director of Greed and Swanson's own lost epic, Queen Kelly). Norma dreams of making a comeback in a remake... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Billy Wilder DVD Release Date: Released the 26 November 2002 Usually ships in 24 hours
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