With a five-day tribute to director Vincente Minnelli’s melodramas starting tonight at Anthology Film Archives, I stayed up late last night to watch The Bad and the Beautiful on TCM On Demand.
The Bad and the Beautiful marked Minnelli’s first real success as a director of “serious”, non-musical pictures. It’s less self-assured than Some Came Running (to my mind, the masterpiece of Minnelli’s melodramas), but seemingly a hell of a lot more personal. Released in 1952, it was the director’s follow-up to the Oscar-winning An American in Paris, and it landed smack dab in the middle of a series of Hollywood elegies to Hollywood.
In both tone and function, The Bad and the Beautiful can be seen as a bridge between Sunset Boulevard (1950) and A Star is Born (1954). If Billy Wilder’s Sunset represented Golden Era Hollywood at the height of its self-loathing, and George Cukor’s Star both satirized and condemned Hollywood’s ability to mobilize that self-loathing into reification of its founding myths, Minnelli’s almost naive faith in the sheer value of film as art allowed him to deconstruct that myth-making with sympathy for all involved. It’s industrial critique-as-soap opera, which makes it potentially the most accessible film to come out of this wave of highest Hollywood narcissism.
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