Vincent Minnelli's 1952 Masterpiece The Bad and the Beautiful is one of the Most Powerful and Insightful Films Ever Made About Hollywood
Over the course of his one hundred and three years on the planet, Kirk Douglas was not just one of the greatest movie stars the silver screen has ever known, a larger than life icon and quintessential ham. The late Lifetime Achievement Academy Award winner and Presidential Medal of Freedom honoree was also a bona fide behind the scenes powerbroker who helped end the blacklist by officially crediting the formerly blacklisted Dalton Trumbo as the screenwriter of Spartacus, a film Douglas Executive Produced through his Bryna Production company along with other projects like Paths of Glory, which was also directed by Stanley Kubrick, a filmmaker Douglas gave some crucial early breaks.
Douglas’ actor and producer son Michael followed very directly in his father’s footsteps by producing Best Picture Winner One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Kirk’s son inherited the project from his father, who played the lead in Broadway in the 1960s and bought the film rights with an eye towards adapting the explosive allegory as a film vehicle for himself.
Physically and emotionally, Douglas radiated confidence bordering on cockiness. So he was a perfect choice for the plum role of Jonathan Shields, the hero, anti-hero and hiss-worthy producer villain of the classic 1952 melodrama The Bad and the Beautiful, from screenwriter Charles Schnee and director Vincente Minnelli. Minnelli was, of course, a legendary master of musicals and melodrama who was also the patriarch of a legendary Hollywood dynasty, being the ex-husband of one movie star in Judy Garland and the father of another in Liza Minnelli.
Minnelli and Douglas understood the film business from the inside out. They were titans deeply immersed within the industry, quintessential insiders who brought a lifetime of relevant experience to this morality tale about a town without a conscience and the scheming, desperate but strangely honorable dream-weavers who get ahead in a business where you can’t truly succeed without losing some of yourself and your soul in the process.
Douglas brings an automatic authority to the role that can only come from knowing and understanding the overlapping worlds of power and movie-making intimately. Douglas makes Shields a dazzling and dazzlingly complex figure. He’s at once a guardian angel and a demon baby, an artist and a back-stabber, a world class villain you can’t help but kind of love in spite of the awful things he says and does.
Douglas gives Shields’ the devil’s own charm. Over the course of the film, Shields ingratiates himself into the lives of several ambitious outsiders: director Fred Amiel (Barry Sullivan), heartbreakingly fragile actress Georgia Lorrison (a powerfully vulnerable Lana Turner), a second generation movie star and wry, witty, pipe-smoking professor turned big-time screenwriter James Lee Bartlow (Dick Powell), and proceeds to turn them upside down.
Shields gives the stars in his orbit the tools and the opportunity to become the best, most successful versions of themselves, Oscar and Pulitzer-winning dynamos with the industry in thrall to their explosive talent while betraying them in the most agonizingly personal way. Shields is the radiant, all-powerful, life-giving sun around which a series of lesser bodies orbit unsteadily.
In one of the many references to real-life film lore littering Charles Schnee’s clever script, Shields and Fred learn their craft and work their way up the Hollywood ladder by taking a page from the Val Lewton playbook and using darkness, shadow and the power of suggestion to transform a zero-budget stinker with bad guys in what look like store-bought cat costumes called Doom of the Cat Men into an eerily effective psychological thriller like the Lewton-produced 1942 cult classic Cat People.
Shields and his right-hand man Fred are eager to move up in the film world. To put things in Boogie Nights terms, they’re in a furious hurry to go from grinding out genre movies on a budget to making the movie they want to remembered for. But when it comes time to make that big leap into the world of quality and prestige, Shields betrays his friend and collaborator by elbowing him out of the way so he can make a solo lunge for the big time.
Shields betrays an understandably bitter and resentful Fred personally and professionally. With gorgeous, fragile actress Georgia Lorrison, he adds an element of romantic betrayal to the mix. But as with Fred, before the dynamic, heartless producer can tear her down and destroy her self-esteem he first builds her up as a human being and, more importantly, as a movie star.
Through a combination of steely will and canny commercial calculation Shields makes the depressive actress a movie star only to betray her during what should be a moment of ultimate triumph after the premiere of the movie that will catapult her to the rarified realm of the A list.
In his mad quest for power and success, not to mention Oscar Gold, the producer lures Powell’s James Lee Bartlow, a dry-witted, pipe-smoking professor and academic snob, to Hollywood so that he can dazzle and seduce the intellectual and his Southern belle wife and manipulate the reluctant star author into writing a movie for him through any means necessary, including separating the star scribe from his doting wife, permanently, as it turns out.
Shields may be vulgar and grasping, a shameless opportunist willing and eager to do anything necessary to achieve his objectives but he’s not a philistine. He may be amoral but he has a moral code that prizes art and success above all else. Shields cares about the quality of the movies he makes in a way that he does not care about the people he makes them with, or people in general. For this ruthlessly pragmatic Hollywood player, people are just a means to an end, pawns to be moved around the big Chess board of life; movies are what matter, the emotions of the people involved are of little importance to him.
On a similar note, The Bad and the Beautiful is deeply cynical about show-business and the compromises and betrayal endemic to making it to the top in a dirty, rigged business. Yet it’s simultaneously a valentine to the motion picture business and the outsized personalities that make it so sublimely ridiculous.
Charles Schnee’s Oscar-winning screenplay finds a perfect balance between heavyweight, tearjerking life-or-death drama and wry, knowing comedy while Robert Surtees won an Oscar for lush, black and white cinematography that lends a sumptuous visual opulence to the tawdry machinations and muscular melodrama.
For all of the universally brilliant contributions of the film’s cast and crew, The Bad and the Beautiful belongs unmistakably to Douglas. It’s his movie as much as it is Minnelli’s. His brawling, bullet-proof self-confidence is the film’s engine.
The film’s rightly revered screenplay takes the form of a series of elaborate flashbacks as the director, actress and screenwriter Shields has betrayed are called into the office of Harry Pebbel (Walter Pidgeon), the mini-mogul who gave Shields his break with a proposal that should be much easier to reject than it turns out to be.
Shields is down on his luck thanks to a few flops and in desperate need of a comeback, so he is asking people with every reason in the world to hate him to work with him one last time to create something greater than they’d ever be able to achieve separately. It’s as if Shields’ light is too dazzling, overpowering and potentially blinding to take in on its own; instead we need to see it filtered through the different prisms of people who have loved and lost and hated and resented Shields but could never forget him, no matter how desperately they might want to.
Douglas was brilliant at playing bad guys because he understood that there was something good in all of them, and a lot that’s admirable even in a world-class lout like Shields. The Bad and the Beautiful suggests that there’s a little Jonathan Shields in all of us. That’s simultaneously reassuring and helps explain why the character is so strangely sympathetic, as well as utterly terrifying, because Shields is ultimately a monster whose monstrousness is all too relatable, not to mention seductive.
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