The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)
They all want Jonathan Shields to drop dead, but maybe they’ll make a movie with him anyway.
For almost as long as we’ve had movies, we’ve had movies about the process of making movies.1 It’s not my favorite genre since it’s often full of backwards-looking inside baseball that comes at the expense of the storytelling.2 The best of these movies find a way to make parochial Hollywood plots speak to something more universal: Sunset Boulevard (1950) and one’s own deterioration and obsolescence, A Star is Born (1954) and the anxieties of aging, La La Land (2016) and how great traffic is.3 The Bad and the Beautiful unfortunately doesn’t reach that level of commentary on the human condition.
Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas) has screwed over director Fred Amiel (Barry Sullivan), movie star Georgia Lorrison (Lana Turner), and author James Lee Bartlow (Dick Powell), but producer Harry Peebel (Walter Pidgeon) wants the three to reunite with him for one last picture. Through flashbacks, we see Shields’ genius and generosity with each of them, but also the cold, calculated way he discarded them to get ahead.4 The question: will they ever forgive him? (Spoiler: no way! That guy is the “bad” in the title of the movie, the end.)
So what did we learn? That hubris is bad? That humility is important? That ambition shouldn’t come at the expense of your friends? That you shouldn’t murder your friend’s wife? Yeah, I think we already knew all that. Mostly we just reinforced that Hollywood gets only one star on Glassdoor.
Rating: 5/10, bad and beautiful in equal measure.
Cast and Crew
Kirk Douglas, born Issur Danielovitch, came from a relentlessly poor Russian family to became an all-time screen legend. First thing’s first: you should know what his chin looks like.
We’ll see Kirk’s chin a bunch of times in this column, but for early-career Kirk, you need to know that he began his work with frequent collaborator Burt Lancaster in 1949’s I Walk Alone. In 1950, he starred as a fictionalized version of cornetist Bix Beiderbecke in Young Man With A Horn. I’m pretty excited to get more Kirk.
Lana Turner has perhaps the most legendary discovery story in Hollywood history. She skips her class at Hollywood High School to go buy a Coca-Cola at a soda fountain.5 A newspaper publisher sees her and can’t imagine her not being in the movies; he offers that opportunity to Turner and she responds with “I’ll have to ask my mother first.”
Turner’s first part was in the film They Won’t Forget (1937), where she received the nickname she’s best known for: “sweater girl.”6 Some of her major movies as she blossomed into a star were Ziegfeld Girls (1941, with Hedy Lamarr and Judy Garland), and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946, a film about an insistent mailman7). Her last big hit was 1957’s Peyton Place, based on the soapy novel by Grace Metalious.
The Trivia
Movie star Georgia is told that only a woman like Lillie Langtry could pull off a particular dress. Lillie Langtry, known as the “Jersey Lily” because she was born on the isle of Jersey, was one of the first socialite actresses and was also known for her relationships with Edward VII and Prince Louis of Battenberg.8 Judge Roy Bean, the Justice of the Peace in Val Verde County, Texas, known as “the only law West of the Pecos,” was enchanted with Langtry and (in legend) named a city in Texas after her.9
James Lee’s wife runs a Symposium, a bimonthly group where the women meet up to “enjoy a little culture and a lot of gossip.” Symposium is just a fancy way of saying “a conference on a particular subject,” but its etymology hints at something more fun: it comes from the Greek for “to drink together.”10 In Ancient Greece, a symposium was a drinking party held after a banquet. Plato’s “Symposium,” which contains speeches made by notable men (including Socrates, Alcibiades, and Aristophanes), takes place at the titular symposium.
James Lee is said to have won a Pulitzer for his work. The Pulitzer Prize is named after Joseph Pulitzer11, onetime congressman from New York and publisher of the New York World. Recall that competition for readers between the World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal led to the rise of yellow journalism. The Pulitzer Prize was first awarded in 1917 and was designed to award both journalism and non-fiction writing (specifically history and biography). Now there are 23 categories.
Odds and Ends
“Non sans droit,” which appears on the crest of Shields’ studio, also appeared on Shakespeare’s coat of arms; it means “not without right”...an uncredited Louis Calhern performs the “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech from “Macbeth,” and that’s a pretty cool speech…one character is called “Gaucho,” which is the word for the cowboys of the South American Pampas…James Lee wears cashmere, which comes from the Cashmere goat’s winter undercoat…Vincente Minnelli directed The Bad and the Beautiful, fresh off his work on the Father of the Bride films and Best Picture winner An American in Paris (1951).
The oldest one I could find is Show People (1928), a silent film about Hollywood starring Marion Davies.
For examples of this, see Hail, Caesar! (2016) and Mank (2020). Also, Amanda Seyfried plays Marion Davies in Mank, linking our first two footnotes.
Fine, I don’t know what La La Land is about.
Specifically, he took Fred’s dream directorial assignment away from him, cheated on Georgia, and murdered James Lee’s wife. Now, you may be thinking, “he didn’t actually murder James Lee’s wife, right?” Well, when a character feels the need to yell “I didn’t kill her! She killed herself!” it looks, like, super incriminating.
The legend says it was at Schwab’s Pharmacy, but this is wrong. Now the incorrect trivia has become trivia itself.
That nickname, like lots of Hollywood stuff, is gross.
Fine, I don’t know what The Postman Always Rings Twice is about.
Prince Louis of Battenberg was Prince Philip’s great-uncle, but also who cares.
Judge Roy Bean was played in The Westerners (1940) by Walter Brennan. Brennan won three Best Supporting Actor Oscars, including for that role. Not a lot of people have won three acting Oscars, so it’s sort of a big deal. We’ll be seeing Brennan supporting in an upcoming movie soon enough.
I’m not going to pretend to know Greek or Latin, but the “syn” root means “together” and “po” means “drink” (you can see that latter root in words like “potable” and “potion”).
Pronounced “PULL it sir.”