Kirk Douglas as a headstrong, hot-shot movie producer would've been welcome in any movie but in "The Bad and the Beautiful," he is also egotistical, arrogant, showy and an irredeemable backstabbing son of a gun. The truth is that his character of a movie producer known as Shields wants to hurt people...and he can't help it. This movie could've been harder to take had the hard-as-granite charisma of Kirk Douglas not been cast.
Vincente Minnelli's star-studded production (how could it not be?) with writer Charles Schnee ("They Live By Night") has a flawless, unusual flashback structure. It begins with a writer who's both novelist and screenwriter with a cool detachment (perfectly cast Dick Powell), a spurned actress (Lara Turner) and a movie director's crooked history with Shields (played by Barry Sullivan) meeting with a Hollywood honcho (Walter Pidgeon) to discuss all three signing up for a new film project. This project is not what they expect since it means dealing with Shields, whom they all hate. Each of them tells of their different collaborations with Shields, none of which are memorably good experiences.
Amiel, the director, is hired as one of many extras for Shields' father's funeral (no one would have attended otherwise) and he meets Shields (Douglas) whom he follows to an empty mansion. They sort of hit it off, becoming partners in B movies (one of them is based on the actual B-movie "Cat People") until Amiel wants to direct a serious picture that no studio wishes to finance. Shields, ever the clever producer, gets the financing yet backstabs Amiel by hiring someone else to direct.
Meanwhile, there's the actress, Lila (Turner), who has a festering alcohol problem and performs bad screen tests. Nobody wants her to star in a film except for Shields. The film in question is some sort of period piece romance and it makes her into a major movie star. Then Shields walks out on her after presumably falling in love with her and we see him bedding a bit player - you know, how Hollywood normally works. They hire you, bed you, make false love promises and then abandon you.
The novelist, Bartlow (Dick Powell), is indifferent to Hollywood and its machinations and has no interest in adapting his own best-selling book for Shields. Money talks and Bartlow proceeds but he is not the least bit dazzled by Hollywood glamor or parties - his Southern belle of a wife (Gloria Grahame in an Oscar-winning performance) is more than just dazzled. Tragedy does strike and Shields' manner of handling the tragedy will leave you wanting to strangle him.
"The Bad and the Beautiful" is not a love letter to Hollywood - it is too acidic and dark to really do anything other than strike a nerve. It is an anti-Hollywood film in the sense that you are taken in by the riches of La La Land in terms of big, ostentatious parties and mansions and lots of booze but little else other than the cold, sterile emptiness of it all. Showbiz stories are almost always scandalous and scatalogical. Kirk Douglas embodies that frigid cruel demeanor and its both tantalizing and pathetic and yet, despite all the betrayal and dishonesty bestowed upon these three creative people whom we are sympathetic to, Shields still finds a way of entrapping them. Bad, beautiful and entrancing.
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