Kirk Douglas specialized in heartless tough-guy narcissists early in his career. The year before this, he played one of the most misanthropic characters ever to grace the silver screen in "Ace in the Hole." Eventually, he turned his image around until he became a sympathetic tough guy in classics like "Paths of Glory" and "Spartacus." But in "The Bad and the Beautiful," he is at his peak in living up, or should I say down, to his negative image.<br /><br />Kirk plays Jonathan Shields, son of a tyrannical Hollywood producer who has just passed away. Angry (why is never explained) at Hollywood in general, he vows after the funeral to become a success in order to throw the name Shields back in everyones' face. This leads to a series of vignettes involving a wannabe director (Barry Sullivan), a wannabe actress (Lana Turner) and a novelist who is a reluctant screenwriter (Dick Powell).<br /><br />Shields is patterned on David O. Selznick. To make it obvious, there is a brief scene showing Shields amongst some actors dressed as Civil War soldiers, as in Selznick's "Gone With The Wind." Like Shields, Selznick had been retired for some years at the time of this film, but was lurking, maybe ready to make a comeback. Interesting to contemporary insiders, but who besides film buffs remember Selznick today?<br /><br />In structure, the story resembles "Citizen Kane." Told in flashback, we even get a brief trip to a derelict castle that rather obviously resembles the one in "Kane." As in "Kane," we find out that Jonathan's path to the top of Hollywood involved viciously hurting the feelings of Turner, Sullivan and Powell. The main departure from "Kane" is that Jonathan, as is apparent from the very first scene, ends this picture very much alive and with the chance of redemption. So, consider this a "Kane" with a happier, crowd-pleasing ending.<br /><br />Unfortunately, the comparisons with "Kane" end there. The script has moments of brilliance, but a whole lot more of melodrama and unexplained contrivances. The trip to the deserted mansion of a dead film star, for instance, comes out of the blue and doesn't advance the story at all. Many other moments in the film are either self-indulgent (Douglas playing a record of the dead film star for Turner, the dead star's daughter), or just plain mysterious (Douglas paying mourners to be at his father's funeral).<br /><br />But the real downfall of the film is that Jonathan, set up to be this ogre, really doesn't come off that bad at all. In fact, all of his supposedly terrible actions actually seem quite logical, even inevitable, and at worst no more Machiavellian than your standard social climber. It really is how the others react to him, or should I say how they react to the reality of business necessity, that paints a negative gloss. But he doesn't intentionally go out of his way to hurt anybody. So in what way, really, is he so bad? There you have one of the problems with this film. It pulls its punches throughout. "Kane" showed an innocent corrupted by his own talent into becoming a monster, realizing only too late where he had gone wrong. This film pretentiously tries to imply that a somewhat ordinary fellow with lots of opportunities is just this wicked, wicked man because he wants to do things the right way. It just doesn't come together. Jonathan's not wicked, or at least not wicked enough, to ever work up strong feelings about him. Now, this film at best is valuable as a behind-the-scenes look at how Hollywood is actually a business and not a fairytale land, which may have been astonishing in 1952 but sure isn't today.<br /><br />Gloria Graham won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress, but it sure must have been a weak field that year. Or perhaps the Academy was rewarding her for her strong body of work that year in "The Greatest Show on Earth" and "Macao." Really, though, Hollywood was just, as usual, rewarding a woman for playing a bad girl of easy virtue. Certainly no surprise there, it happens almost every year right up to the present day.<br /><br />Dick Powell is great, though his character makes no sense (how did he ever hook the vixenish Graham anyway?). The biggest mystery is how Turner got top billing over Douglas, since he dominates practically every scene in the film and she only appears here and there. She does have one marvelously comical (unintentionally so) scene where she drives like a maniac after finding out that Jonathan doesn't love her (the heel!). She's pretty, but that's about it.<br /><br />"Bad" is Hollywood at its most excessive, trying to paint itself in vivid colors that are recognizably fake. It's an interesting film with pretensions of greatness that falls flat. See it for some corny performances and a glimpse of old Hollywood, but it's no "Kane."