The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)<br /><br />Almost one of the best.<br /><br />Such an expert, glittering, fast-paced, and neatly structured film this is! And that's appropriate enough, because this is a film about film-making, a fictional insider's view of four main characters: a director, an actress, a writer, and a producer. Oh, and the fifth and main character, Jonathan Shields, played by Kirk Douglas, who is all of these, and most of all, a driving inspiration to the others.<br /><br />It might be fun to have seen how William Wyler (the consummate Hollywood director of this time) or Douglas Sirk (the consummate melodrama director) would have handled the same material. Or even how Joseph L. Mankiewicz, with all his witty intelligence, might have (he liked working with Douglas, it seems). I say all this because Vincente Minnelli, with a decade of growing successes behind him, directs this new one with finesse, creating an elegant masterpiece of film-making that falls short of being legendary most of all from its finesse. It's too polished, too well balanced, too considered throughout. And yet it's a really terrific movie, not to be missed.<br /><br />It's odd to make a distinction between an incredible movie, like say Strangers on a Train or Sunset Blvd and a merely nearly great one, like The Bad and the Beautiful (or, to keep the parallels going, The Detective Story and the very comparable All About Eve). All these movies were made within a year of each other, and the best show a director's genius for rising above, and the others show a more communal genius, or an ability to work together within the system and create uncompromisingly excellent films, but films that somehow lack, at least a little, the edge, or the originality, or the surprise, of a timeless great.<br /><br />All of which is debatable, of course, but watch this one and give it a thought. Minnelli makes no mistakes, setting us up, then leading us one by one through the three main stories. Each story works on its own, and makes a kind of three reel tale within a tale. But even within each of these the other two stories start to pop into place, and the intertwining is subtle and flawless. You might even sit up suddenly and realize, hey, that's the person from the previous section. And it all flows together, and of course needs to conjoin this way because in fact the three stories are all the same large tale built around the legendary, difficult director/producer played by Douglas. And Douglas is a continuing marvel of ease and agitation, of charm and selfishness. As an actor he's nearly always wonderful, and here he is at his best.<br /><br />Will you cry? Will you fret at the hanging ending--if you think it's hanging at all? Will you be infected by the movie somehow in your head the next day, the next week? You might not, not all three. But you'll smile and laugh and really marvel at how terrific it all is as it goes. As a celebration of Hollywood's excess and greed and grinding machinations the movie takes no prisoners. But it really is a celebration of the three survivors (or four, if you include the producer who guides us through it all). And an acknowledgement that there are victims throughout, and sometimes those who lose are the ones with the most to give, and the most to lose.<br /><br />In the end, like the three characters, we are disgusted and yet can't help listening in, because of the inglorious magic.