The Bad and the Beautiful, a film about the behind-the-scenes artifice, technique and environment of the celluloid universe was based upon a short story titled Tribute to a Bad Man. The main character, a freshly dead, underhanded, exploitative Broadway producer, was adapted into a living, vainglorious Hollywood producer desperate for a return in a versatile, restless performance by eternal youth Kirk Douglas.<br /><br />In Hollywood, screenwriter Dick Powell, played with an exacting self-honesty despite his old-fashioned style, movie star Lana Turner and director Barry Sullivan each decline to speak by phone to Douglas' Jonathan Shields. A movie producer played with Walter Pidgeon's unfettered naturalness urges them to help Shields out. The subsequent segmented chronicles are narrated in recollection. In each retrospective, Shields' extravagant life is seen through their eyes. Their careers have profited from working with him, but each of them also undergo an intimate expense. Jonathan estranges, cons, deceives, abandons, and almost consumes each of them in his own egocentric, legendary ascent to his peak.<br /><br />This was one of the first in an extensive sequence of films, some acerbic and disparaging, that lampooned, speared or studied the making of films on the gaudy Hollywood back lot, including the same year's and studio's Singin' in the Rain, Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, Truffaut's Day for Night, Kazan's The Last Tycoon, Robert Altman's The Player, and sundry more. This one is a melodrama, but director Vincente Minnelli separates his love of romantic fantasy from his ability to identify with the whole spectrum of human gray area, yet there is much veiled satire: Indeed, Dick Powell's novel about early Virginia provides a wealthy opportunity for it. We deliberately determine that this "serious" work is a commercial work. It promises its celebrity with a "liberal peppering with sex," and the film version is decidedly trite with a man in a gray Confederate uniform is pecking with a heroine. The Bad and the Beautiful submits that romances of the Old South merely sell the tackiest sentimental delusions. This Minnelli endeavor also sees making B-Movie Westerns as among the least notable enterprises in Hollywood. And budding star Lana Turner's first movie role associates trade novels with tasteless teasing and garish mise-en-scene.<br /><br />Alternately, there are tremendous insights into the creative process, such as when Shields proposes the concept of scaring people by uncertainty and shadows when called on to make a thriller influenced by the actual film Cat People. This inspired episode is realized with various lighting transitions, including turning a switch on and off and moving a lamp. The scene's intricacy is assured by its long-take camera movement, and its visceral effect is imprinted fleetingly in other moments: Lights going on and off in the screening room cause the window from the projection booth to start or stop working as a mirror. We see the heroine's image show and vanish in the window.<br /><br />There is a party at a mansion where an enthralling tracking shot furnishes an elaborate evolution through the crowd, each of the extras having their own clique of goings-on and intellectual dialogue. Candelabra are everywhere. On the set of a movie wedding scene, there is a checkerboard floor, 19th Century dress uniforms, Christian symbolism. On another film set, a huge chandelier is over a dining room table, statues present. Another film set shows a revolution, opening with special effects men adding smoke. All the studio shooting set pieces are roped off from the real world. Their style is found in movie sets, not day to day. A few extras get to wear white tie and tails, but none of the outer movie's focal male characters ever do.<br /><br />Gloria Grahame won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for this Hollywood melodrama, in which she plays a status-seeking wife, pressing her screenwriter husband to move to Hollywood and live a more lavish rank. But Kirk Douglas finds that she is distracting to her husband's screen writing. Despite her unmistakable sexy grandiosity and childlike enthusiasm, his award was clearly for her earlier work, as she hardly gets to do anything here but babble on in a Southern accent in the periphery of a few shots in the latter half of the film. But whatever she does, it's certainly a refreshment to see her in the interval dividing Lana Turner's screen time, because unlike Grahame, Turner does not, in her impersonal approach, appear to have any internal dynamics. But overall, this is a fascinating film.