The Bad and the Beautiful

Our latest Film Studies series will feature 25 minute introductions by film historian and curator Donald Brackett, followed by the screenings and a brief audience talkback.

Unscrupulous movie producer Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas) is a child of Hollywood who ruthlessly toils his way to the top of the studio system, discarding movie star Georgia (Lana Turner), director Fred Amiel (Barry Sullivan) and writer James Lee Bartlow (Dick Powell) along the way. Although Shields manipulates them and leaves each in despair, they find success in Hollywood, thanks in part to Shields, and must decide whether or not to repay him when he offers them a collaborative project.

As its title suggests, The Bad and the Beautiful manages to combine cynicism and romance, noir sharpness and glossy glamour in its love-hate portrait of Tinsel Town. Shields may be a manipulative hustler, but his energy and determination make him hard to resist—and he gets results.

All films will screen again, without the talk.

Aesthetically promiscuous, confoundingly likable, and intermittently unhinged, The Bad and the Beautiful is a crash course in mid-twentieth-century Hollywood mores and backlot intrigue.[…] In working different tonal and moral registers in the brash anything-for-a-frisson Citizen Kane mode, there’s a dynamic sense of joyfully toying with form and attitude. Minnelli’s animating impulse is love of the medium and its eccentric possibilities, which extends to and from his accomplices, including the much-undervalued screenwriter Charles Schnee and the cinematographer Robert Surtees. It’s also a love for the damaged and destructive people who tap into those deep surfaces and shallow depths. Turner and Douglas project the dicey charisma of instability and self-loathing channeled into the Will to Succeed.

Howard Hampton, Art Forum

Donald Brackett, a Vancouver-based film critic and historian who writes about the art and craft of movies and their place in our pop culture, is the author of many articles and essays on the subject, as well as being the guest-curator of several film programs for Cinematheque. He is the author of several related books, the most recent being Double Solitaire: The Films of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, which explored their collaborative impact on the golden age of Hollywood.