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.
10:30 am
11:00 am
Donald Brackett
Vincente Minnelli
Kirk Douglas, Lana Turner, Barry Sullivan, Gloria Grahame
USA
1952
English
5 Academy Awards, Best Screenplay, Cinematography, Art Direction, Costume, Supporting Actress (Gloria Grahame)
Indigenous & Community Access
Credits
Screenwriter
Charles Schnee
Cinematography
Robert Surtees
Editor
Conrad A. Nervig
Original Music
David Raksin
Art Director
Edward Carfagno, Cedric Gibbons
Also in This Series
What Price Hollywood?
In our latest Film Studies series film critic and historian Donald Brackett gives us a whistle stop studio tour of movies about movies, taking us from the Golden Age to the C21st, beginning with George Cukor's seminal 1932 film, What Price Hollywood.
Sullivan's Travels
Continuing his exploration of Hollywood's fascination with itself, Donald Brackett introduces one of the great satires of the Golden Age, Sullivan's Travels. Earnest filmmaker Joel McCrea disguises himself as a hobo to get to know the real America...
The Bad and the Beautiful
Film scholar Donald Brackett introduces Vincente Minnelli's 1952 Hollywood melodrama--a portrait of a driven producer, Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas) that went on to win five Academy Awards.
The Day of the Locust
Midnight Cowboy director John Schlesinger turned his gaze on Hollywood in this rich adaptation of Nathanael West's famous satirical novel, in the latest screening in our Film Studies series, Hollywood Through the Looking Glass.
Babylon
Damien Chazelle's second Hollywood on Hollywood movie (after La La Land) follows Margot Robbie as a starlet on the make at the tail end of the silent film era in the late 1920s, and a couple of friends she makes along the way.