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"I get a bit tired of words sometimes, don't you?" (Pinter's The Collection) The inanity of awards shows can be a springboard for sardonic reflection, thus a procession of remembrances while the winner is suspended in a freeze-frame. The aspiring ingénue (Anne Baxter) bides her time in the alley outside the playhouse, her "quality of quiet graciousness" is a practiced performance, she tries it for the Broadway lioness (Bette Davis) who's rather susceptible to adoration. Playwright (Hugh Marlowe), his wife (Celeste Holm) and director (Gary Merrill) comprise the whirl, all are moved by the newcomer's tragic backstory, "everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end." Only the maid (Thelma Ritter) sees through it, she's from vaudeville. (Hollywood is the rival kingdom in the distance, TV is where Marilyn Monroe's Copacabana School of Dramatic Arts graduate is banished to.) "I'll never understand the weird process by which a body with a voice suddenly fancies itself a mind." Snobs, sycophants, bubbleheads and "professional manure-slingers," the Joseph L. Mankiewicz métier. His stand-in is the critic (George Sanders) with mighty pen and cigarette holder, quite the flame-thrower amid the verbal sharpshooters. Barely a glimpse of the theater itself, drama and comedy unfold instead in the various prosceniums of dressing rooms, cocktail parties and restaurants, where people "compensate for underplaying on the stage by overplaying in reality." Epigrammatic bitchery for days, anchored by Davis' magisterial blend of venom and hurt—an aria of wrath and self-pity at the Liebestraum-scored soiree, a flash of grudging vulnerability in a car stalled in the snow. "When she gets like this... all of a sudden she's playing Hamlet's mother." Faustian success is its own comeuppance, all told, the heartless Cinderella gets her own stalker in the end. "I can't believe my ears!" "What a dull cliché." The best analysis is Cassavetes' in Opening Night, unless it's Verhoeven's in Showgirls. With Gregory Ratoff, Barbara Bates, and Walter Hampden. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |