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The hack scribe who replaces madame's chimp, "a rung or two down the old evolutionary ladder" as Albee would have it. Palm trees and the gutter are the poles for a dead man's tale (cp. Double Indemnity), the reporter from Ohio (William Holden) churning out screenplays in Los Angeles. One detour and he's in the Gothic palazzo "crumbling apart in slow-motion," within is Miss Havisham reincarnated as silent-movie memento (Gloria Swanson). She has a distaste for dialogue but is glad to find a doctor for her mountainous Salome script, his wise-guy veneer meanwhile can't quite cushion the slide into gigolodom. To his loathing and her mania is added the masochism of the fallen auteur (Erich von Stroheim) who can only feed the fantasy. "You sound like a bunch of New York critics!" Billy Wilder cleans house, the cruelest wit to illuminate the Tinseltown mausoleum. Tango across Valentino's ballroom, bridge party with "the waxworks," all part of the brilliantly nauseous séance. (Many phantoms are invoked, among them Lon Chaney Sr. at the pipe organ as played by the cinéaste of Queen Kelly.) "Don't you sometimes hate yourself?" "Constantly." The industry's glorious grotesqueries handily devour its bland mediocrities: Wholesomeness is embodied by "one of the message kids" (Nancy Olson) working on "Untitled Love Story," no match for Swanson's galvanic panoply of gestures and hisses. The Paramount backlot and its residing baron, Cecil B. DeMille—Antonioni recalls the cardboard street (La Signora senza camelie), Fellini vacuums up the rest for 8½. The water in the dilapidated swimming pool might be the prolix writer's ink, he topples into it face first. "You know, a dozen press agents working overtime can do terrible things to the human spirit." The finale calls for deranged mise en scène and gets it, the screen is wiped clean by Medusa's gaze. Cinematography by John F. Seitz. With Jack Webb, Fred Clark, Lloyd Gough, Hedda Hopper, Buster Keaton, Anna Q. Nilsson, and H.B. Warner. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |