On Screen:
DWORKIN, MARTIN S.
On SCREEN Hollywood Takes Its Dreams Seriously By Martin S. Dworkin IN A SERIES of nine programs through the months of October and November, the Film Library of the Museum of Modern Art has been...
...But within its sentimentalism there was some sharp comment, if memory serves, not only about Hollywood people and customs but about the tyranny of the public...
...Nor is there bitter insight, as in Sunset Boulevard or The Bad and the Beautiful--or even the original A Star Is Born...
...Fleming mercilessly caricatured the Hollywood of colossal fakery, parvenu vulgarity and publicity-fabricated personality...
...But an irony here is that the younger sophisticates inherited Hollywood already fully formed--while the older generation had to learn a vocabulary of dreaming almost from its first syllables...
...The new A Star Is Born celebrates this world--even opening and closing with scenes at benefit performances, those rituals wherein entertainers are most conscious of their place in society as performers...
...Some younger viewers apparently think the resurrected dreams of their elders hilariously ridiculous...
...There are some good scenes...
...With Janet Gaynor as the rising star, and Fredric March as the declining one, that film looked into the mirror not for laughs but for tears...
...While it can be related to the progressing "popularization" of even the more classic arts, this phenomenon has a kind of poignancy: a quality of self-consciousness, of somewhat painful ratiocinative consideration of once-precious dreams and of the processes which gave these dreams such seductive articulation...
...Twenty-year-old cinematic fiction seemed surprisingly knowing about current reality...
...Some of the audience seemed especially astonished at the parallels between the lampooned publicity build-up of Bombshell Harlow in the film and today's breathlessly journalized Marilyn Monroe...
...The film may still be too long, even after a 27-minute cut which has been made for ordinary runs so that theaters can turn over audiences faster for more returns...
...Four years after Bombshell, David O. Selznick produced perhaps the best-known Hollywood film about Hollywood, A Star Is Born...
...Styles do change, in dreams as in anything else...
...In this world, the box office is god, columnists are prophets, and heroes live their private lives in ways much like those they project in their performances...
...The film has been remade, with Judy Garland and James Mason in the leading roles...
...It is also a world, whirling epicentrically about the orbits of those other worlds we call more "real...
...A little disconcerting for both the hushed film classicists and the upstart iconoclasts are films in the Museum's "Looking Glass" program which are as irreverent as anyone would wish...
...There is little humorous insight into Hollywood's dream factory, as in Bombshell, Merton of the Movies or many others...
...The combination of shared heartache and successful comeback with her matured ability to tug heartstrings made her suitable for establishment as a culture heroine...
...So seriously is the analytical appreciation of old movies taken that there are angry letters in serious film magazines and even general newspapers about audience irreverence...
...Because of this, for one thing, the important character of the publicity agent, played by Jack Carson, seems emptily distasteful...
...The version which opened in New York and leading cities is more than three hours long, attenuating its dramatic story and interpolating long musical episodes in a deliberate effort to achieve a show-business epic...
...Mason acts stylishly and Miss Garland socks over her songs in a way to make Broadway sentimentalists moistly satisfied...
...But the deepest quality of the film is its self-conscious acceptance of the Hollywood dream in its own dream-terms, never penetrating the imaginary tissue to an underlying reality...
...On SCREEN Hollywood Takes Its Dreams Seriously By Martin S. Dworkin IN A SERIES of nine programs through the months of October and November, the Film Library of the Museum of Modern Art has been peering "Through the Looking Glass"--as they call the whole presentation --at Hollywood's own consciousness of itself...
...It is amusing--and revealing--to hear people say after a showing of Victor Fleming's Bombshell of 1933, "Why don't they make movies like that anymore...
...But the film, starring Jean Harlow, satirized with an affectionate assurance bespeaking considerable maturity...
...There is a resurging critical awareness of the film as a medium for affecting the public--to which the Museum gave pioneer encouragement--that now is abetted by film societies and university and museum film libraries around the country...
...Show business is an industry, manufacturing and distributing entertainment...
...In the old film, Lionel Stander's bitter envy represented more clearly the worst aspects of publicity's pandering to an insatiable public...
...One reason for this is that it was designed as a vehicle for Miss Garland, who catapulted back into the show-business limelight not long ago after three years of personal tribulations which were reported at length in the press...
Vol. 37 • November 1954 • No. 45
