Vincent Minnelli's The Bad and the Beautiful traces the rise and fall of Jonathan Shields, a tough and ambitious Hollywood producer who was obsessed with perfection when it came to making great films. Told through a series of elaborate flashbacks, The Bad and the Beautiful tells this man's story through the eyes of three past collaborators, a Pulitzer-prize winning writer, James Bartlow, a Hollywood starlet, Georgia Lorrison, and a director, Fred Amiel. Perhaps the greatest film ever produced about Hollywood, The Bad and the Beautiful beautifully captures the ruthlessness of Tinsel town, with Shields being a man whose obsession with perfection leads him to ruthlessly manipulate talent in an effort to make a successful picture. The movie comes first, over everything else for Jonathan Shields, who shows little empathy for anyone around him, only using them to help him achieve his next great project. The Bad and The Beautiful touches on unique aspects of each disciplinary, from director, to actress, to writer, with unique insights to inner-workings of the creative process. Perhaps the film's greatest attribute, regardless of the individual character's plights, is the film's ability to capture this overall sense of neglect this town breeds, with both Georgia, and Jonathan, being characters whose weaknesses stem at least somewhat from the neglect they felt from their famous parents. Georgia is a particularly tragic character at times, a Hollywood actress who has struggled with bouts of alcoholism and despair due to her troubled relationship with her father, a famous actor who simply put his career ahead of his family. The film never goes into too much depth exploring Jonathan's relationship with his father, but The Bad and The Beautiful manages to capture through these characters the corruption in which success breeds, the broken children left behind in this town who feel unloved by men whose first love is the silver screen. Kirk Douglas gives an amazing performance in this film as Jonathan Shields, with the explosive scene between Georgia being a standout, where Douglas is able to capture a man who does show glimpses of love towards Georgia but simply won't allow it, unwilling and unable to let anyone or anything come in-between himself and his budding empire. From a technical standpoint alone, The Bad and the Beautiful is an impressive film, with some impressive cinematography throughout, especially its use of elegant tracking shots to give the experience more punch. Full of fascinating insights that are both subtle and explosively clear, Vincent Minnelli's The Bad and the Beautiful is a powerful story of one man's rise and subsequent fall, being a fascinating expose of the Hollywood system where the pursuit of making the perfect film often leaves shattered lives in its wake.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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