The Bad and the Beautiful – review

Rereleased 60 years on, Vincente Minnelli's Hollywood black comedy stars Kirk Douglas as Jonathan Shields, the mercurially brilliant but widely hated producer: no one in 1952 used words like "bipolar". He is remembered in flashback, like a lower-rent Charlie Kane. Three former colleagues are approached by Walter Pidgeon's world-weary studio boss, begging them to work with Shields again: director Fred Amiel (Barry Sullivan), screenwriter James Lee Bartlow (Dick Powell) and star Georgia Lorrison (Lana Turner). Each icily refuses, and we see why: three intimate personal betrayals, of increasing horror, which nonetheless furthered the victims' careers in the long run. Shields's relationship with Georgia is fascinatingly ambiguous: Georgia's actor father once gave young Shields a deflowering introduction to manhood and the business. Now, by building up Georgia, he seeks – revenge? Redemption? Hollywood here looks diabolically seductive.