![]() ![]() Robinson is it’s director and Kirk Douglas’s character in it starred in it. ![]() It’s interesting because Minnelli creates a kind of cinematic world that some of his films take place in because in the film, Barry Sullivan directs the Greta Garbo film Anna Karenina, a real film, and later on in Two Weeks in Another Town the Lana Turner put down scene is screened for the crew of the film being made in that film, and in its universe Edward G. To end the film, Minnelli’s resolution to the conflict is a perfect capper whenever any of them met with Douglas, they all found themselves unable to resist the temptation to work with him, but instead they meet with Pidgeon, not Douglas, about the new project he wants them all for, and even though they say no, right afterward as soon as they hear Douglas’s voice over the phone they all realize it’s impossible to resist him even after all this time. Still, despite the juice in that segment, the best is probably saved for last with the screenplay turnarounds in Powell’s story I especially love the pause at the “I begged him, don’t take that plane, Gaucho” as Douglas just stops talking knowing what he just let onto. Douglas gives one of his most brutal performances over the entire film but he’s never better than in the second story with Lana Turner she is an actress and a woman, and unlike the other two stories where Sullivan and Powell start out relatively equal in the world to Douglas (he and Sullivan set out to take over Hollywood from the bottom in the first story and Powell is a huge novelist – William Faulkner basically – who he brings out to Hollywood to assist in an adaptation of his book), she begins the film as a minor background actress – though like Douglas the child of a major figure in Hollywood – that he turns into a star, and unlike Sullivan who he just sort of tosses aside dispassionately and Powell, to whom he doesn’t even do the dirty work himself (though he arguably has the worst fate with his wife dying, though not by intention), he is personally cruel to Turner that first scene where he destroys her, screaming at her about how she’ll never be anything but her father’s daughter as long as she can’t act like he could, as long as she’s in her “tomb” and then later on at the end of her segment as she finds out that she doesn’t love him when she finds the other girl at his mansion (though the film makes no effort to convince us they’re “in love” it just seems to be in Turner’s mind as her character isn’t shown to be very bright) and he demands she leave and then she almost kills herself driving away is another standout. Minnelli starts each story with a zoom into each character in Douglas’s office in the present and a dissolve away to the past and the endings have a similar dissolve back to the present and a zoom out. ![]() The formal structure of the film is great: 3 stories from Barry Sullivan, Lana Turner and Dick Powell of their past experiences with the brutish producer Kirk Douglas, who stepped on all of them on his way to frame, but just as he was about to hit it big with them he throws them out but they find success elsewhere. This black-and-white film is one of 3 pictures directed by Minnelli from 1951-1953 to make the TSPDT Greatest Films Top 1000 (he only has 5 films on the GF 1000 in total) and a stirring, almost uncharacteristic, indictment of Old Hollywood in the midst of its producer-driven Golden Age. ![]() It breaks my heart to put this magnificent film all the way down at 9th place but that should be taken as a testament to the shocking strength of Vincente Minnelli’s overall filmography. I wonder if this film’s title inspired The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. I didn’t rewrite it because already writing those last 4, where I especially have to aim to capture the greatness of the films in addition to a more general pitch that you should watch them, was difficult enough already. Please excuse the fact that the Home From The Hill paragraph is a bit more truncated than these others, it with the two cut ones was one of the first 3 that I wrote and I don’t think I gave it as much work as I should have then. I decided to cut Gigi and Lust for Life from this because the paragraphs on them get pretty critical at times even though I have an overall positive opinion of the films. ![]()
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