Reflections on ... The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968)

Recently re-visited: The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968). Tagline: “Overnight she became a star. Over many nights she became a legend.” 

Klaxon!! A pristine version of this widely reviled misbegotten camp oddity is currently viewable on YouTube – and it’s compulsory viewing for devotees of “bad movies we love”. I hadn’t seen this one since I was a teenager - and in fact even then I’m not sure I made it to the end. 

Sultry Kim Novak stars as decadent German screen diva Lylah Clare (think Marlene Dietrich or Greta Garbo), who died in her prime in murky circumstances – and urban myth has it she was initially discovered working in a “brothel that catered to some pretty peculiar fantasies.” Now, twenty years after her death agent Bart Langner (Milton Selzer) has terminal cancer and his final wish is to produce a tell-all Lylah Clare biopic. But when Langner pitches the idea to Lylah’s temperamental husband and director Lewis Zarkan (Peter Finch), he’s dismissive anyone could do Lylah justice (“Dreary little pussycats come mincing in here like bitches in heat doing their dirty little business!” Zarkan fumes). But then Langner introduces his discovery and proposed leading lady - a mousey unknown wannabe actress called Elsa Brinkmann (Novak again wearing glasses and a brown wig). “Shoulders. Hips. Cheekbones. Just like Lylah. It’s uncanny!” he raves. 

When she arrives at the mansion Zarkan shared with Lylah, the meek Elsa seems oddly mesmerized by a huge oil portrait of Lylah – and the sweeping dramatic staircase where she plunged to her death. (To be fair, it is a total death trap!). And when the tyrannical Zarkan manhandles her, the angered Elsa suddenly exclaims, “Keep your feeelthy hands off me!” in Lylah’s guttural Germanic voice - and in fact, seems to be possessed by her! (Note that Lylah’s “baritone babe” voice is dubbed by the great German actress and singer Hildegard Knef). Uh oh! From here, things just get weirder and messier … 

Director Robert Aldrich sure loved recycling the show biz-is-hell theme: The Big Knife (1955). Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). The Killing of Sister George (1968). For good measure, Aldrich also throws in references to other peoples’ movies like Sunset Boulevard (1950), Vertigo (1958) and Valley of the Dolls (1967). (More recently, Lylah Clare belongs in the same lineage as David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2006) and the ultra-divisive Blonde (2022)). 

Downsides: characters endlessly pontificating at length about the dog-eat-dog cruelty of Hollywood. The furiously hammy spittle-flecked performances of Finch and Ernest Borgnine are insufferable. There’s zero attempt to capture period verisimilitude in the flashbacks to the 1930s (or is it the 1940s? It’s impossible to tell!). Coral Browne plays a malicious dragon lady gossip columnist loosely based on Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons. The cruel humour poked at the fact she’s disabled and wears a leg brace has aged like an avocado. 

But Novak is always compelling to watch. This is her equivalent of Boom! or Secret Ceremony, the freaky “failed art movies” her peer Elizabeth Taylor made in the same period. Interestingly, Aldrich’s first choice for Lylah was French actress Jeanne Moreau (her presence would have made it feel more cerebral and European art cinema) – which feels inconceivable today considering Lylah Clare (with its themes of shifting female identities and men obsessively making-over women) seemingly makes deliberate allusions to Novak’s earlier film Vertigo.  (Novak had been absent from the screen for three years and Lylah Clare would be her final major starring role). 

Critics were mostly hostile, but some were prophetic. "Not merely awful; it is grandly, toweringly, amazingly so,” Richard Schickel wrote in Life magazine. “I laughed myself silly at Lylah Clare, and if you're in just the right mood, you may too”, while Roger Ebert concluded, “Like the Burton-Taylor Boom, it provides its own grisly satisfaction: You can have fun watching it be so bad.”

Judge for yourself!