Next Lobotomy Room Film Club: The Star (1952) on 16 March 2023

 

/ “Never has the Hollywood story been told so frankly … so boldly … so completely! Here is every woman who ever climbed the stairway to the stars – only to find herself at the bottom, looking up!” /

/ “She fought for the power to stay on top … and almost lost the privilege and glory of being a woman!” Bette Davis and Sterling Hayden in The Star (1952) /

To commemorate “Oscar season” (full disclosure: we don’t actually care or pay attention to the Academy Awards!), on 16 March the free monthly Lobotomy Room film club presents The Star (1952)! Featuring the perennially fierce Bette Davis as Maggie Elliot, a faded fifty-something actress on the skids struggling to reignite her stalled career. “One good picture is all I need!” she screeches to her manager. Later, she confronts a parasitic sponging relative with, “Can’t you get it through your thick head that I’m broke? Dead, flat, stony broke!” 

/ “The orchids … the furs … the diamonds that were the star’s were all gone now … and nothing remained …  but the woman!” /

/ “ONLY Bette Davis – the star of stars – could accept the challenge of such a role! Only the WOMAN within her could find the penetrating insight to play it! ONLY the two-time winner of the Academy Award could give it such greatness!” /

The Star is comprehensively overshadowed by two other films where Davis played troubled ageing actresses: All About Eve (1950) and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1952). But it’s one of my favourite unsung Davis performances and the film has an appealingly harsh low-budget ambiance that lends it a gritty almost documentary feel.  Years later, Davis herself would argue “I have always felt The Star was very underrated by critics and the public.” 

/  Davis with Sterling Hayden / 

And just wait until you see the camp highlight: slurring “C’mon, Oscar! Let’s you and me get drunk!” and strapping it to the steering wheel, Maggie takes her Academy Award for a drunken joyride - and winds up in a prison cell! (In a “meta” touch, the statuette in question is one of Davis’ own).  Rounding out the cast: Natalie Wood as Maggie’s daughter and hunky Sterling Hayden as a younger actor (who just may be Maggie’s romantic saviour …). And speaking of Oscars: Davis did get nominated for Best Actress for The Star (her ninth nomination), but she lost to Shirley Booth for Come Back, Little Sheba. 

/ “The story of a woman who thought she was a star so high in the sky … that no man could touch her … until she was no longer … THE STAR!” /

Lobotomy Room Goes to the Movies is the FREE monthly film club devoted to cinematic perversity! Third Thursday night of every month downstairs at Fontaine’s bar in Dalston! Two drink minimum (inquire about the special offer £6 cocktail menu!). Numbers are limited, so reserving in advance via Fontaine’s website is essential. Alternatively, phone 07718000546 or email bookings@fontaines.bar to avoid disappointment! The film starts at 8:30 pm. Doors to the basement Bamboo Lounge open at 8:00 pm. To ensure everyone is seated and cocktails are ordered in time, please arrive by 8:15 pm at the latest.

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To whet your appetite ... the outrageous trailer! 

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!