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Up on the flying trapeze, down in the Walk of Fame, the Old Hollywood curse. A sledgehammer on the Sternberg-Dietrich mystique, "a moderately attractive piece of clay" pulled this way and that until she shatters and he's got his masterpiece. The renaissance of the reclusive auteur (Peter Finch) includes retrospectives and Cahiers du Cinéma tributes, above all the chance to resurrect his late muse with a doppelgänger (Kim Novak). From mousy starlet to celluloid goddess is not an easy operation, or maybe it is, it takes a stroll down the grand staircase ("We are moving like a deeply offended Tibetan yak!") and a bit of supernatural possession. The diligent agent (Milton Selzer) awaits a cancerous demise while the crass movie honcho (Ernest Borgnine) lives forever, the gossip doyenne (Coral Browne) skulks imperiously while the drug-addled confidante (Rossella Falk) swears revenge. "Aren't you borrowing a little heavily from Sunset Blvd.?" Devouring Vertigo, 8½ and Lola Montès, Robert Aldrich erects the necrophiliac hothouse Tinseltown deserves. Skirmishes at the Brown Derby, press conference in the mausoleum, the Bluebeard locked room brimming with memorabilia. The Big Knife adjusted to the end of the studio system is a new brand of horror vision, the distorted flashback is capped with a splash of cartoon blood. Amid festering dirt and gall, the repackaged fetish image revolts with a raucous cackle. "Defenders of cinematic rigor mortis!" The obsessive artist kills his beloved with the camera, he gets the last shot and sits alone in the audience and gets cut off by an impatient TV reporter when fumbling for words about loss. "Les bons chiens" for the jaw-dropping punchline, as Baudelaire would have it, bared fangs are the norm in Aldrich's world. With Valentina Cortese, Gabriele Tinti, Jean Carroll, Michael Murphy, Lee Meriwether, Nick Dennis, and George Kennedy.
--- Fernando F. Croce |