What
Price Hollywood – US, 1932
Now rewind about five minutes. The set-up
to the grotesque display I have just described occurs on a Hollywood film set, where
a director is filming live actions shots of a game of polo. The soon-to-be-abducted
woman is shown taking an interest in a rider wearing a uniform numbered 2. When she hears he wants nothing to do
with “Hollywood blondes,” she is beside herself, and when an errant ball hits
her from behind, she decides to give the man a piece of her mind. What follows
in a dressing down the likes of which rarely come from protagonists, and you
could understand if the jockey concluded this exchange by observing how right he
was in his earlier sentiments. Except he doesn’t. No, the guy takes an
interest in his insulter and is soon asking her to join him for dinner. She
makes a few remarkably greedy demands and then stands him up even though he has
met them. Enraged at the loss of face, he sets off to commit the crime
mentioned in the first paragraph.
Would it surprise you, given such an
introduction to these two characters, that they get married just a few scenes
later? Admittedly, surprise is the wrong
word here, for, as with similar moments in John Waynes’s McLintock! and The Quiet Man,
modern sentiments simply do not endorse the kind of verbal attack levied upon
the man or back the notion that kidnapping can be the start of a beautiful
relationship, not even in a film made before the Hayes Code was fully enforced –
unless George Clooney is involved, that is.
The woman referred to above is Mary Evans
(Constance Bennett). When we first meet her, she is an aspiring actress waiting
tables at a restaurant frequented by a number of Hollywood elite. She is also
confident in her abilities and walks with the kind of swagger that reveals just
how much confidence she has in herself. One particular day, Max Carey
(Lowell Sherman), a big-time director, walks in drunk and distributing flowers.
Mary begs her co-worker to let her wait on him, and pretty soon, she’s being
swept off to a Hollywood premier and receiving an opportunity to break into
Hollywood. One guess how that turns out.
I like that Mary is overconfident and slightly
arrogant. You probably had to be to make the cross-country journey that so many
people did at that time. And I like that she matches Carey’s sardonic wit with
humor and sarcasm. It makes her a force to be reckoned with even before she has
any real power over her own destiny. Suddenly, she got a contract. It’s all so
sudden – a fairy tale lie that Hollywood all too often tells about itself. A
wiser film would have explored her ascent and growing skills. Instead, all we
get is a night of rehearsing and, voila, a studio head is offering her a
seven-years deal and declaring that he’s going to make her a star – all this
after seeing her onscreen for just ten seconds. The Hollywood myth on display
for all to see.
Here would be a good time to mention that
tokenism of the African-American characters, a sad part of early Hollywood
history, and a scene in which Max pulls an African-American servant into a
swimming pool after she decides to spontaneously serenade him as an audition is
particularly jarring. After all, he gave Mary a part for doing essentially the
same thing. Honestly, some of what used to be passed off as humor is utterly
embarrassing today.
What
Price Hollywood is a decent and engaging film when
it focuses on Mary’s friendship with Max. That’s right, friendship. Like The Artist, Max discovers Mary, and Mary’s
career flourishes; when Max hits rock bottom, it’s Mary that tries to
resuscitate him and get him to dispel his demons. In later versions of the
story, the roles of the husband and director were morphed together, which was
the right decision. With two male protagonists, What Price Hollywood is too disjointed, with Mary running around trying
to save her marriage in one scene and Max’s soul in the other. In this version
of the story, Max’s story gets the short end of the stick, and that is to the
film’s detriment. As for the ending, it can only be seen as a product of its
times, when unwritten rules didn’t allow female heroines to be self-sufficient
or single. A knight had to come riding along, regardless of whether the damsel
was actually in distress.
If you know the structure of the various
iterations of A Star Is Born, the
second half of the film will look familiar. Fortunately, it is in this half
that the film finds its stride. Cukor was an excellent director, and he is at
his best here when focusing his lens on Mary and Max. Cukor also helps viewers
understand a time that is remarkably similar to the present. Throughout the
film, he frequently returns to newspaper clippings that are both speculative
and salacious. The most invasive one is a column called “You Ask Me,” which,
like many websites today, publish the rumor instead of the facts. As a result,
Mary must deal with headlines that speculate on the health of her marriage and
later Mary’s relationship with Max.
Still, What
Price Hollywood is only partly enjoyable. When it focuses on Hollywood’s
inner workings and exposes its seedier side, the film is a revelation, and when
it explores the connection that Mary and Max have, it is riveting. Yet when it
turns its lens to the marriage, the films suffers, partly because the film is
so short, that it’s impossible to get how they met out of your head. This created
an awkward moment: In one scene, Mary is distraught over the state of her
relationship, and I mentally shrugged. Of
course, it fell apart. Don’t you remember how it began. I know I do. (on
DVD from Warner’s Archive Collection)
2 and a half stars
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