The Hollywood Movie

Lest you think that “Hollywood Movie” encompasses all products of the “dream factory”, I confine the term to those movies that are about Hollywood. Before its first fully realized exemplar in Sunset Boulevard , the subject of these two reviews, only a few precursors may be cited. Perhaps the first is “What price Hollywood ” directed By George Cukor. This film initiates a narrative wherein an ingenue's rise in Hollywood parallels the decline of her aging male mentor (an actor or director). The theme struck a chord with the public and the same storyline with some variations continued with “A Star Is Born ” and its later iteration in 1954 staring Judy Garland, also directed by Cukor. It is perhaps not coincidental that “What Price Hollywood ” was released in the so-called “pre-code” era, shortly after the full integration of sound technology, the first major shakeup in the movie industry. It is equally telling that “A Star is Born ” proved to be Judy Garland's most powerful role as well as her cinematic swan song.

But in the larger sense, “What Price Hollywood? ” raises the question at the heart of all Hollywood Movies, or: What is the personal cost of fame in the movie business, or even of working on its margins? Both reviewers of Sunset Boulevard address this question and in so doing, enumerate other features of the genre. They pay particular attention to the mixing of fact and fiction in the casting of Gloria Swanson in the role of Norma Desmond, Max Von Stroheim as Max Von Mayerling, and Hedda Hopper, Buster Keaton, and Cecil B. DeMille in cameos. The art -imitating -life (and vice-versa) theme reveals how Hollywood incorporates its own critique and its own remedy for its ills into its ongoing mythology.

The underlying truth of the Hollywood movie is thus its depiction as a realm unto itself, as a fully self-contained entity, and therefore, with absolutely no capacity for taking an outside position toward itself. This striving to control its own narrative harks back