The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) review

Here's a film similar to The Razor's Edge and just as effective: both are long-winded, flawed but still compelling portraits of a man, pieced together by multiple narratives and done with flashbacks. Here, three top-tier Hollywood talents meet with Walter Pidgeon about flawed-but-well-meaning producer Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas, overall pretty good) and give their individual reasons why they refuse to work with the man. The film stays away from extreme melodrama (except in two thankfully brief instances where Douglas hams it up) and is skillfully constructed, with deliberate pacing (thanks, in part, to a first-rate script) and complex characters - nobody in here is perfect or pretends to be (especially Lana Turner, whose boozy self-loathing reminds me of countless real-life actresses). Most interesting is how Minnelli shows the conflicts on the film sets and in corporate offices, and doesn't disguise the fact that a lot of the executives think what they put out is garbage too (it is all about the money).