What Price Hollywood?

"What Price Hollywood?" is one of my favorite films of the 1930s. With loads of drama, glamour to spare, and some romance too, this movie is one of the best behind-the-scenes looks at the old Hollywood studio system that was ever made. Constance Bennett, looking her radiant best, plays the lead role with finesse. Lowell Sherman also turns in a powerful performance as a washed-up director. This movie was the basis for "A Star is Born." All in all, one great film.

One of George Cukor's earliest successes before his glory years at MGM was this classic What Price Hollywood. Done at RKO it's the story of three star crossed people and that's literal for one of them.

Constance Bennett plays Mary Evans who is discovered by drunken director Lowell Sherman while working as a waitress at the famous Brown Derby in Hollywood. In 1932 that was the place to be if one wanted to be discovered because all the Hollywood celebrities dined there at one time or another. Including those like Sherman who liked their cuisine strictly liquid and at that time illegal.

You might think that playing a movie star was no stretch for Connie Bennett. But she and her sisters Joan and Barbara were of a distinguished theatrical family with father Richard Bennett in Hollywood himself at that time. She was as far removed from Mary Evans in real life as you can get, still Bennett got deep inside the part.

Sherman might have modeled his character on any number of distinguished Hollywood lushes. He probably took bits from all of them, but his director is uniquely his own, at once self centered, talented, vain and frail.

The third part of this triangle is Neil Hamilton, polo playing scion of a prominent society family who is introduced to Bennett when he smacks her with a polo ball. It was definitely love at first sight, but love between them takes a rocky road.

Hollywood has never been easy on itself. The movie industry figures that the scandals they've had are all too public so honesty is probably the best policy. In the sound era What Price Hollywood is one of the first of a long line of critical examination of the movie industry that also includes The Big Knife, The Bad And The Beautiful, Callaway Went Thataway and Two Weeks In Another Town. And of course we can't forget A Star Is Born in its original and remakes.

What Price Hollywood got an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. As its done before the Code, it holds up well today as a mark of distinguished and mature film making.

Another film that deserves a wider viewership and a DVD release, "What Price Hollywood?" looks at the toll Hollywood takes on the people who make it possible.

Adela Rogers St John wrote the Oscar-nominated story of a fading genius of a director, destroyed by drink, who launches one last discovery into the world. Lowell Sherman, himself both a director and an alcoholic, played the sad role that had been modeled, in part, on his own life. (Sherman's brother-in-law, John Barrymore, was also a model, as was the silent film director Marshall Neilan.) The divinely beautiful Constance Bennett plays the ambitious Brown Derby waitress who grabs her chance. Neil Hamilton, paired to great effect with Bennett that same year in "Two Against the World," plays the east-coast polo-playing millionaire who captures Bennett's heart without ever understanding her world.

George Cukor directed the film for RKO, and already the seeds of his directorial genius can be seen. Wonderful montages and double exposures chart Bennett's rise and fall as "America's Pal," and I've rarely seen anything as moving as the way Cukor presented Sherman's death scene, using quick shot editing, exaggerated sound effects and a slow motion shot. As startling as it looks today, one can only imagine the reaction it must have caused over 70 years earlier, before audiences had become accustomed to such techniques.

While the romantic leads are solid--Bennett, as always, especially so--and Gregory Ratoff is mesmerizing as the producer, hats must be doffed to Lowell Sherman for his Oscar-calibre performance. The slide from charming drunk to dissolute bum is presented warts and all, and a late scene in which the director examines his drink-ravaged face in the mirror is powerful indeed. It's hard to imagine what it must have been like for Sherman to play such a role and it was, in fact, one of the last roles he took for the screen, before concentrating on directing--then dying two years later of pneumonia.

When David O. Selznick made "A Star is Born" for United Artists five years later, four years after leaving RKO, the RKO lawyers prepared a point-by-point comparison of the stories, recommending a plagiarism suit--which was never filed. The later movie never credited Adela Rogers St John or any of the source material of "What Price Hollywood?" for its own screenplay, which was written by Dorothy Parker from, supposedly, an idea of Selznick's.

"What Price Hollywood?" is a great source for behind-the-scenes tidbits--Cukor fills the screen with images of on-set action (or inaction), with various crew waiting about as they watch the film-in-a-film action being filmed. This movie works as history and as innovation, but it also works on the most important level, as a well-told story.

This early effort by director George Cukor had such resonance that it was remade three times as A STAR IS BORN, so it lives on to satisfy the curiosity of those who admire one or more of the later productions. What holds it up after all these years are a strong and realistic performance by Lowell Sherman as a successful Hollywood film director whose alcoholism is destroying his career, decent and sometimes brilliant work by ever-stylish Constance Bennett as the ambitious waitress who becomes an overnight star, beautiful and poetic montages by Slavko Vorkapich, a generally witty and clever script by a team of about eight writers including Adela Rogers St. John and Gene Fowler, and some beautifully directed intimate scenes including the opening in which Bennett dresses for work, copying the beauty tips advertised in the fan magazine she is reading. Highlights: the screen test in which Bennett repeatedly fails to gracefully descend a staircase, deliver one line and then react to the sight of a dead body outside camera range; the filming of a nightclub scene in which Bennett delivers a love song in French (a la Dietrich in MOROCCO) as she strolls among the seated patrons. When you think about it, Bennett is really too sophisticated and worldly for this part, which is why it worked much better for the homespun Janet Gaynor five years later. It really doesn't make sense that a lady who can handle herself with complete ease after being dragged to a movie premiere and unexpectedly shoved in front of a microphone would suddenly turn into a klutz in front of a movie camera in a studio screen test. At one point Bennett is seen to converse in flawless, fluent French and we can only wonder how a lowly waitress with naïve dreams of movie stardom ever got that kind of linguistic education. The only explanation could be that the casting of Bennett required compromises. In any case, her natural charm carries her through.

At times the story drags. Neil Hamilton as the stuffed shirt husband adds to the dead weight. The sound quality in the outdoor scenes is weak and tinny. Gregory Ratoff as a studio chieftain has fun but his accent is a bit too thick given the limitations of the recording techniques of the time. Louise Beavers, as always, enlivens her small role as Bennett's maid.

Alcoholic director Max Carey (Lowell Sherman) discovers waitress Mary Evans (Constance Bennett). She becomes a big star and marries handsome Lonny Borden (Neil Hamilton)...but Carey's alcoholism starts to kill him and Lonny can't deal with his wife's stardom....

Very predictable but good. This movie moves VERY quickly; is well-directed by George Cukor; has some sharp pre-Code dialogue and has a good script that gives an interesting look at Hollywood in the 1930s. The church sequence especially is fascinating. It gets a little overly silly at the end but it still works.

Bennett is just great--beautiful and believable; Sherman was good also; Hamilton is just so-so but he's unbelievably handsome so that helps. Gregory Ratoff also gets some laughs as a VERY excitable studio head.

This was (pretty obviously) the inspiration for the later "A Star Is Born" movies but stands on its own merit. I give it an 8.