Hollywood Story

Producer Richard Conte comes to Hollywood to make his next picture. While he's figuring out a subject, he rents an old studio. The guard tells him about a director murdered at the dawn of sound, still unsolved. Conte decides that will make a terrific picture. High school friend and now Hollywood agent Jim Backus hates the idea, as does Conte's partner Fred Clark. Julia Adams, the daughter of a movie star with whom the dead man was linked, asks him to drop it. Even police detective Richard Egan comes by to quiz Conte and tell him it's a terrible idea. conte persists, even hiring the dead director's washed-up screenwriter, Henry Hull. Then there is another murder...

It's a canny, nostalgic movie directed by William Castle, who knows how to evoke old Hollywood without getting trapped in antiques. The studio that Conte rents is Chaplin's studio, and there cameos for a Betty Blythe, a Francis X. Bushman, and William Farnum. The mystery, although far from the William Desmond Taylor murder that inspired it, is nicely constructed, with some decent red herrings. It's a fine example of the unassuming picture that does everything you so right that that it becomes a minor masterpiece.

Saw this movie as a kid, watching " The Late Show, " which was always a great old b/w movie. Years later, read about the murder of William Desmond Taylor and thought this hit awfully close to home. Taylor was a director of some note in early Hollywood, but also known to be quite the ladies' man. He was murdered in his apartment and the case was never officially solved. After his murder, the career of Mary Miles Minter, a well known Hollywood starlet was pretty much in ruins, due to several pieces of her personal belongings found at the scene of the crime, which is interesting, as studio bigwigs were called to the apartment before the police were called. Also interesting was the rumor that his now missing valet / butler / chauffeur was in reality his brother. The deceased Tayor was not who he appeared to be - he had long before abandoned a wife and child and re-invented himself. Years later, the famed Hollywood director King Vidor became interested in the mystery and worked on it for some years. His efforts were detailed in a book called " A Cast Of Killers, " well worth the read.

This is another film I think is incorrectly billed by YouTube as a film noir. In fact it's an intriguing, well-made mystery, made by William Castle in the first phase of his career. From 1943 to 1956 he made a string of B movies: having seen this one and "When Strangers Meet" (1944, with a young Robert Mitchum) I'm keen to see more. After a couple of years in TV Castle made "Macabre", the first of the horror films which he advertised using outlandish marketing techniques, and it's for these, and his producing of "Rosemary's Baby" that he's best known.

"Hollywood Story" was made the year after "Sunset Boulevard", which had revived interest in the silent era. While Gloria Swanson and von Stroheim had leading roles in "Sunset" the old stars who appeared in "Story" (I confess I'd only heard of Francis X. Bushman) had the briefest of walk-ons, as themselves. While the screenwriter in "Sunset" was handsome young William Holden, the one in "Story" is played by Henry Hull as a drunken wreck, living in squalor, who hasn't written a film since the coming of sound, so has never written dialogue, which makes you wonder why the hero hired him. Fred Clark, BTW, was in both films, and Swanson's character was called Norma Desmond, combining the names of silent movie director William Desmond Taylor and his lover Mabel Normand, one of several people suspected of his murder in 1922, which remains unsolved to this day.

Independent producer Larry O'Brien arrives to make his first Hollywood film and on a tour of the old studio he plans to use becomes fascinated by the story of the murder of a silent movie director called Franklin Farrara who was killed in a bungalow on the lot. He wants to film the story, but to do that he must solve the mystery. People try to dissuade him, including one who takes a shot at him. Richard Conte may be ethnically incorrect casting as Larry O'Brien (Edmond O'Brien, also big in 1951, would have been more appropriate) but he makes a very personable hero, and Richard Egan is wonderfully laid-back as a sympathetic cop: in those days actors playing cops worked hard at being tough and unsmiling. There's admirable support from Clark, Hull, Jim Backus and Houseley Stevenson, and the photography is excellent.

All in all a most enjoyable film. A bit naughty, though, to pretend that the fictional Farrara directed the 1925 Lon Chaney "Phantom of the Opera" and that the heroine's mum was Chaney's co-star. Still, Rupert Julian was dead and Nora Philbin had been a recluse ever since the coming of sound and probably never saw "Hollywood Story."

This movie is a double tribute to the old silent Hollywood era. First because the topic is a mystery oriented scheme and looks very like many late twenties and early thirties movies. There were many mystery tales during this period, the early talkies. The second element that makes me say this film is a tribute to the old Hollywood is the topic itself, concerning a crime commited in 1929 when the movie takes place in the fifties. You see the old shooting lots, old stars such as William Farnum and a couple of other silent era stars as cameo appearances. This kind of movie in the early fifties is rare,but in the seventies, there were some TV movies also evoking old stars in the SUNSET BOULEVARD scheme, and unsolved murder mysteries. A good unusual and brilliant topic for an Universal Studios production, with for once Richard Conte in a non gangster nor hard tough cop role.

I got this film because I like 40s/50s mysteries, because I like Richard Conte, and because it was directed by William Castle and thus HAD to be interesting. Actually, it is an excellent little mystery. New York-based producer Conte comes out to LA to make some films and rents an old studio building that hasn't been used since the silent era (which was only 22 years ago at the time of this film). The last year of silents, 1929, a major silent director was killed at the studio, and the case has never been solved. Conte decides to research the director and the murder for a film plot--he digs up a few of the people who worked at the studio and learns more about the mystery... while a new mystery starts to develop and the guilty party from 1929 starts to cause trouble again. It's as cleverly plotted as the best Columbo or Perry Mason episode, and Conte as always is powerful and sympathetic. He was one of the great post-WWII stars and his work should be revived today--watch THE BROTHERS RICO sometime! Great supporting cast with Jim Backus, Richard Egan, the lovely Julie Adams, and silent star and 30s independent-film regular William Farnum. It's always good to be pleasantly surprised by a film that delivers much more than you expected, and this is such a nice little mystery. It's not on video or DVD, but keep your eye out for it.