Guilty Pleasures: The Legend of Lylah Clare

1968 Drama
From MGM
Directed by Robert Aldrich

Starring
Kim Novak
Peter Finch
Ernest Borgnine
Rossella Falk
Milton Selzer
Gabriele Tinti
Michael Murphy
Valentina Cortese
Coral Browne

Badmouthing became the order of the day when this film was released in late 1968.  Vitriol poured out of critics' typewriters and out of the mouths of regular moviegoers who weren't sure what in the hell was going on and why they bought a ticket to see this turkey.  Molten lava couldn't have been more destructive.

There were some holdouts.  Those who love movies about Hollywood might have had a different take and I have to assume that Kim Novak fans, while they may have occasionally covered their eyes, remained loyal to the blonde beauty who always had a problem with the film capital and her reputation as an actress.

Of course, I am among the holdouts.  Don't for a moment think that I consider this a good movie but I did find it aroused my curious nature and was entertaining and often fun.  I felt that back then and after watching it yesterday (and replaying a few scenes over again), I still do.  

The film opens with an agent (Selzer) who persuades  megalomaniacal director Lewis Zarkan (Finch) to hire the agent's new find, Elsa Brinkman (Novak), a woman who looks and sounds like the director's late actress-wife Lylah Clare who died in a mysterious fall off a staircase at home.  Zarkan has not worked since his wife's death 20 years earlier.  The two men convince loudmouth studio head Barney Sheean (Borgnine) to finance a film on Lylah's life starring Elsa.

Elsa is not altogether sure she wants to go this route but she is soon intoxicated with the rude Zarkan, drink, drugs and fame.  Zarkan convinces her to move into his mansion which he shares, for some reason, with Rosella, a drug-addicted, lesbian acting coach (Falk) who we quickly find out was in love with the late Lylah.

Elsa is no more sure of Hollywood than Hollywood is of her.  Aldrich and his writers must have taken this page right out of Novak's real life.  Her first stumble is when she meets a vicious columnist (a tip no doubt to Louella Parsons and played with great flourish by Coral Browne) who embarrasses Elsa at a grand party being held for her.  But Elsa brings down the house when she rips into the columnist that practically renders her speechless.

Lylah was apparently of German heritage and when Elsa is at the height of her rage she breaks into this strong German accent and blasts out a guttural laugh that sounds like a wounded animal.  She does it first in this party scene but revisits it a number of times.  I always found it jarring, laughable, pointless and one of the film's flaws.  While Novak performed the silly task herself, she later said she was humiliated at a preview when it was apparent it was dubbed (by German actress Hildegard Knef).

Elsa falls in love with Zarkan but he is only using her to get her to make the best movie she's capable of doing.  Ultimately she becomes obsessed if not possessed with the spirit of the actress she's playing.  She also becomes suspicious of the way he treats her and his treatment of Lylah, including her death.  Elsa carries on with Zarkan's gardener simply to annoy the director.

Rosella, who now loves Elsa as she had Lylah, warns Zarkan that if he continues to treat Elsa the way he has and she ends up as Lylah did, she will kill him.  On the last day of the shoot as Zarkan harasses Elsa during a circus high-wire scene, she deliberately leaps to her death.  The film becomes a great success and as promised, Rosella kills Zarkan.

If Legend had played out as outlined here so far, it might have made it past many of the naysayers but the director chose to add a number of things that turned the movie into the oddity it is.  First up is a scene of Elsa and Zarkan walking through his gardens.  She has her sweater tied around her neck as she parades around in her bra.  This is done without a shred of explanation.

The ending, too, is something to behold.  It is a TV commercial for dog food... Barkwell Dog Food to be exact... where a pack of dogs wind up in a savage fight.  I guess it's to shine a light on Hollywood's dog-eat-dog world.  And I am guessing but what's not a guess is that it's just plain weird.

Part of the problem here is that one wonders if this is camp, satire or a serious drama and the confusion comes out of the fact that it's a bit of all of them.  Aldrich often clumsily fades in and out of the three to the point that audiences could be heard saying what in the hell is going on here?  

There have been complaints that the love affair between Elsa and Zarkan is not played out well, that it was not believable.  I never saw it as a love affair but simply a situation where two people use one another but live together and capitalize on the attendant benefits.  Their emotions concerning one another and the fuzzy dialogue make for far too much confusion.  An end result is that we don't care about either one of them.

It seemed to me that Lylah's death to a degree is left kind of murky and I wonder what the point of that was.  What did the editor think when surveying the work?  And isn't it just a pointless bore to tell and retell the story so many times and always in some black and white (with blood-red borders), dreamlike aspect?

I've never heard of the two people who adapted this (earlier TV work starring Tuesday Weld) but some of their prose is simply awful.  I realize these are Hollywood people who are given to being dramatic but come on...!  And yes there's probably a fair amount of shouting but migawd, every sentence, every scene, every time?  Aldrich certainly managed to paint a grotesque portrait of Hollywood but there are those who wonder if that was intentional or just careless direction.

Aldrich had made good films about Hollywood before... The Big Knife and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane... so he knew his way around the Tinseltown storyline.  He'd also just come off one of his best highs, The Dirty Dozen.  So what happened?  He would later say that he did not think he made a good film and perhaps he'd lost a little interest in it along the way.  I have always wondered why most everything about the film (certainly the dialogue) is so overwrought.

Actress and director

He felt that he let Novak down somehow even though he considered her a good actress.  But his chief aim was to find an actress who exuded being pure movie star and most would agree he accomplished that.  Lylah was also to be beautiful and mysterious and troubled with making movies and the Hollywood scene.

I enjoyed Novak in the role but then I always did.  Here I thought she came out of her shell.  There was always a certain listlessness in her performances that I didn't think was much in evidence here.  However, there's no denying this movie signaled the end of her starry career.

I always enjoyed Finch's work as well.  He seemed quietly grand and theatrical, educated, a little snobby and he mesmerized me with his portrayals.  I thought he pretty much nailed this obnoxious director given a few excesses the film seemed to encourage.  He (and Borgnine) had just finished working with Aldrich on The Flight of the Phoenix and was anxious to work with him again.  Finch admitted his big lure, however, was working with Novak and he said he was not disappointed.

I was fascinated with Falk's performance, the only time I've ever seen her work.  The glorious Valentina Cortese has too small of a role (I suspect it was whittled down in the editing room) as a studio dress designer which she invests with much humor. Borgnine seems a little too blue-collar to head a studio.  Murphy succeeds as his son and right-hand man who is in love with Elsa.  Seltzer is a surprise addition.  He is a good character actor but I would have thought a bigger name would have filled the role.  I have to give Browne the award for best acting.  Sure her columnist was high-camp but she delivered it with the delicious mean-spiritedness at which she so excelled.

As usual I much enjoy the salute to Hollywood, especially those early days.  Aldrich called the film an amalgamation of myths with its salute to those 1930s and 40s actresses who ruled... Garbo, Harlow, Bankhead, Crawford, Davis, Stanwyck, Hepburn.  The extra-close relationships of Dietrich and director-mentor Joseph Von Sternberg and also Gloria Swanson and Joseph Kennedy may have been a basis for Lylah/Elsa and Zarkan.  I also loved watching the shenanigans at the Hollywood game where the studio head wants to make money and the director wants to make art.  

This is my second guilty pleasure this month about Hollywood which points out how off the rails they can be shining a light on themselves.  Borgnine's studio head says at one point that he wants to make movies not films.  That's probably a fitting closing because this guilty pleasure is one of the semi-great bad movies.

Here you go:

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