Customer Reviews

The Bad and the Beautiful: Hollywood in the Fifties

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

What did the lives of the Hollywood glitterati mean to American culture during the 1950's? We don't find out. Lots of anecdotes, most quite familiar, but little sense of historical context. The text is well written and goes down well, but when the book is over we are left with no greater understanding of the 1950's or the movie industry, wondering, what was the point.

Tantalizing and sometimes dark stories about the movie creators of the 1950s: writers, producers, directors, and yes, even a few of the actors are profiled here with intelligent prose and well documented detail. The chapter on the ill-fated, but brilliant playwright, William Inge, is alone worth the price of the book.

If you read this book from cover to cover then you may be disappointed as not of all it new and interesting. Nevertheless, there are some chapters which deserve the attention of movie lovers including the genesis and production of SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS, the dalliances of SAMMY DAVIS JUNIOR as well as the struggles he endured despite being an entertainer of genius. A book to be cherry picked and read at the airport.

Great! Awesome! Fabulous! The Bad and the Beautiful was sexy and super-fun. It was a great summer read. I was looking to find out more dirt about the hey-days of tinsel town. The authors did a great job at making you feel the glamour, the drama, and the gossip of the time. It was definitely worth the time.

The comparisons to the perfect book City of Nets by Otto Friedrich can only hurt The Bad and the Beautiful by Sam Kashner and Jennifer MacNair but it is hard not to see this volume as a follow-up of sorts to that classic look at Hollywood's underbelly in the 1940s. This book begins quite weakly with early chapters on such topics as an assorted group of children of stars who fared poorly in Hollywood but the book does eventually take off nicely with later chapters on Lana Turner and Kim Novok and movies such as Sweet Smell of Success and Peyton Place. The choppy nature of the book makes it feel sometimes like a serious of magazine pieces cobbled together. Still, overall it will reward the reader who plows through with many interesting anecdotes and thumbnail sketches of Hollywood life in the 1950s.

This terrifically readable cultural history of Hollywood in the Fifties was inspired by James Ellroy's wish to the authors that there were a book about the era as fine as Otto Friedrich's CITY OF NETS; the authors admit they could not quite match the comprehensiveness of Friedrich's achievement, nor are they quite as erudite or analytically sophisticated. But, in their best chapters (on the culture of Hollywood expatriates, and in fine narratives of the making of REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE and NIGHT OF THE HUNTER), they come close to matching the engaging tone of and gossipy frisson engendered by Friedrich's famous book. The initial chapters on the scandals covered by and created by "Confidential" magazine read more like Kenneth Anger's HOLLYWOOD BABYLON than Friedrich, but as the study continues it just gets better and better. I didn't want it to end.

Great book, full of salacious and well-written anecdotes about Hollywood in the 50's.

Bad & The Beautiful is a fascinating and informative history of Hollywood in the 1950s which offers a vivid inside portrait of sex and power games, from the rise of tabloid journalism to the rise of legendary film icons. The authors focus as much on cultural trends and perceptions of stars and Hollywood as upon the films and creations that kept it in the limelight of American culture and innovation.

Probably the worst book i have ever read on the subject, it is a very poor rehash of very old tittle tattle, save your money.

Despite current nostalgia, 1950s Hollywood was a particularly strange and interesting era. It had commies to contend with, and even more seriously, television and the dismantling of the studio system. The fifties have been regarded as a bland cinematic decade, but there were some astonishingly thoughtful and influential films that became revered by French filmmakers and current Hollywood ones. The period is reconsidered in _The Bad and the Beautiful: Hollywood in the Fifties_ (W. W. Norton) by Sam Kashner and Jennifer MacNair. The authors admit that this is not a comprehensive history of that period in Hollywood; indeed, it is surprising that they have no chapters devoted to westerns or to science fiction. They call their book instead "a kind of archeological dig by two writers too young to have experienced the decade firsthand," and as such, it is a useful reminder of such things as the blacklist, novel and provocative tabloid journalism, influential gossip columnists, and a good deal of scandalous dirt.

Plenty of the scandal is sexual, of course, and some of the stories are not at all new. Rock Hudson had a powerful effect on women, and one actress tried to get him to show proper affection on screen, begging a director, "Can't you get Rock to kiss me properly?" The director, Douglas Sirk, "declined, knowing why Hudson's kisses seemed awkward." Lana Turner gets a chapter, including tales of her promiscuity, as does Mae West and her hilarious geriatric sensuality. The forgotten affair between Kim Novak and Sammy Davis, Jr., gets an airing, too. Billy Graham's first religious film is included, as are the more familiar biblical epics of the period. There are excellent chapters here about particular films, like _Peyton Place_, _Sweet Smell of Success_, and _Rebel Without a Cause_. Did you know that in that last film, director Nicholas Ray hunted hard for the three leads, James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo, and seems to have had affairs with all of them? And James Dean did, with Natalie Wood, who also was with co-star Dennis Hopper.

The book starts with _Sunset Boulevard_, a film it refers to through many chapters. In it, Gloria Swanson made her peculiar comeback as the bypassed and doomed silent film queen Norma Desmond. The book ends with the presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy, whose father had had an affair with Swanson, and whose campaign had unprecedented ties to Hollywood and its stars. In between is a wealth of the sort of trivia, titillation, and sleaze that could only come from Hollywood. Kashner and MacNair love their theme, have picked their subjects well, and have juicy bits to reveal to anyone interested in the movies.