What Price Hollywood? Reviews

(OK) A glimpse of "A star is born" in the story of waitress become star Cosntance Bennett (never better than just coming down the stair) and specially the suicidal story of Lowell Sherman, who has excellent lines...

While not exactly the foundational brick for the four official versions of A Star Is Born (to date, tick-tock on the fifth), What Price Hollywood? is still owed a debt of gratitude and payment when discussing those films. If you were to officially rank it among the four, it would slide obviously above the Barbra Streisand version and below the Janet Gaynor leaving it in fourth place. It zips along with a saucy (and soused) Pre-Code energy with the scrappiness and disparity of the Great Depression nipping at the heels of its starry-eyed dreamer.

 

Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before: waitress with dreams of motion picture stardom (Constance Bennett) has a chance meeting with a big Hollywood player (Lowell Sherman), he gives her a shot in a bit part that leads to eventual ascension. Her fame grows, his alcoholism worsens, she meets a polo player (Neil Hamilton, best remembered as Gordon to Adam West’s Batman), marries, and finds the lifestyle of the rich and glamorous more fraught than she imagined. Eventual tragedy looms over everything, but we still get a triumphant (I guess?) final scene before the end credits roll.

 

Ok, so it’s not exactly the tortured romance of A Star Is Born, but it’s close enough. So close that RKO threatened legal action against David O. Selznick when he produced the first Star in 1937. But What Price Hollywood? gives Constance Bennett a great part, she knows it too as she delivers a complex essay of a sturdy archetype, and sacks her with a leech of a love triangle that goes nowhere slowly and removes much of the energy, charm, and wit from the movie.

 

One of the best choices the eventual variations of this story made was removing the secondary character. Hamilton’s polo player is a #MeToo waking nightmare of a character. He breaks into Bennett’s house, forces her into a date she blew off, and routinely proves that he’s fragile masculinity personified as being Mr. Movie Star is too much for his wounded pride. He needed to go for a variety reasons, one of them was his toxic and abusive idea of “courtship,” but his complete lack of chemistry with Bennett sinks half of the story.

 

Bennett and Sherman have a better chemistry together and their characters are more fun to watch interact. It’s rare to see male/female relationships played for something other than eventual marriage and domesticity, and it’s sweet to watch her continually stay by her friend’s side as everyone else in town treats him as a pariah. They sling fun barbs, treat each other with respect, and are clearly enjoying playing off each other in both high melodrama and bawdy comedy.

 

What is patently obvious is how enamored and disturbed George Cukor is with Hollywood both as a physical location and a place of vast mythology, then in the earliest process of drafting it. Scenes where Bennett’s limited dreamer rehearses her scene until her artifice strips away and she’s onto something better is a glimpse into the hard work and thought required to make art. What Price Hollywood? is problematic and uneven, but there’s always Bennett and Sherman in two great parts, Cukor’s sophistication, and enough juicy bits of expose to keep your interest.