What Price Hollywood?

Lowell Sherman and Constance Bennett in What Price Hollywood?

George Cukor's What Price Hollywood?, from 1932, is the best iteration of the numerous versions of A Star is Born. Judging by the results of the latest Sight and Sound Poll, the contributions of classic Hollywood are a bit underrated today, but these things wax and wane. Certainly, few films made today have this level of energy, craftmanship, and wit on display here. Enough vinegar remains from Edna St. John's original to make this a raucous Pre-Code delight. As Andrew Sarris has noted, Cukor thrived when focusing on show people and this look at the rise of a Hollywood star seems tailor made for the former Broadway phenom.

Constance Bennett stars as Mary Evans who we first meet mooning over Clark Gable as she reads a Hollywood fan magazine. By this time, the film industry had been established in Hollywood for two decades and this film offers a tart picture of the publicity machine generated by the industry and its stars. Evans' rise to stardom is pictured in headlines from both news and trade papers. When Evans is mired in scandal a pile of papers is shown laden with mud. Her wedding is disrupted by a mob of well-wishers and members of the press. She must abandon her home because it is constantly being besieged by paparazzi and flees to France. This is the price of fame the film implies, Yet, despite alcoholism, divorce, and suicide. What Price Hollywood? exudes a cockeyed optimism buoyed the sheer joy of the filmmaking process. The scenes on the RKO soundstages show off Cukor at his most youthfully energetic, not a description I would offer to any of his work after Sylvia Scarlett. 

Cukor's skill with actors was perhaps unrivalled in Hollywood and he guides the cast to some of their best work. Bennett is waitressing at The Brown Derby at the opening of the film, the biggest stretch in the film for this sophisticated actress who belonged to an acting clan that rivalled the Barrymore's. Bennett is entertaining and convincing throughout, even in the potentially sticky domestic scenes with a small child and Louis Beavers as "The Maid". Her Garbo imitation was funny enough to be reprised and expanded upon by Janet Gaynor in the 1937 A Star is Born. What Price Hollywood? is the high water mark of her career with 1937's Topper being a sort of last hurrah. 

One change that the subsequent ...Star is Born films all share is that they combined the drunken mentor (Lowell Sherman) and romantic lead (Neil Hamilton) characters into one person, the doomed Norman Maine. I think this is a flaw that bedevils all the subsequent versions. The character of Maine makes the story overly lugubrious whether he is portrayed as in the film or music industry. Neil Hamilton is more than adequate as Lonny Borden, a polo playing heir who literally sweeps Evans off her feet. Hamilton's career dates back to the silent era, where he was a leading man for D. W. Griffith, but he is best known today as Commissioner Gordon on television's Batman. Hamilton didn't have much range, but is well cast as a patrician swain who looks down upon Mary's fellow film folk. Cukor gets an unusually animated performance from Hamilton. One of his two best. The other being a B horror turn in the little scene 1961 feature, The Devil's Hand.

Lowell Sherman portrays Max Carey, a noted director who meets Mary at The Brown Derby and launches her meteoric rise. Sherman, a longtime veteran of stage and screen (he plays the cad who jilts Lillian Gish in Way Down East), is delightful in an outmoded role that was then a convention, that of the good natured drunk who revels in his perpetual pixilation. A canard perhaps, but a lot more fun than hanging out with hangdog Norman Maine. Sherman not only handles well the insouciant quips of his character, but also his decline and eventual suicide. The suicide scene hits a little close to home, since Sherman was to die prematurely, at age 46, a few years later. In the film, Carey is shocked at his dissipated visage in a mirror which is next to a studio glamor portrait of himself. Sherman truly does look like shit in the reflection and, thanks to Cukor's visceral handling, we can see why he grabs a handy pistol and offs himself. What Price Hollywood? was Sherman last role in a film that he did not direct. Apparently, Sherman was finding playing an endless litany of playboys and cads "monotonous" and took to directing to allay his boredom. He was more than a fine actor and director (the most famous film he helmed was the Mae West vehicle, She Done Him Wrong) whose output is now relatively neglected.