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Murder in a vacant studio, the pistol firing at the audience evokes Spellbound, or, closer to home, The Great Train Robbery. The unsolved case catches the eye of the East Coast producer (Richard Conte) two decades later, "there's a good story here." The victim was a silent-film director, for the new dramatization the original screenwriter (Henry Hull) is sought, he's found at a Santa Monica bungalow amidst scattered pages. ("You got your foot on my second act.") An elusive diva is also included, the protagonist contemplates the painted portrait with the bullet hole in it when in walks the daughter (Julia Adams), her spitting image. The agent (Jim Backus) narrates the tale, cheerfully. "That's very good advice. Do you mind if I pay no attention to it?" The William Desmond Taylor mystery, sort of, just a specter around which William Castle builds his modestly self-reflexive tour of Tinseltown. Fred Clark for the direct connection to Sunset Blvd., Richard Egan as a grinning police lieutenant, "maybe comic relief, you know, the blundering flatfoot." A neat expression of the time and place, cinema's earlier epoch like the memories of an aged security guard redivivus. ("Class of '29" reunion, Francis X. Bushman and Betty Blythe and William Farnum and Helen Gibson happy before the camera once again.) Behind the scenes with Joel McCrea for a moment or so, art of the script, "it's all finished, all I got to do now is put in the words." Blackmailers bumped off in seedy motels, a shooting recreated in Chaplin's old backlot. Losey (Finger of Guilt) and Altman (The Player) are among the subsequent variations. "Still writing bad scenes, aren't you?" With Paul Cavanagh, Houseley Stevenson, Katherine Meskill, and Peter Brocco. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |