Film Review: What Price, Hollywood?

Just got out of my first '30s Cinema History screening. We watched a Burns and Allen short and What Price, Hollywood? which basically defines the prototypical "well made film". Mary Evans is a lowly struggling actress trying to make it big in pictures. Somehow she lucked into a job at the legendary Brown Derby as a waitress, and she gets her golden opportunity when the legendary, and currently drunk film director Max Carey walks in before his big premiere. They hit it off, he puts her in his next picture, proclaims his love for her and makes her a star. It's all standard stuff, easily producible and marketable (which is probably why it was made into A Star is Born with Judy Holiday and again with Barbara Streisand).

What sets this apart, however, is the overall quality of every aspect of the production. This was George Cukor's eighth film in his first three years in Hollywood. As the wave of the talkies came in, Broadway talent came with it. Cukor was a successful Broadway director who eventually would become one of the great old Hollywood directors. Not much of a visual stylist, Cukor had an amazing touch with his actors. In What Price, Hollywood? Cukor had his second major production and his first that really established him as a "woman's director", shorthand for the fact that he was gay. Constance Bennet had a long career, but was never better than playing Mary here. She brings enough innocence that is perfunctory for the part, but it is her strength that sets her apart. The repartee with Lowell Sherman's Max shows that this woman is no one to be taken lightly, and the film actually manages to avoid the pitfall of making Mary into a martyr. When life begins to crumble in the third act, it is all natural, sympathetic stuff and not a cliché of debauchery that would so soon be established for films like this.

Article Author: Jesse Trussell

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