Also seen recently, though I had watched bits and pieces of it before, 1966's
The Oscar a star-studded bomb based on a popular novel by Richard Sale, which was in the same vein as the sort of sleazy melodramatic pulpy novels by the likes of Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann. It's a laundry list of every show biz/Hollywood cliché that were already starting to become well-worn with age in the 1930s. It's a contrived, florid fairy tale full of clumsy metaphors, belabored cliches and all that, that asks the audience to believe that Hollywood is comprised of basically decent, principled, hard-working folks, including agents and film studio presidents and unscrupulous bad apples like it's main character are the rotten exceptions.
It tells the story in flashback from Oscar Night, of Frankie Fane, once a sleazy borderline sociopath who went from traveling from small town to small town, promoting his girlfriend as a stripper at various cheap clubs and booze joints, and ends up dropping her for an apsiring New York City fashion designer played by Elke Sommer, especially after the GF asks him to maybe get a job of his own perhaps - but his new relationship goes south until he somehow catches the eye of a Hollywood talent scout and soon rises up in the ranks of stardom via backstabbing and stepping on people, his doormat pal Hymie Kelly watching from the sides. His career hits a few snags though and desperate to not end up another has-been he stakes revitalizing his career on winning a Best Actor Award - and the makers of this film actually received an endorsement from the Academy to use its trademark image and awards ceremony in the film, their actually approving the use of their image in such a sordid flick is almost mind-boggling.
It's the sort of sleazy pandering-yet-earnest, self-serious Hollywood trash no one has the old-school, out-of-touch naivete to be able to make any more. It's bad alright, but watching the whole film it's the sort of gaudy badness, the sort of flamboyantly awful film that hasn't been made in quite awhile.
First off, every scene looks like a soundstage, everyone's clothes in every scene looks like they've never been worn before, and when the film moves to Hollywood, the garish phoniness becomes even more pronounced, chintzy sets that would barely pass muster on a modest-budget tv show are intended as signs of high glamour.
The performances, however oh, the performances.
Hymie Kelly is played by none other than legendary singer Tony Bennett, in a performance which shows why this was not just his first but also his last dramatic role in a film - played with an awkward and trite "earnestness" that comes off as whiny at times, he's also physically awkward, always hunched over slightly and in the scene where he finally tells off Frankie and leaves, he ends up running out of the scene like someone who is not used to running very much, it's very awkward.
Ernest Borgnine as an obnoxious private investigator, Eleanor Parker as the talent scout who "discovers" Frankie and is used and discarded by him, in a brief role Peter Lawford as a "has been" actor (a little too on the nose for him at the time) and a very low-wattage Milton Berle as Frankie's agent who delivers his lines in a way so low-key as to be no-key, including this "classic" tell-off:
Have you ever seen a moth smashed against a window? Leaves the dust of its wing. You're like that, Frankie. You leave a powder of dirt everywhere you touch.
and then there's the main event himself, played by Stephen Boyd, best known for his role as Massala in 1959's
Ben-Hur in a way that's both wooden and ham-tastic. To quote Michael Sauter from his book
The Worst Movies of All Time; Or What Were They Thinking?
...it has the absolute in bad film acting. The chief offender is Stephen Boyd, who stars as Frankie Fane, a Hollywood heel scratching and screwing his way to fame. Boyd is so hopeless that he can’t even hack it as the no-talent actor Frankie is supposed to be. Tearing through the movie like the Tasmanian Devil, he snarls, sneers, makes sudden menacing gestures, snarls some more, sneers some more, and makes the cords in his neck stick out.
Boyd bellows, makes lots of hand gestures and robotic body movements - one favorite moment is when he tricks a gal into thinking he's crying then he takes his hands away from his face to reveal he was just "acting",
baby and it's even less convincing than the rest of his performance. It reaches a peak in this "climactic" scene where Bennett finally rebels against his partner after being asked to carry out one too many dirty deeds to help him get ahead.
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FREELOADERS!"
