Hollywood Story (Universal-International, 1951)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Hollywood Story was made in 1951 and was directed by William Castle from a script by Fred Kohner, son of expat German turned Hollywood agent Paul Kohner and father of Susan Kohner as well as another daughter, Kathy, whose stories of hanging out at Malibu Beach and watching boys surf inspired Fred to create the character of “Gidget” (short for “girl midget”) and launch a highly successful series of films for teen audiences. Kohner co-wrote the Hollywood Story script with Frederick Brady and the two dredged up one of Hollywood’s most infamous real-life scandals for the plot: the mysterious death of director William Desmond Taylor in his bungalow in 1922. This led to the collapse of the careers of actresses Mary Miles Minter and Mabel Normand, both of whom had been supposedly linked romantically with Taylor (though at least one version of the story says they were both “beards” and Taylor was really Gay and was using his Black chauffeur to pick up boys for him). The Taylor killing was never solved -- though in later years director King Vidor researched it and hoped to develop a comeback film based on it (he decided Mary Miles Minter’s overprotective mother had killed Taylor, though a later author disputed that and said Taylor had been killed by organized crime) -- and in this version it gets tweaked in some interesting ways.

Hollywood Story begins with a prologue depicting the murder and then cuts forward from 1929, when the murder occurred (Kohner and Brady moved it seven years forward so they could incorporate the change from silent to sound films into their plot), to 1950. Hotshot New York-based film producer Lawrence “Larry” O’Brien (Richard Conte, top-billed and anxious to change his image from gangster roles to good guys) has just been lured, along with his producing partner Sam Collier (Fred Clark), to make films in Hollywood. (The film is narrated by Jim Backus in his role as Mitch Davis, O’Brien’s agent, a gimmick I could have done without -- though Backus is quite fine in it and it’s nice to know he could do other things besides the voice of Mr. Magoo, the rich guy in Gilligan’s Island and James Dean’s emasculated father in Rebel Without a Cause.) O’Brien rents an old studio that hasn’t been used in 20 years (it was really Charlie Chaplin’s lot!) and stumbles on the studio bungalow where 21 years earlier the famous director Frederick Ferrara was killed while a player piano cranked out Rimsky-Korsakoff’s “Song of India.” He’s fascinated by the scene, the story behind it, the photos of famous silent stars on its walls and the fact that the room was left so untouched the roll of “Song of India” was still on the player piano. So he decides to base his first Hollywood film on the Ferrara murder, which means he has to solve the cold case himself.

Among the properties he spots in Ferrara’s old bungalow is a portrait of the great silent star Amanda Rousseau -- and in one scene he turns from looking at the painting to seeing a woman who’s the spitting image of the woman in the portrait. The living woman turns out to be Amanda’s daughter Sally Rousseau (Julie Adams, who turns in a rich, remarkable performance that will surprise you if all you think of her as is the damsel in distress in the 1954 monster film Creature from the Black Lagoon). O’Brien investigates the case and at the same time hires Ferrara’s former writer, Vincent St. Clair (Henry Hull), to do the script for his movie even though his last credit was in 1929 and that had my B.S. detector going: I asked, “How do they know he can write a script with dialogue?” (Writers were far less important in the silent era than they became later, and most silents were written by three people or teams: one writer thought up the overall story, the next worked on the “continuity” -- the content of each individual scene and how they would link up -- and the third would write the intertitles that contained the dialogue.) As it turns out, the difference between silent and sound writing becomes an important issue in resolving this film’s plot.

O’Brien interviews the surviving suspects in the Ferrara murder case and also finds out that Ferrara was a descendant of one of the original Californios, the Spaniards who settled the state, received land grants from the Spanish crown and held their high social positions until California became part of independent Mexico in 1821 and then was conquered by the United States as part of the 1846-1848 Mexican War. He had a brother, Pete Ferrara, who was credited as a writer on most of Frederick’s films but was always jealous of Frederick’s success. Among the original suspects were Peter, actor Roland Paul (Paul Cavanaugh) -- a silent-era star in Ferrara’s films whose career was wiped out by the scandal of Ferrara’s death, though he’s still working in Hollywood and scraping together a living in bit roles -- and screenwriter St. Clair, who turns out to be Peter Ferrara. It seems that the Ferrara brothers had just made their first talkie before Frederick was killed, and it had been a wretched flop because of the poor quality of the dialogue (see, I told you that was going to be important!), whereupon Peter killed his brother out of jealousy of his success and assumed the name “St. Clair” because St. Clare was the patron saint of the Ferrara family. (O’Brien realizes this when he visits the famous San Juan Capistrano mission and sees a metal plate -- made by the Ferrara boys’ silversmith father -- of St. Clare on the outside wall of the mission.)

Among the surprise suspects is O’Brien’s partner Sam -- well, he is played by Fred Clark, after all (Clark is even seen in a flashback that shows him 20 years younger, though the only difference is he’s wearing an ill-fitting toupee) -- though at the end St. Clair is established as the real killer and hunted down in the studio (the chase takes them through the prop department, where we see a lot of bric-a-brac in the background: yet another indication of Orson Welles’ influence on William Castle!), the film gets made and is a huge success, and O’Brien and Sally Rousseau pair up. There are some intriguing directions Kohner and Brady could have taken his story, including having O’Brien cast Sally Rousseau to play her mother in the film and build her into a big star and making O’Brien more of a rougher and conflicted character -- as Charles noted, Hollywood Story had the visual “look” of a film noir but little of the moral ambiguity; the characters are pretty much either all good or all bad, and part of that may have been Richard Conte’s desire to play an unambiguous hero after years of being typecast as a crook (apparently it hadn’t occurred to him that he could carry over elements of his former anti-social typecasting into his mostly good-guy roles the way Humphrey Bogart did in his transition from gangsters to sympathetic leads).

It’s also obviously a film influenced not only by the William Desmond Taylor murder case but also by the huge success of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, made the year before and also a murder film set against the backdrop of both silent-era and contemporary Hollywood. We get to see two clips from silent films, one real (Mary Philbin’s famous “unmasking” of Lon Chaney, Sr. in the 1925 Phantom of the Opera) and one faked (Julie Adams and Paul Cavanaugh in ridiculously heavy makeup in a scene from one of Ferrara’s films starring Amanda Rousseau … so Adams got to play her own mother on screen, and in a featured interview on the DVD in which she still looks surprisingly good she talks about how much fun she had duplicating the stylized acting of silent films; ironically the action in the scene is reminiscent of the clip from Gloria Swanson’s 1928 film Queen Kelly used in Sunset Boulevard, and there’s a world of difference between Swanson’s restraint in the actual silent clip and Adams’ exaggerated gestures in the 1951 simulation), and we also get to see surviving actors from the silent days, including Francis X. Bushman (a frequent guest on early-1950’s TV show talking about Hollywood’s silent days) and Helen Gibson, and Charles noted that Castle gave them a lot more to do on screen than Billy Wilder had in the infamous “waxworks” scene showing them playing bridge in Sunset Boulevard.

Hollywood Story is a quite interesting movie, well made and with a convincing ending to a mystery that remains unsolved in reality -- though I must say that I was a bit put out by them making the writer the killer, just as I had been in a 1930’s “B” whose title escapes me at the moment in which the gimmick was that the reporter “sleuth” character figures out that the writer committed the murder because of the similarity of the real-life crime to his script!