Subtlety.
Through all their ups and down, hits and misses, you could always depend on Aldrich's movies, no matter what their genre, to slam into you with blunt force trauma.
Flush with blockbuster success and accompanying loads of cash from "The Dirty Dozen", Aldrich felt free to indulge himself with whatever wild concept struck his fancy, no matter how grotesque and bizarre......
Having already treated Hollywood as a viper's nest in "The Big Knife" and a horror show in "Whatever Happened To Baby Jane", Aldrich dialed up the Crazy to the max with "Lylah Clare".....
Grotesque and bizarre? Those are the more restrained of the film's qualities.....
If you didn't already get the idea that Hollywood is a lunatic asylum run by its inmates, this movie arrived to erase all your doubts......
A desperate, cancer-stricken agent (Milton Selzer), hoping for a producer credit before he croaks, serves up Elsa to Lylah Clare's one time Svengali Lewis Zarken (Peter Finch), a washed up director.
Zarken, who's an equally nutty blend of Otto Preminger, Erich Von Stroheim and James Stewart's "Vertigo" sucker, sees in Elsa his golden chance to pitch a Lylah Claire bio-pic to studio chief Barney Sheean (Ernest Borgnine).
Barney's a howling, screaming, apoplectic vulgarian blatantly modeled on Columbia Studio's Harry Cohn........and Borgnine gives us the full pedal-to-the-metal, unleashed Ernie here, practically willing his own eyeballs to pop out of his head during his sputtering rages.
And oh what a parade of wacky tinseltown loons come strutting through this film......Rosella Falk, fresh from her creepy assassin role in "Modesty Blaise", as Finch's creepy live-in assistant named....Rosella (ponder that, if you will).......Valentina Cortese as flamboyant stylist Countess Bozo Bedoni (honest).....and the cream of this nightmarish crop, Coral Browne playing a crippled, reptilian almighty powerful gossip columnist.
Everything's in place for a tsunami of weirdness and Aldrich lets the whole movie cut loose into unbridled, way-over-the-top insanity. Finch's Zarken, for all his ego-consumed rants, doesn't have to work too hard to perform his make over of Novak's Elsa........ at key moments, Novak carries on as if she's literally horror-movie possessed by the deep-voiced, take-no-prisoners Lylah......(these unintentionally hilarious scenes are way beyond Novak's limited range, but to her credit, she gives it a fair try anyway....)
But wait! Aldrich isn't quite done with us........in case you didn't fully grasp his vision of Hollywood as a boiling cesspool of monumental satanic proportions.....he clubs you over the head with a satirical metaphor........(we'll make no attempt to describe it, you'll have to experience it for yourselves to properly gape at it in disbelief.......)
By any normal, sane standards of critical evaluation, "The Legend Of Lylah Clare" is a zero star trainwreck.......
Call us soft in the head (and you won't be the first)......but we couldn't avert our eyes from the drunken, drug-fueled Halloween-party-gone-wrong vibe that this movie puts out. It's right up here with "Rocky Horror Picture Show" and "Eraserhead" for pure Midnight Madness guilty joy....so we're unabashedly awarding it 3 Hollywood-Walk-Of-Fame stars.....(***).
See it to believe it.
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