“To direct a picture, a man needs humility. Do you have humility, Mister Shields?”
The Bad and the Beautiful, 1952, Metro Goldwyn Mayer,produced by John Houseman, scripted by Charles Schnee from a story by George Bradshaw, directed by Vincente Minnelli. Pictured: Ivan Triesault, Dick Powell.
Inspired by some of your previous posts, I just screened this movie and enjoyed the heck out of it. Minnelli’s film, by its very design, may suffer from the kind of overheated pacing the director character above bemoans in his own film-within-the-film production: “It’s all climaxes.” Nearly every scene begins and ends with an almost total reversal of the characters’/audience’s previous emotions and narrative expectations, but Minnelli guides all this furious energy into something like a believable portrait of a B‑movie Charles Foster Kane.