Tales from The Warner Archives #13: "The Legend of Lylah Claire" (Robert Aldrich, 1968)

When I was a kid, I had this fun idea that I thought of at the time as a nifty cine­mat­ic prac­tic­al joke. Nifty albeit com­pletely unprac­tic­al, that is. Essentially, you’d make a film that was kind of a respect­able, well-cast, earn­estly thought-out char­ac­ter drama, with con­flicts and plot points and a mount­ing sense of urgency, and at a cer­tain point just pri­or or so to what we’ll call, for the sake of this par­tic­u­lar argu­ment, the “third act,” you’d have the main char­ac­ters embark on an ocean liner voy­age. Something out of, you know, Dodsworth or Marnie. And then it’d be night on the ship itself, all the char­ac­ters hav­ing retired for the even­ing, and then (and here it really was Marnie that I was envi­sion­ing, in the pri­vacy of my warped little boy ima­gin­a­tion) the cam­era would pan, say, from a closed cab­in door to a porthole. The moon would shine on the ocean hori­zon. And then, slowly, out of the ocean, would arise…Godzilla. Who would then stride toward the liner, and once he was close enough, smack it in two, breathe fire on it, and con­sign all its pas­sen­gers to obli­vi­on. Followed by the end title card. 

A self-negating film, in oth­er words, although of course I did­n’t think of it as such. I did­n’t know at the time (I think I was around 10, which puts it at 1969 or so, and no, I was­n’t yet aware of the exist­ence of Bambi Vs. Godzilla either) that Robert Aldrich had in a very real sense actu­ally made just such a film, a film whose final two minutes or so upend and cri­tique and lay a kind of waste to everything that had gone before, a film called The Legend of Lylah Claire, star­ring Kim Novak and Peter Finch and Ernest Borgnine and Coral Browne and a very young Michael Murphy, all of whom are in a sense only import­ant to the film inas­much as their import­ance to it is anni­hil­ated in the finale. 

As the above frame grab implies, the pic­ture was Aldrich’s fol­lowup to The Dirty Dozen, and only a film­maker as pur­pose­fully per­verse as Aldrich would choose such a project—a quasi-amour-fou story of a dead Hollywood sex-symbol’s naïve (or is she) phys­ic­al dop­pel­gänger embody­ing said sex sym­bol in the pas­sion pro­ject of the obsessed dir­ect­or who once loved her original—to come after the wildly pop­u­lar and sem­in­al WWII action clas­sic. I don’t know too much at all about the cir­cum­stances of its mak­ing or how Aldrich came to the material—given he’s one of my favor­ite dir­ect­ors, I really ought to have read up more about him, biography-wise, but one can­’t do everything—but I do know that right of the bat Lylah has a some­what chint­zi­er, ana­chron­ist­ic air than many of Aldrich’s oth­er poison-pen let­ters to show busi­ness (which up to this point included The Big Knife, Whatever Happened To Baby Jane, and, in the  U.K.-Situated Division, The Killing of Sister George). Its 1.85 frame is more or less almost com­pletely dom­in­ated by cramped medi­um shots, sug­gest­ing not so much claus­tro­phobic atmo­sphere as lim­ited pro­duc­tion design budget. Even the office of the stu­dio big­wig played by Borgnine feels tight, oppress­ive, but in a non-purposeful way. Every now and then, as in an over­head shot in which the sex-goddess dop­pel­gänger (played of course by Novak, in one of her most absorb­ing per­form­ances) is over­whelmed by a dizzy­ing selec­tion of pub­li­city stills, the pic­ture’s visu­al scheme breaks out of this doldrum, but it’s a rare occurence indeed. Within this mat­rix the film hobbles from one bit of nas­ti­ness to the next, say­ing that the rar­efied glam­our of Old Hollywood was a repress­ive crock on the one hand and not even both­er­ing to point out that whatever­’s replaced it isn’t so hot either. Few stones of devi­ance are unturned, and in case any of it’s too subtle for you at around mid­point the pic­ture intro­duces a vile steely gos­sip colum­nist named Molly Luther (a thor­oughly fright­en­ing Browne), who you can look at as a throw­back to Parsons or a proph­ecy of Finke. She has only one leg, and her pros­thes­is is hol­low and ugly. Get it?

Things move right along, the guign­ol ele­ments start­ing to evoke a cross between Sunset Boulevard and Aldrich’s Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte, and while Finch does­n’t do much to sell us on the notion of his char­ac­ter as a cinema “geni­us” evok­ing Stroheim and/or Sternberg, Novak gamely swans around in all sorts of improb­able ensembles, as see below, wherein Finch clearly struggles to estab­lish some­thing along the lines of eye-contact.

And then comes the end­ing, which is even more of a shock­er than the oth­er “twist” pic­ture of ’68, Planet of the Apes, in part because it’s been less set up, or I should say less blatantly set up, for us than the Apes reveal. And also because, rather than explain­ing or illu­min­at­ing what we’ve seen in any kind of con­ven­tion­al way, it shows us that the broken thing we have been watch­ing was cre­ated for the sole pur­pose of being broken even fur­ther, that what we were tak­ing for the work of a dir­ect­or who could be said to have been kind of out of touch or out of synch not just with what had been going on in Hollywood but the world over was not just in on but entirely ahead of the game, but that this was some­thing a little more com­plex than his just play­ing pos­sum. It’s a capital‑S Surrealist gesture/statement that just can­not, nev­er mind should not, be encap­su­lated in a verbal descrip­tion, and it’s what makes this new release from the Warner Archive as must-own an item as there ever was. And yeah, I admit this is the first time I’ve seen the damn thing. I can­’t ima­gine how I’ve missed it all these years, and by the same token, I’m kind of glad I did­n’t exper­i­ence it on late-night TV while fucked up, because it woulda messed with me even more.