[Originally published in Movietone News 40, April 1975]
The first of the best films of 1975 has been and gone, and won’t be back, at least at your naborhood theatre. Love among the Ruins appeared on ABC-TV on March 6; reportedly, an agreement with Sir Laurence Olivier ensures that it will never be released theatrically. One can only hope that the film will soon be leaked quietly to 16mm nontheatrical distributors (as, for instance, is the case with Losey’s A Doll’s House), for it’s a treasure, a shining testimonial to the glories of memory and dreams that deserves better than to become merely a memory itself.
If the story of What Price Hollywood?, the George Cukor-directed 1932 show-biz tale of an aspiring actress on the rise and an alcoholic director spiraling downward, sounds familiar to you, it’s likely because it’s something of a rough draft for A Star is Born. Not that Cukor’s film or the original story, penned by newspaperwoman-turned-screenwriter Adela Rogers St. Johns, received any credit, but the inspiration is undeniable. The 1937 A Star is Born has a more polished script and lavish budget, and its rise and fall tale has a classically tragic arc, but What Price Hollywood? is witty, spunky, adult, and bouncing with energy, a Hollywood tale right out of the pre-code sensibility of the early 1930s.
