Critic Christopher Palmer writes: One never quite forgets one's first hearing of this picture's main-title music...this enormous melodic sentence immediately picks us up and carries us along with it. It is a paragraph of glorious sensuousness and elevation, and leading melodies of this length and breadth were a rarity in film music. The Bad and the Beautiful recreates the rise and fall of a Hollywood producer (Kirk Douglas) through flashbacks from the memories of those he victimized: the star (Lana Turner), the studio head (Walter Pidgeon), the writer (Dick Powell) and the director (Barry Sullivan). All have sworn never to work with him again, but as they await a telephone call now, it seems that they may all change their minds. A sharply observant tale of movie machinations, set for the most part in the studios, The Bad and the Beautiful cleverly reflects the Hollywood surface it caricatures-the egos, the pretensions, the ridiculous trials and transparent babble of life in tinsel town. All this is intriguingly staged under Vincent Minnelli's direction, which finds Hollywood half horror movie, half haunting romanticism.