Sunset Boulevard (1950) had been a knockout film saying “Don't trust movies-the people who make them are crazy.” Two years later, Vincente Minnelli's The Bad and the Beautiful is a gentler story in which the monstrous producer, Jonathan Shields (a heady mix of David O. Selznick stories and Kirk Douglas's self-confidence), offends everyone in his world but still hooks them on talk of what might be a great new picture. No one here is exactly crazy-just ambitious, or sexy or brilliant, and very selfish. That's where Minnelli's kinder touch can be subtler than Billy Wilder managed. For at the heart of this top-notch melodrama (not even nominated when the awful Greatest Show on Earth won Best Picture) is the teasing question: what is bad and beautiful? And what has become of those standards if we are in a dream?