“It is...flamboyant, wildly exaggerated in both plot and character, stylized to the point of madness.... The film is about Hollywood - the garish, swollen Hollywood...of our most extravagant nightmares” (Stephen Farber, Film Quarterly).
Combining the astringent pessimism of The Big Knife (see Saturday, June 20) with the macabre sense injected into Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, The Legend of Lylah Clare is probably Robert Aldrich's most personal, most extreme, but certainly most poorly received, of all his films on Hollywood. Kim Novak plays a young actress, Elsa Brinkman, hired by director Lewis Zarkan (Peter Finch) to reenact the life of screen goddess Lylah Clare, Zarkan's wife who died under mysterious circumstances on the night of their wedding some 20 years earlier. As she becomes increasingly involved in the part, Elsa begins to exhibit an intimate knowledge of Lylah Clare, essentially taking on her spirit and, eventually, her misfortunes, including the love of Zarkan. Though the story sounds “workable” enough, it was Aldrich's treatment of it that accounted at once for the artistic interest and the dubious commercial potential of the film. Fred Camper (Chicago Art Institute) explains: “...(Aldrich) sees Hollywood as being totally without values...and (this) is generally expressed through a visual style which undercuts any consistent way of seeing space....”