Thoughsatire is hardly a mode with which King Vidor is associated, he was, to judge from this backstageHollywood silent, thoroughly adept with it. Show People was based on a play which Vidor couldn't stand tofinish reading. Its true inspiration was the career of Gloria Swanson, who, like Show People's heroine,began as a slapstick comedienne and reached ludicrous extremes of "European" pretension. Marion Daviesplays "Peggy Pepper," Georgia belle and aspiring starlet who with her Southern "Colonel" father drivescross-country to "this glorious spot on the map called Hollywood." Davies is perhaps fated to beremembered through Orson Welles' slander as "Susan Alexander," the talentless tootsie foisted on theopera-going public by Citizen Kane. But that reputation ignores her genuine gifts as a mime revealed in threecomedies with Vidor-The Patsy, Show People, and Not So Dumb-lampooning the very high-art pretensionsof the Susan Alexanders of Hollywood. Although Vidor doesn't spare his own earlier films, the satire isaffectionate rather than vitriolic. In a sense, it's a defense of Hollywood-then under criticism as a hotbed ofimmorality-as a place of small-town values and hard work, where the simplest pratfall is earned byendless rehearsal. In cameos are Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, John Gilbert, William S. Hart, andMarion Davies-as-Marion Davies, with whom Marion Davies-as-Peggy Pepper is distinctly unimpressed.The puncturing of pretensions is so complete that MGM's always inappropriate motto encircling Leo's head,"Ars Gratia Artis" (Art for Art's Sake), comes across this time as some gremlin's smart-aleck irony.Scott Simmon