Hollywood Story (1951)

New York Producer Larry O’Brien (Richard Conte) moves to Los Angeles to found and head a new independent movie studio. Buying an old studio building that’s been unused since 1929, he learns of the unsolved murder of former silent star director Franklin Ferrara. Ferrara was shot right in his office on the lot, too, so it’s easy for Larry to become somewhat obsessed with the matter.

Clearly, the combination of oldest school Hollywood glamour and an unsolved murder should make box office gold, so Larry decides to turn this particular true crime story into his first Hollywood film, despite misgivings from friends and very shouty misgivings from his money man Sam Collyer (Fred Clark). And because Larry’s a bit of a method producer, he starts hiring old talent for that project, former silent actors as well as Ferrara’s old script writer Vincent St. Clair (Henry Hull). Also not amused by his project – or is it his deep dive into the matters of the case? – are the daughter of Ferrara’s favourite star (Julie Adams) as well as the actual killer.

Supposedly made as Universal’s answer to Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd, and directed by William Castle, this mystery doesn’t actually have much in common with the Wilder movie beyond the call-backs to the silent era and some cameos and small part appearances by actual silent era actors whom Universal, staying classy as always, decided to pay the lowest rates possible. It’s also, keeping with being classy, a thinly veiled version of the actual unsolved murder of silent movie director William Desmond Taylor, leading to a film that’s strangely meta in a very different way to Wilder’s film.

But then, Sunset Blvd was all about Hollywood and what it does to (at least some) people, whereas this one’s a zippy murder mystery whose moments of meta and strange resonance seem less based on an explicit artistic program but just come about through a combination of a somewhat exploitative set-up, a director in William Castle insisting on a degree of authenticity when it comes to places and their feeling by using actual silent sound stages as well as a couple of well-known Hollywood spots, and the magic that a film where production and plot can’t help but mirror one another a little simply cannot avoid when made by dedicated professionals. So while there’s no direct attempt at depth or more than a small critique of Hollywood life in the film’s script, there’s a certain resonance to the proceedings, as if this particular film had stumbled into a particularly liminal space by a mix of accident and mercenary commercialism, providing things with an air of the slightly weird throughout.

Thanks to being an actual murder mystery, and its willingness and ability to tell a genre story, Hollywood Story also avoids the horrors of artier movies about filmmaking, a sub-genre much beloved by Ebert-style film critics and certain directors that’s typically comparable to all those Great Novels about middle-aged writers, their writing blocks and their wish to fuck their grand-daughter-aged students. That is to say, this stuff is really of no interest to anyone but the makers and their cliques.

If you’ve first encountered the great William Castle, king of the gimmick movie, with his later, independent productions, and heard and seen all those lovely gimmicks, it’s often easy to forget that the man had had a healthy career as a studio contract director before that. It’s a bit ironic that this film made in his studio phase is also a bit of a gimmick movie with its “ripped from the old headlines” approach, but it’s not Castle’s gimmick, it’s the studio’s.


The gimmicks also can tend to hide Castle’s considerable abilities as a director, like his command of pace – as a rule, a Castle movie is never slow nor full of filler – or the generally short but deft and effective use of expressionist filmmaking stand-bys like chiaroscuro effects, stark shadows, and so on and so forth. Hollywood Story in particular features some clever tracking shots, and well-staged suspense sequences, but its high point is the film’s actual climax that’s about three minutes of a beautiful potted noir chase through a studio lot by night, wonderfully mixing Castle’s talent for the efficiently brief and the expressionist.