Clevercell Very disappointing...

Comwayon A Disappointing Continuation

ActuallyGlimmer The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Kamila Bell This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Ed-Shullivan What a screenplay! No wonder it won five (5) Academy awards including best screenplay. In the closing scene when Lana Turner, Barry Sullivan, and Dick Powell abruptly get up from their chairs and leave second generation film producer Jonathan Shields' (Kirk Douglas) Hollywood office while Kirk's producer/accountant, Harry Pebbel (Walter Pidgeon), who arranged the overseas phone conference meeting, and Kirk are trying to convince them while he is still in Paris through an overseas phone call to make just one more picture with him. I thought Kirk Douglas would appear in the foyer to confront his three old friends in person who all worked with him to great success on earlier films that he produced. But that did not happen. Instead, actress Georgia Lorrison (Lana Turner), picks up a secondary phone in the foyer to listen in on the phone conversation the three old friends of Kirk just abruptly left while Kirk continues to speak to his producer/accountant, Harry Pebbel (Walter Pidgeon). Then as Georgia listens in (as she previously did some twenty years ago before she was made a big star) Pulitzer Prize winner screenwriter James Lee Bartlow (Dick Powell) and famed director Fred Amiel (Barry Sullivan) huddle next to each of Georgia's ears to also listen in on the continued phone conversation between producer Jonathan Shields and accountant Harry Pebbel. This scene gave me the goosebumps as it shows the audience that as much as the three former friends had good reasons for not wanting to be involved any longer in producer Jonathan Shields next film, the individual stories of how the three of them rose to fame are explained on the screen, and their personal stories and heartbreaks are owed to their involvement with the great second generation producer Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas). I loved this film and if it were not for Gary Cooper's great performance in the 1952 western High Noon, co-starring Grace Kelly, I am sure Kirk Douglas was also deserving of the best actor award for his stellar performance in the Bad and the Beautiful. I rate this film a perfect 10 for 10.

KylePowell The film starts off as an interesting concept. Three comrades in filmmaking recount their terrible experiences with a shared connection with flashbacks depicting said tales. A man who works for said connection begging them to reconcile with him and help him on his new project. What could go wrong?Although it has its moments, The Bad and the Beautiful failed to deliver for me overall. It wasn't as much the setting as it was the overall feel for the characters. For some reason it just didn't keep me as interested and involved as I had expected a melodrama to do.Overall, I honestly don't regret watching the film but I just feel it had more potential than what was shown.

higherall7 I have seen this film many times and the thing that is interesting is how swiftly time seems to pass for the viewer. Despite its dark subject matter about a cutthroat producer who will use anything and anyone to succeed; ruthlessness being a common Douglas theme and motif, there is this undeniable sense of warmth and familiarity between the characters and a sense of family as the narrative comes to its conclusion. Yes, Jonathan Shields as played by Douglas, has done terrible things to this wildly popular actress Georgia Lorrison, the imminently successful director Fred Amiel, and the Pulitzer Prize winning author James Lee Bartlow. But as Lana Turner, who plays the actress, holds the phone for Barry Sullivan, who plays the director, while Dick Powell, who plays the author share cheeks together listening in, you feel there is something ambiguous and paradoxical about 'The Shields Touch'.When I first saw this movie, it seemed somewhat light and just this side of a soap opera. But over the years it has grown on me and in stature as a serious work of cinema. Nowadays it strikes me as a strange and glossy form of verisimilitude. There is this sense that at its core it is telling the truth about a particular age in Hollywood when the studio system was in its heyday and does so with honest sensitivity and something more than bordering on fond regard.None of the characters are complete ogres and each has something likable about them. Many of the characters like Gaucho, the Latin Lover, played by Gilbert Roland, or his date, the Dancing Blonde played by Lucy Knoch, represent stock types more or less to varying degrees. For a long time I thought a writer's life must be something like the way Dick Powell portrayed it to be and was looking forward to adopting such a lifestyle. At times you feel like you are getting an inside look at workings of the Hollywood system. Or are you? Hard to tell exactly the difference between reality and illusion here. Jonathan confesses to Georgia that he feels a letdown after each and every production that he puts in the can and that this feeling is getting worse; yet I felt no letdown at the end of this film. Quite the opposite. Every time I see this film my regard for it increases and it's getting better. I also like the way it does not call attention to the techniques it uses to convey its story. The handling of time in the flashbacks makes the story seem non-linear although this is not, strictly speaking, the case at all. Even though it's photographed in Black and White, oddly enough I often remember it as though it were filmed in color.There is evil in this story and Kirk Douglas as Shields largely represents this. However, it is amusing how all the main characters have been affected by this Faustian Bargain that Jonathan the producer seems largely to shoulder on his own. After all, James Lee Bartlow's wife, Rosemary, as played by Gloria Grahame, has died in a horrible plane crash along with the contract player known as the Gaucho. Surely that is enough to condemn the machinations of Hollywood as a corrupt and unworthy system.But still there is that ending that gnaws at the imagination. James Lee Bartlow, Fred Amiel, and Georgia Lorrison have each survived their encounters with Jonathan Shields and are now more successful than ever. Feels like some kind of Hollywood ending shaping up. Could there be a story in all this? Something that would pack them in at the box office? Hmmnn, no, there's nothing to that but your average everyday Hollywood hype. Still, I would give my eye teeth to hear Shields begging us to give him one more shot with this new 'bright idea' and big project he has in the works. Harry Pebbel is out of his mind. 'Give the Devil his due'!But still... listen to him squirm.. about time, I say... did you hear that? Boy, he must be really desperate...

Applause Meter Lana Turner abandoned developing her talent into becoming a good actress early in her career when still a teen-age starlet. Here a mature Lana puts out her usual wooden performance, an actress always acting, always conveying to the audience that she is Lana Turner, Sex Goddess and Movie Star. Kirk Douglas is fierce and dictatorial, a character type he excels at and could probably play in his sleep. Dick Powell is a bland presence in every movie he's in. Walter Pigeon is in it too. Aren't he and Melvyn Douglas the same person? Barry Sullivan, a competent B movie actor, has a role. Gilbert Roland is thrown in for effect to represent the generic Latin Lover female moviegoers traditionally swoon over. Gloria Grahame shows up too, always the "dame," in this case a Southern belle one fluttering and flitting all over the place; and the Academy honored her with a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for 1952!That takes care of the cast. As for the story, well it's supposed to be an inside look at Hollywood wheelers and dealers, star making, and breaking, glory takers and those on the down escalator to failure. It's the real story, exposed! Wrong. It is so full of clichés and tired old tropes, stereotypes--- everything that the public anticipates and comfortably accepts in a fictionalized story purported to be drawn on "real life" events and people. All the soap opera melodrama bursts out of it everywhere making scenes meant to be taken seriously more like comedic spoofs from Saturday Night Live. And the Academy honored this with a Best Screenplay Oscar for 1952!The weepy, poignant musical score by David Raksin serves as the baleful icing dripping off this collapsed cake. To say that this is not director Vincent Minelli's best effort is an understatement. He made a lot of good movies. This should be relegated to the bottom of the heap.