Hollywoodland

When I was a small boy, The Adventures of Superman, starring George Reeves, was broadcast as reruns on TV.  I remember the blurry grey low-budget appearance of the show -- it seemed archaic and ancient to me, like a faded parchment only partly legible, underlit and ill-focused.  In fact, the shows were only a few years old, but I didn't think much of them.  I've never had much affection for Superman, a hero with exorbitant powers that I always thought too excessive to be interesting -- if a super hero can do anything, then, he might as well do nothing.  I didn't like the show and found it vaguely disturbing, possibly because my father, who was very cynical at that time in his life, mentioned that George Reeves, the star of the show had killed himself out of despair at being type-cast in this ridiculous and cartoonish role.  I never knew if this account of the star's death was true or not -- on the basis of Hollywoodland, I guess that my Dad's version of events was, more or less, accurate.  

Hollywoodland, directed by Allen Coulter, is a 2006 film in which events all pivot around Superman's death, an event that occurred in 1959.  The movie is very well-made with superb acting and very ambitious, a sprawling novelistic work with many subplots and showy histrionic scenes -- the large cast gets to strut their stuff in this film; every major character gets an emotional outburst or a "big scene" of some kind.  The picture is shot in a subtle monochromatic beige and tan -- everything is bathed in a soft slightly greyish light that is curiously redolent of the grim black and white in which the Superman Tv show was initially shot.  The film's structure is very complex involving many flashbacks, at least two of which are intentionally misleading -- they stage as an accomplished fact what is actually merely a hypothesis.  David Bordwell has pointed out that this movie, a complicated neo-noir, in fact embodies many of the baroque narrative strategies that characterized American movie making between 1945 and 1955.  

The film begins with the central event that the narrative seeks to explicate:  George Reeves apparent death by suicide.  In flashbacks, we see Reeves playing guitar for his contemptuous girlfriend and a couple of sinister and louche looking Hollywood types.  Reeves (BenAffleck) is singing a sad Mexican song.  The other younger people in his living room, including his wife, are overtly bored.  She mocks him and puts on "The Girl Can't Help It', a rock and roll tune from a Jayne Mansfield movie and Reeves, making a courtly bow, goes upstairs to bed.  A few moments later, there is the sound of a gun being fired.  The police are quick to assess the death as a suicide.  The film, then, introduces us to Louis Simo (Adrian Brody), a smarmy cut-rate private eye specializing in sordid divorce investigations.  Simo operates out of a grisly-looking apartment building that is more like a motel, with a filthy pool and terrace, than a home.  Simo has a girlfriend with whom he lives.  She is studying acting and turns out to be sleeping with one of her fellow-students.  Simo is divorced and has a disdainful ex-wife and six year old son.  The little boy is distraught that Superman killed himself; he dangerously burns his Superman costume on the couch in his mother's home and says with appalled dismay:  "he (Superman) shot himself in the head with a Lugar -- that's a Nazi gun."  Simo used to work for a detective agency that fried bigger fish -- it tailed and blackmailed Hollywood stars.  One of his colleagues from that agency passes onto Simo a client, George Reeves' suspicious and vengeful mother.  She refuses to believe that her son has killed himself and wants Simo prove that Reeves was murdered.  Simo's modus operandi is to string his clients along, taking money from them at intervals to support himself while, really, delivering no actual results -- he decides to represent Reeve's mother according to this opportunistic paradigm.  (We know how Simo operates because we have seen his exploiting a half-mad man who thinks his younger wife is committing adulterym although there's no evidence of this.)  Simo begins his investigation by contacting the newspapers and telling the journalists that Reeves was murdered, although there is no evidence of this either.  He bribes a morgue attendant and goes through Reeves personal effects uncovering an inscribed watch that leads him to some clues about events leading up to the actor's death.  As these clues are discovered, the film effortlessly shifts into flashbacks dramatizing the circumstances uncovered by the gumshoe.

Reeves, we learn, had been an up-and-coming actor who had worked with Sinatra and Clark Gable.  He's handsome and intelligent although a drunk.  Reeves is picked-up by Toni Mannix, the disgruntled wife of the famous studio executive Eddie Mannix.  Eddie has a Japanese mistress (she speaks no English) and Toni, a beautiful if somewhat faded movie star type, seduces Reeves, initially it seems out of lust and a desire to  revenge herself on her overtly adulterous husband.  (Toni Mannix is expertly played by Diane Lane; Eddie Mannix is acted by Bob Hoskins.)  Toni falls in love with Reeves and sets him up in a nice house in Benedict Canyon.  She gives him expensive gifts and helps him out in various ways -- recommending him for parts at the Studio.  It's through Toni's efforts that Reeves gets the part of Superman, a role that he finds very demeaning.  The humiliating aspects of the part are demonstrated in a couple of memorable scenes -- because the show is shot in low-grade black and white, Reeves costume is not red and blue, but rather grey and brown (the contrasts are better for the murky Kinetoscope stock); in one scene, Reeves is flying but the apparatus fails and he thuds heavily to the floor of the studio.  Reeves tires of his older mistress, Toni Mannix, and, while trying to establish himself as a theatrical actor in New York, picks up a girl whom he later installs in his home in LA.  Toni Mannix is enraged and there is an implication that she may have killed Reeves -- in fact, we see a murder scene with her staged as an ostensible flashback.  Eddie Mannix, who cheats on Toni but still loves her, sees his wife sobbing inconsolably in her big luxury car.  He tells Toni that he will always protect her and,  maybe, hires someone to kill Reeves to punish the man for upsetting his wife.  Finally, we are shown a flashback hypothesizing that Reeve's selfish girlfriend from New York accidentally killed Reeves in a fight in his bedroom.  These various hypotheses as to how Reeves died are imagined by Louis Simo and arise from his investigation.  Simo has become increasingly obsessed with the investigation and is drinking heavily.  Ultimately, the studio buys off Reeves' mother by promising to build a statue of her son at the Grauman's Chinese Theater.  Simo, who now has no client, continues his investigation.  Mannix' henchmen beat him up and, with his face all battered and drunk as well, he goes to see his little son who is terrified of him.  Simo's girlfiend has now left and the PI sits around listlessly drinking.  Finally, he interviews Reeves' agent.  The agent shows him a Super 8 film showing Reeves' practicing to become a professional wrestler.  Superman has been canceled and the actor can't find work.  In the Super 8 footage, we see that Reeves is obviously injured and grimaces with pain as he postures, tucks and rolls rehearsing to be a professional wrestler.  This evidence implies that Reeves was pressed into a corner and desperate at the end of his life and, probably, committed suicide although the truth will never be known.  

The movie is notable for many small, if indelible, bits of business.  When Toni gets George Reeves a role in From Here to Eternity, the audience at the screening laughs at him, people whispering  derisively "It's Superman."  The studio boss gestures to cut the footage from the film. (This misrepresents the truth:  Reeves' part was not cut from the Oscar-winning movie.)  A disturbed little boy at a public appearance points a loaded revolver at Superman and threatens to shoot him.  Simo's client who distrusts his wife, finally, murders her brutally.  There's a scene of appalling emotional cruelty in which Toni, offended by Reeves' new girlfriend, insults him in the most vicious imaginable terms.  Later, we see the brutish Eddie Mannix gently caressing his wife's face and telling her how beautiful she is -- in fact, she has never looked worse in the movie.  All of the minor characters are fully realized and the bit parts are brilliantly acted -- there's a whole rogues' gallery of crooked publicists, minor henchmen and thugs, vicious studio executives and the like.  I can't find anything to fault in this movie.  The script is excellent full of Billy Wilder-style one-liners and superb tough-guy stuff -- at one point, for instance, a tough dame says to Simo:  "You couldn't nail me with roses and a trip to Vegas."  The very complex plot and structure is lucid throughout -- you're not confused unless you're supposed to be.  Something indefinable is lacking from this movie; perhaps, it's not wild enough and too cautiously directed.  But I don't know and there's no doubt that the picture is technically superb on all levels.    

(Toni Mannix supposedly confessed that her husband sent a mafia man to kill Reeves.  This was a deathbed confession and made when she had Alzheimer's disease and, therefore, questionable).