The 1952 Bette Davis Vehicle The Star is Raw, Real and Messy, Just Like Its Star
The 1952 show-business melodrama The Star, which gave its star her ninth Oscar nomination but otherwise was a critical and commercial failure, is cursed to live forever in the outsized shadow of two more successful Bette Davis melodramas about the soul-poisoning ugliness of the movie industry: All About Eve and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? The low-budget sleeper can’t hope to compete with those towering cult classics when it comes to set-pieces or quotable dialogue. Nor can The Star hope to compete with Davis’ other all-time inside-show-business classics when it comes to the impact they made or their enduring influence.
This is partially because The Star is such a strange, small, unconventional film, pitched uneasily but compellingly between character study and melodrama, but also because few films have endured the way All About Eve and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? have, as evidenced by Feud, the recent, much-talked about mini-series from Ryan Murphy about the explosive rivalry between Davis and arch-nemesis Joan Crawford on the set of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Crawford is already probably as well known as a biographical subject as she is for being an Academy Award-winning actress. Davis isn’t blessed or cursed to have a Mommy Dearest in her past but part of the appeal of All About Eve, The Star and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, as well as Mommy Dearest and Feud for that matter, lie in the idea that these queens of melodrama’s offscreen lives were just as intense and sordid and rife with gossipy intrigue as the movies they made.
As a cinephile, there’s something oddly reassuring about knowing that Joan Crawford and Bette Davis were most assuredly not normal people. They were divas, legends, icons whose onscreen personas bled over into their private lives and vice versa. Davis is obviously playing fictional characters in All About Eve, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and The Star, but she also seems to be playing some strange, sad, shadow version of herself on some level, even if her character in The Star was reportedly based on Crawford.
In the bluntly titled The Star, that strange shadow self is Academy Award-winning actress Margaret "Maggie" Elliot. As the movie opens, our anti-heroine is in a sorrowful state of disrepair. Her belongings are being auctioned off to pay off her creditors, her adoring daughter (Natalie Wood) asks her if she’s a has-been and an industry she once conquered increasingly shuns her.
Maggie begins the movie near the bottom, only a few steps above the gutter and things take a turn for the worst from there. After unadvisedly deciding to take a drunken car ride with her Academy Award statue as passenger, Maggie ends up in jail for a DUI and her already wobbly standing in the industry plummets even further.
There’s a distinct element of masochism coursing through The Star, a sense that the film is cosmic punishment for Davis for the unforgivable sin of getting older and not being the box-office attraction she was in her prime. Davis looks her age here but this being Hollywood, that means that people look at her like she’s a hundred year-old witch liable to try to eat their children and not merely a beautiful woman who has seen better days.
Maggie has at least one ally in her mid-life crisis in the form of Jim Johannsen (Sterling Hayden), a young stud she plucked from obscurity and helped make a star. Out of loyalty and affection, he’s willing to stand beside her during a profound personal and professional crisis. Hayden would go on to become a formidable character actor (in movies like The Long Goodbye, The Godfather and Dr. Strangelove) and tough-guy leading man (The Killing) but The Star captures him in his earliest phase, as something of a male starlet, a big, beautiful slab of beefcake who, in a fortunate turn of events, also turned out to be a brilliant actor and fascinating human being.
Hayden and Davis have an unusual but potent chemistry here. The traditional gender dynamics are reversed: the star/star-maker is a much older woman while the sexy young protege coasting breezily on their looks is a strapping younger man. Despite the difference in age, their friendship is surprisingly solid. He alone seems capable of loving Maggie for the troubled, depressed and uncertain woman she is rather than the superstar she once was.
The Star offers a parade of humiliations for its cursed protagonist beyond her belongings being sold at auction, a DUI and getting branded as unemployable. The fading superstar becomes so disgusted with Hollywood that she takes a job as a humble clerk at a department store but discovers that her bad reputation follows her there as well.
Maggie pins her professional future on winning the role of the simple older sister in a prestige picture but she stubbornly refuses to accept the brutal realities of her career and tries to win the juicier role of the younger sister by performing what comes off as a crude pantomime of youth and flirtatious sexuality during an audition that horrifies rather than impresses.
The Star is full of fascinatingly meta elements. When a deluded Maggie monologues about how “Ernie Laszlo” always told her that she had such an intuitive grasp of lighting that she could work in cinematography if the fancy struck her, she’s referring to Ernest Laszlo, the legendary real-life cinematographer of The Star.
At its darkest and most dream-like, The Star recalls the trippy show-business psychodrama of Mulholland Drive, most notably in a heartbreaking set-piece where Maggie looks at footage of her audition to play the older sister and is suddenly overcome with a horrifying self-awareness. The myopic actress’ fog of narcissistic self-absorption briefly clears and she realizes for the first time just how ridiculous and pathetic she looks to the outside world when she tries and fails to hang onto her fading youth and beauty.
It’s a mesmerizing actor’s duet, yet also, somehow, a monologue as the now-mortified Maggie verbally attacks her embarrassingly flirty doppelgänger on the big screen. In The Star, Davis delivers a big, raw, theatrical performance bravely devoid of vanity, devoid of self-consciousness and completely fearless. She isn’t just willing to go to the darkest places imaginable: she’s eager.
I can see Cahiers du Cinema and contrarian types liking, or even adoring, The Star not despite being minor, strange and meta but rather because it’s so minor, strange and meta. It is to All About Eve what Two Weeks in Another Town is to The Bad and the Beautiful: a companion piece to a classic that’s ragged and ungainly and deeply flawed but endlessly fascinating in its own right, as much for the stories behind the scenes as the ones on the big screen.
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