Hollywoodland: Feet of clay
Friday 15 September @ 03:11:04 |
 by MAX SPARBER
The sad story of the suicide of actor George Reeves was always one of Hollywood’s more sordid tales. The beefy former amateur boxer, best known for his role in the 1950s television series “The Adventures of Superman,” apparently shot himself in the head in 1959. Word came out of the actor’s long-lasting affair with actress Tony Mannix, once a Ziegfield Follies showgirl, who, at the time of the affair, was the wife of MGM head Eddie Mannix, a shady figure with reported mob ties long suspected of having murdered his previous wife. Inconsistencies in Reeves’ death prompted his mother to hire a private investigator named Louis Moglio to investigate it as a possible homicide. Moglio managed to keep the case open for three years, but both he and Reeves’ mother died before producing anything more conclusive than a few stray bullet holes and some inconsistent testimony. It’s a classic tabloid story that played well in the tabloids of the time—it was inconclusive and excessively prurient, offering nothing but the seedy spectacle of Hollywood failure.
But Hollywood loves its seedy failures, as demonstrated by such sordid popular
films as “Sunset Boulevard” in 1950 and “L.A. Confidential”
in 1997. Although separated by almost a half-century, both films cast gimlet
eyes at the film industry’s misfits and losers, from aging silent films
stars caught in murderous delusions of self-importance to prostitutes surgically
altered to look like starlets. The film industry has a long history of reflexively
gazing back at itself and then recoiling in horror at what it sees. But this
near-gothic sense of Tinseltown as a crumbling, gilded madhouse is good box
office, and sooner or later Reeves’ sad tale was going to make it into
movie form.
 That
film, “Hollywoodland,” has been the subject of mixed reviews, and
earns them. There really isn’t too much to say about Reeves; despite being
in the public eye, the man’s biography is slight, and he appears in the
film as an amiable party boy (played by another amiable party boy, Ben Affleck).
Reeves mopes about his career, goofs around on the set of Superman, strums guitar
and sings Mexican ballads. The film’s Reeves converses mostly in witty
ripostes, which often come moments too late and aren’t really that witty;
in a few instances in the film, when women respond to his gentle flirting with
something genuinely bawdy, Reeves is stumped as to how to answer. Affleck’s
Reeves seemed like he would have been fun to hang around with. In one instance,
at a live appearance as Superman, Reeves lounges backstage, ignoring his cue
to spring into faux-heroic action. Instead, he sips from a flask and jokes with
stagehands, and, when he finally rouses himself to do something, turns to the
stagehands with a quizzical look on his face. In broad daylight, in his falsely
muscled Superman getup, Reeves looks ridiculous. “Tell the truth,”
he says to the assembled, and then grins at them. “Can you see my penis
in this?”
The scene that follows is terrific. Reeves leaps into frantic action, battling
black-hatted cowboys, for no clear reason, as a small army of astounded children
look on. Reeves bends rubber guns around the villains, and the film’s
director, Allen Coulter, repeatedly cuts away from the preposterous action of
Reeves’ hokey stage show to the reaction shots of children dressed in
little gray suits and cowboy hats. The children react with unfeigned astonishment,
slapping their heads, mouths agape, until one steps from the audience, brandishing
what appears to be a toy revolver. Reeves crosses to speak to the child, and
then notices that the child’s revolver holds real bullets. “I want
to shoot you in the chest,” the child tells him, squinting stupidly, “to
see the bullets bounce off.”
It’s a harrowing scene, and reportedly one that actually happened. Even
if exaggerated, Reeves suffered terrible abuse at the hands of his fans, who
endlessly tested his fictional superpowers with blows to the stomach and stomps
to his feet, and the film makes great sport of Reeves’ frustration with
the role. This despite the fact that Reeves’ Superman is the best work
he ever did—a charming, wryly comic fellow, for whom being both Superman
and Clark Kent seemed like a puckish put-on. At one point in the film, Reeves’
lover Tony Mannix, played expertly as a neurotic, fading beauty by Diane Lane,
tells him exactly that -- that he will never be better than the work he did
as Superman. Reeves responds in horror.
There’s great material here, and sometimes it’s well handled. But,
because it’s so slight, director Coulter, working from a script by Paul
Bernbaum, is forced to flesh it out with a fictionalized account of the investigation
of Reeves’ death. He creates a fictional gumshoe named Louis Simo to stand
in for the real investigator, and gives him half the film. Simo is played by
Adrien Brody, and he turns in a superb performance; his PI is a boyish loser
with a penchant for sucking on soda pops while mouthing tough-guy patter, and
there is something beatnikish about Brody’s characterization. He wanders
Hollywood in slacks and short-sleeve shirts, and, at one point, his son asks
him why he’s not at the office. “I don’t work in an office,”
he answers sharply. “That’s for squares!” Unfortunately, his
story has a manufactured squalor about it that feels borrowed from older, and
better, movies, and, as good as Brody might be, his tale isn’t nearly
as interesting as Reeves’. After all, Louis Simo is a fiction of Hollywood’s
dark side. Reeves was the real stuff. ||
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