"The Legend of Lila Claire" Robert Aldrich is an extremely curious author of American cinema of the middle of the last century. He worked in a variety of genres and with a variety of material, gave Betty Davis, considered one of the most important roles in his career, has a prize at the Berlin Festival for directing ... well, I respect it as an audience by itself. “The Legend of Lyle Claire” is not the most popular work of the director, lost among hits like “Dirty Dozen”.
By the way, the main character (the same Lyla Clare), walking at the beginning of the film along Hollywood Boulevard, passes by the cinema, in which the “Dozen” is just spinning. That's how Aldrich signs -- you know, here I am, Robert Aldrich -- "A dozen" is mine. My poem, Hollywood, I know I shoot chaga. In short, if – “Lyla Claire” is such a thrashy melodrama about the Hollywood underside, “Showgels” of the 60s.
Kim Novak, known to a wide audience for his role in Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece Vertigo, plays the lead role, and like the early epic of Heach – in triple volume/format/dimension – she and Lila, she and Elsa... “Role matryoshka in the best traditions” with a hint of Hitch and attracting the appropriate audience of curious. What Aldrich and Novak will do, to be honest, is a natural horror: it makes you furiously bloat your eyes, dresses up an aki prostitute from the movie "Blue Chinese Woman", and in addition, hires Novak to duplicate a German actress with a rough and sharp voice - why tantrums performed by the stars of the 50s become infernal in nature. However, despite this, Kim remains attractive in appearance and fascinating acting.
Novak herself, seeing herself at the premiere of the film in the year of release, left the hall without waiting for the final.
Original in terms of stylistics, the film looks like a standard of bad taste from the chamber of measures and weights, and it is not completely clear whether Aldrich deliberately put it so (how did a peculiar conceptualist take all the worst of Hollywood cinema?) or simply changed the taste and the muse left (?). Ambiguous.
One thing is certain - after the first hour of narration - the tape suddenly begins to work. And what used to seem like a viscous mixture of Starling and Lyre (1974), Vertigo, All About Eve and something less successful is revealed as a very good unintentional comedy, a kind of satire and author's film in the spirit of Waters. I can’t say that the main idea of the tape served as a revelation for me – but this parallel between a pack of dogs and a can of canned food / Hollywood dealers and the heroine Novak – it was interesting, a scene in the car, when the director can not get a convincing performance from the actress (given how little of this most convincing in Aldrich’s work itself) – it was interesting, the attitude of the creator to his creation, the attempt to find the lost and the inability to overcome the mistakes of the past life, multiplying them – all this together makes the spectacle worth reading. I would even put this work in the category of cult tapes of the 60s.
I would advise interested Aldrich and Kim, despite the fact that the tape is not among the best of their fairly extensive reputation.
