The Legend of Lylah Clare

From Viennale

The culmination of Aldrich’s reckoning with Hollywood and the start of a breathtaking series of uncompromising films, with which he immediately squandered the financial capital of his global success THE DIRTY DOZEN (1967) in the name of artistic integrity. In her last major screen appearance, Kim Novak plays a double role: as the starlet Elsa Brinkmann, she is hailed as the reincarnation of the legendary diva Lylah Clare, who died mysteriously twenty years earlier. It is not just Lylah’s former husband, an egomaniacal film director (Peter Finch), who is fascinated by the resemblance; he goes on to make a movie with Elsa about Lylah’s life—with fatal consequences. Hollywood Babylon: Aldrich’s morbid, camp self flagellation depicts the dream factory as a glittering wasteland that requires the most scathing of satires. This tasteless spectacle is crowned by a hellish vision of commercial culture that is unheard of even by Aldrich’s standards of provocation. “We worked four years on that monster. We tried to avoid making it Marienbad Revisited. It got terribly disjointed and the big problem was to make it legitimately disjointed and not arty-crafty disjointed,” Aldrich said of working on the script. Although the result initially flopped, it quickly became a cult film. (Christoph Huber)