What Price Hollywood? (1932)

(On Cable TV, August 2019) This is it: the granddaddy of the A Star is Born series, and reportedly one of the first successful movies that Hollywood made about Hollywood, warts and all. The story follows a young girl determined to make it big in Hollywood, as she gains fame and must deal with the consequences. If you’ve seen the later remakes, this will initially feel familiar, although the film does play with its plot elements in a different way than the later movies. This being said, we’re still working from the same playbook here: rising female star, declining male star, the corrosive impact of media attention that makes people into fictions, alcoholism, handlers, and so on. It still works nearly ninety years later—it’s a tale old and yet always true, melodramatic but still understandable despite old-school gender roles and dated technology. This was, after all, made barely five years into the sound movie era, and the film does make the most out of the “fan magazines” that existed at the time. The Pre-Code status of the film can be most clearly seen with a dressing scene with nylons that wouldn’t have passed muster even five years later. George Cukor directs with occasional flair, effectively demonstrating the skills that would see him direct movies for the next forty years. Perhaps the best recommendation one can make about What Price Hollywood? is that it’s an early take on A Star is Born, except sufficiently different to keep it interesting, and with a very distinctive early-thirties view on the early thirties Hollywood—which, to be clear, was barely twenty years old at that point.