The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968)

(On Cable TV, February 2022) I’m going to be very brief about The Legend of Lylah Clare because I’m so disappointed in it. Hollywood satires are right in my wheelhouse, and yet the film doesn’t work. It’s a clunker almost all of the way through, playing with Hollywood archetypes but not achieving anything along the way. It’s not really funny, it’s certainly not insightful and it’s entertaining only in seeing how a film with a big budget and even larger intentions can fail to achieve anything. You can see where and how the same elements could have been combined for a much superior result, but that’s not it—The Legend of Lylah Clare simply doesn’t work despite Kim Novak in the lead and plenty of call-backs in the details. Even for a Classic Hollywood buff, it’s a dud.