As a kid living in Beverly Hills some 20 years after this was filmed, by then this this evocation of small town ritual in The Home to the Stars would have been hard to imagine. With all the build-up on the Boulevard in just a couple decades, all those low-slung stucco buildings had been replaced by sleek glass and steel modern ones. Those kitschy Arabian Nights fantasy onion domes, seen then in the second shot here, had no place in the anally tasteful place Beverly Hills had become. World-famous for its scarcity of available parking, here we see what, by the 70's, had become just a motorist's dream: a parking lot right on Rodeo Drive!
Movies are all about acting, and here the Hills of Beverly are acting like Anytown USA, only with swimming pools and movie stars, with the main drag standing in for Everytown's Main Street. Here's Uncle Sam on stilts carrying an Easter Lily, a marching band and a majorette's bandaged knee, a girl in a donkey cart, and, thanks to the wildly popular Westerns, cowboys on horseback twirling lassos. There's an onlooker in the crowd sitting in a sun chair, reading what appears to be a programme, thru white cats-eyes sunglasses. A girl presses a hand-size transistor radio to her ear--is she listening to parade announcements or Elvis? That secret is lost to the ages as this film footage has substituted a swingin' jazz score for the original sounds
While the NY original was all about the Hats ("In your Easter Bonnet..."), BH's is all about Cars of the Stars, with a cast of, maybe not thousands, but too many to mention here. Check it on the imdb cast list. Art Linkletter is the Grand Marshall, with his wife and daughter sitting next to him in their convertible. Seeing that sweet little girl here, who ended up one of Hollywood's most notorious youth drug tragedies, is a kind of grim jolt back from this calm sunshiny past fantasy to the congested smoggy reality it became meantime.. .
