RandyRodman

I thought this was a dandy picture until little Shirley nearly ruined that fine Swedish Landrace piglet by picking him up and darn near rubbing the hide off him. Don't those Hollywood people know anything? You rub up on a baby Landrace too long and you spoil him for his mama, and everyone knows a spoiled pig ain't no good to nobody, especially a Swedish Landrace. After a Chester White their the most delicate hogs there is! Now, you take one of your hardier breeds, like a Berkshire or a Saddleback, you can pick them up all you want. It won't hurt them at all; matter of fact, they like it. But you handle your Landraces too much when their young and you'll never get them back on their mama's teat. They are fussy ones, those Landraces.

Otherwise, a dandy picture.

As a rule, I'm against gratuitous remakes of film classics, but the cynical yet poignant story told in Sunset Blvd. is so timeless that it could easily be redone every ten years or so, like A Christmas Carol, with each version chronicling the slow decent into madness of a different fading movie star and his show business contemporaries due to their abandonment by Hollywood. For example, Sunset Blvd. 2002 could star Jack Nicholson as Norman Desmond and Roman Polanski as Max. They spend their evenings screening Chinatown again and again while complaining bitterly about the "weasles at Paramount" who won't return their calls. Jack sits stooped over his typewriter for days on end, adding yet another scene to his mammoth comeback screenplay, 'Five More Easy Pieces', while Roman pens phony fan letters for his deluded boss, scented with Chanel #5. Jack works tirelessly each day except Wednesday, when Warren Beatty, Peter Fonda and Karen Black come over and, between bong hits and hands of canasta, swap bittersweet stories of the good old days of Hollywood, before "the suits" took over. Jack's downfall is completed when naive young screenwriter Heather Graham rejects his leering attempts at seduction and is found face down in Jack's swimming pool, bludgeoned to death with his best putter.

Next week: Nick Nolte and Walter Hill guzzle lukewarm Old Milwaukee and throw darts at a poster of Eddie Murphy.

Shirley Temple has continually reassured her fans that her unique Hollywood childhood was as normal and trauma-free as any other 1930's kid. People simply assume that an actress as young as she must have suffered some sort of psychological scarring along the way, Mrs. Black's denials notwithstanding. I, however, have always chosen to believe her, the conventional, scandal-free adulthood she's led since her retirement being proof enough for me, and I also believe this movie is an accurate portrait of Shirley's childhood memories. The film itself is a little too glossy and it certainly could have used more authentic 1930's atmosphere, but I'm not here to nitpick. Like all of Shirley's films, the less you analyze, the more you enjoy.

On the other hand, it would be interesting to see this same subject redone, unauthorized. I never entirely trust autobiographies; the human ego is simply too fragile to reveal all of it's secrets and shames. Not that I expect to hear many tantrum tales, (if stories like those did exist, I'm sure we would have heard them by now,) but it would make Shirley Temple's life story more believable if her life weren't so darn perfect. There must be someone out there who can tell us about the line she refused to say or the song she refused to sing, or the time she slapped Jane Withers in the mush (I'm just assuming, here), but either the people who know of this darker side of the Shirley Temple story are keeping quiet or else the dark side doesn't exist. Sadly, for a lover of Hollywood dirt like me, it's probably the latter.