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From the start of his career, Bob Aldrich was always hellbent on dissecting Hollywood. His films cut through its gilded exterior with scathing pessimism, desecrating illusion to reveal its underlying and unrecognizable rot. These unflinching appraisals of stardom-gone-sordid have been paramount in shaping cinematic evolution: BABY JANE’s defining masochistic brutalism proved an instrumental catalyst in the rise of Hagsploitation and other horror adjacent genres specific to Hollywood. By preying upon uncontrollable agents — amongst them age, familiarity, and the passage of time — that dictate life and death he evokes a fear that is innately and unnervingly human. It’s horror re-imagined, bereft of preternatural allegory yet still just as pervasive.
Six years after JANE’s roaring success, Aldrich would circle back to Tinseltown and return his attention back to faded starlets. In 1968’s THE LEGEND OF LYLAH CLARE, he wrestles with elusivity and identity to chastise the synecdotal gilded mythos specific to Hollywood. It’s microcosmically meta, following the efforts of studio magnates as they struggle to cast and produce a biopic detailing the life of the late Lylah Clare. Through the lens of her unsuspecting double idling along Hollywood Boulevard, we learn that Lylah is a symbolic composite of several tragic luminaries. The camera, mimicking her gaze, fleetingly pauses on the stars of Garbo, Valentino, and Monroe — all three exotic and enigmatic figures driven to death or disappearance, and consequently revered. Lylah has been martyrized similarly, building posthumous fame thanks to the cryptic circumstances surrounding her death.
Her former lover Zarkan, privy to the truth, sees the latent omniscience bedded in this directorial opportunity and seizes it as personal catharsis. In broad terms, he agrees to immortalize her, but not before exploiting his creative liberties to sculpt and idealize her character in a way to placate his conscience. He’s stunned to discover a doppelganger in the unknown Elsa Brinkmann, and immediately coaxes her to star in his production. Brinkmann appears reticent, but soon warms up to the idea and accepts. In priming for the role, she submerges herself in the remnants of Lylah’s world, finding inspiration in her possessions as well as former acquaintances. This constant immersion encourages a total abandonment of the self, and Elsa gradually recedes into Lylah’s persona until she is enveloped whole. Delusions have triumphed, and with them alarming consequences. Only death can emancipate Elsa, recalling Lylah’s own demise — and according to Aldrich, the only way out of the merciless Star Machine.
A perfect synergy overtakes the film as it broaches its climactic finale. Ambiguity descends when Elsa prepares for her final performance, and the cycle of stardom is cruelly realized in bitter irony. Suspended high in the air, she purposefully plummets to death to voluntarily share in Lylah’s fate, surmounting the boundaries of performance in nebulous actualization. There’s a gruesome inevitability nestled within the camera’s gaze that haunts — an endurance that wasn’t desired, an exploitative notoriety that spares no remorse for the victims at its expense. It is Hollywood that is immortal, plump and robust as it feeds off the grief of disposable starlets. Aldrich’s visual eloquence echoes like a haunting apparition, a cynical and prescient indictment of the media and a predecessor in many ways to NEWTORK. The subject is irrelevant, and at best a pawn of the machine, regardless if one’s a celebrity or a non-entity.
All of this exists entirely separate from the queerness that obsequiously pervades the film’s fabric, which in and of itself is a fascinating subject of study even independent of its plot. Lylah’s assistant, Rossella, makes her proclivities known and loud — she fawns over Elsa just as she did Lylah, yet her advances never feel creepy or malicious. Her character is designed to function as a subtle clue that foreshadows the grand reveal, and furthermore a historic nod toward Hollywood’s underground queerness. Zarkan is a beard, a byproduct of the illusion machine repurposed for saving its own reputation. Though ephemeral and largely inconsequential, the queer reveal of Lylah’s paramour is a powerful visual and, furthermore, a tangible indicator of Zarkan’s homophobia and his fervent obsession for revisionism.
THE LEGEND OF LYLAH CLARE is far from a perfect film. It suffers from uneven performances as well as narrative drag, but the message housed in its structure triumphs nonetheless, surmounting obstacles with ease to directly contradict the quandaries of its protagonists. It’s a rich and telling watch that demands careful attention — one that, if properly ingested, will linger in the conscience a good long while.
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