EDITOR’S NOTE: The Legend of Lylah Clare was on the CBS Late Movie on March 15, 1976.

The Legend of Lylah Clare was based on a 1963 DuPont Show of the Week co-written by Robert Thom (Wild In the Streets). It’s about Elsa Brinkmann (Kim Novak), an actress who looks and sounds exactly like Lylah Clare, a star who fell to her death twenty years ago. Agent Bart Langner (Milton Selzer) gets Lylah’s ex-husband, Lewis Zarkan (Peter Finch), to meet her. Once he’s won over, they convince studio boss Barney Sheean (Ernest Borgnine) to make a movie with Elsa becoming Lylah as they make the movie of her life.

As the movie’s shooting begins, Lylah takes on the role to almost a Method degree while dealing with Hollywood’s pressures. She sleeps — and falls in love — with her director, battles gossip columnist Molly Luther (Coral Browne) and avoids the attention of her acting coach, Rossella (Rossella Falk). As filming continues, her identification with her role gets more intense.

She has become the role by the end, doing things Lylah would do, such as sleeping with a landscaper (Gabriele Tinti, who did the best out of anyone in this movie by marrying Laura Gemser) and making sure that she’s caught to make Zarkan jealous and finally killing herself by falling, again, from a high wire. That makes her a star all over again, but amid her newfound posthumous fame, her would-be lover Rossella murders Zarkan.

Here’s where the film gets audacious. The entire movie stops for a dog food commercial, a deliberate and unexpected break from the narrative that serves as a commentary on the commercialization of Hollywood. I’m sure people who saw it then were enraged at director Robert Aldrich. It’s the best thing in the entire movie, which is overwrought at times and ridiculous at others, but I love Aldrich and his work. Some moments in this made me laugh out loud because they’re so melodramatic.

I also have to confess that I’m a sucker for old Hollywood and glamour, so when Novak shines in this movie or stands in the cement footprints of a long-dead actress, she embodies the essence of classic Hollywood. Her performance and the film’s nostalgic elements evoke a sense of reverence for the golden age of cinema, and I’m definitely loving this movie.

The director had announced that he would make this movie five years before as part of a $14 million production program of eight films from his new company Associates and Aldrich, including Cross of Iron, Whatever Happened to Cousin Charlotte? (which became Hush…Hush Sweet Charlotte), The Tsar’s Bride, Brouhaha, Paper Eagle, Genghis Khan’s Bicycle, and There Really Was a Gold Mine (a sequel to Vera Cruz). He had also planned to make Now We Know, Vengeance Is Mine, Potluck for Pomeroy, The Strong Are Lonely, Pursuit of Happiness, a TV series called The Man and Too Late the Hero.

Before making those movies, he had to direct The Flight of the Phoenix and The Dirty Dozen. In between, he worked on the script with Hugo Butler and Jean Rouverol before saying, “It got terribly disjointed, and the big problem was to make it legitimately disjointed and not arty-crafty disjointed.”

Kim Novak was signed on to star. She hadn’t been in a movie since Eye of the Devil, in which she was injured in a riding accident during a crucial scene. This accident led to a significant delay in production and may have contributed to the film’s lukewarm reception. This, coupled with a series of personal setbacks, including a divorce and financial losses, had taken a toll on her.

He saw Novak as a gamble and dealt with the well-regarded original in which Tuesday Weld played Marilyn Monroe.

The movie was poorly reviewed and did poorly in theaters. In the years that followed, Aldrich reflected on it several times, blaming Novak’s performance and bad editing for its failure.

He was pretty diplomatic when he spoke to Film Comment in 1972, “I was about to bum rap Kim Novak when we were talking about this the other day, and then I realized that would be pretty unfair. Because people forget that Novak can act. I really didn’t do her justice. However, some stars have a motion picture image so firmly and deeply rooted in the public’s mind that an audience enters a movie with a pre-conception about that person. And that pre-conception makes “reality” or any myth contrary to their pre-conceived reality impossible. To make this picture work, to make Lylah work, you had to be carried along into that myth. And we didn’t accomplish that. You can blame it on a lot of things, but I’m the producer, and I’m the director. I’m responsible for not communicating that to the audience. I just didn’t do it.”

Five years later, Aldrich took full responsibility for the film’s failure, acknowledging that, as the director, he bore the ultimate blame.

As for Novak, she regretted her decision to make the movie, calling it ‘a weird little picture.’ Her distress was evident when she discovered that Aldrich had Hildegard Knef dub her in some scenes. She candidly confessed to The Washington Post, “God, it was so humiliating.”

This would be her last starring role in an American film.

Sources

The Legend of Lylah Clare – Rotten Tomatoes. https://bioincubator.iitm.ac.in/pdffile/journal/1h2xw0r.php?a76bee=the-legend-of-lylah-clare-rotten-tomatoes

Robert Aldrich – Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Aldrich

Oscar Actors: Kennedy, George (Cool Hand Luke) Dies at 91. https://emanuellevy.com/oscar/oscar-actor-george-kennedy-cool-hand-luke-dies-at-91/

The Legend of Lylah Clare. https://www.torinofilmfest.org/en/24-torino-film-festival/film/the-legend-of-lylah-clare/7897/

The Legend of Lylah Clare 1968 – The Last Drive In. https://thelastdrivein.com/category/1960s/the-legend-of-lylah-clare-1968/