Old Hat

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Old Hat FEDORA

Directed by Billy Wilder Screenplay by Billy Wilder and I. A.L. Diamond

She is a legendary beauty whose legend and beauty refuse to fade even though she is pushing 70. Now a shabby producer who was her lover one night long ago arrives at her villa on Corfu to lure her out of retirement. It is the only way he can get financing for his last-hope project, a remake of Anna Karenina. The star is as ravishing as ever, thanks, it is said, to one of those goat-gland doctors, who is part of her grotesque entourage. Unfortunately the lady seems to be as mad as one of Hedda Hopper's hats (Hedda is but one of dozens of names from our shared celluloid past invoked to give the movie a certain air of strained realism).

What is going on here? In terms of mystery, not much. It will quickly become obvious to the most gullible moviegoer that the star is foisting a double on the public and that she must be a close blood relative. The result of this trumpery is that poor William Holden, as the producer, must act far dumber than we know this intelligent actor to be. It is a measure of his reliable skills that we stay with him. We must also believe that Marthe Keller, who plays Fedora in the flashback scenes and her double in the contemporary sequences, has the Garboesque acting skills to match her undeniable beauty, and that requires a much more precarious leap of faith. Finally, because this movie invokes Director Wilder's earlier Sunset Boulevard, we are asked to accept a melodra matic manner of storytelling and characterization that is outmoded by at least a quarter of a century. Settings, dialogue, the very looks on the faces of everyone in Fedora's household teeter on the ludicrous.

There is a sober subtext to this nonsense. The film preaches against the excesses of self-absorption that are the wages of modern celebrity. It also makes a case against the cult of youth by demonstrating the grotesque lengths to which some people will go to try to cheat mortality. Since only a few thousand of the world's most privileged people are in a position to cope with these problems, it is hard to work up much moral indignation about them.

And yet in some perverse way Fedora is an entertaining film. It is not cynical. There is a weird charm in its enthusiastic embrace of antique cinematic conventions and, more important, a certain daring in the way the piece is written. Throughout their script Wilder and Diamond are ready to undercut their melodrama in order to make judgments ranging from the sly to the nasty about everything from the way to handle the funerals of world-class celebrities to the way the rest of us allow ourselves to be drawn into their self-created dramas. There is a splendid cheekiness of old age about this picture. Its creators seem to be saying. "This is the way we've always made them; this is what we think about the false and foolish world we have inhabited all our lives." The energy of the determinedly unfashionable informs their work, and almost redeems it.

--Richard Schickel

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.