Should really have been called, Big Bad and Beautiful, as this is Hollywood movie-making on a grand scale with a big budget, A-list director and a starry cast producing a high quality melodrama centred on the world of movie-making itself. Unusually constructed around three separate lengthy flashbacks of past associates (a director, actress and writer, played by Barry Sullivan, Lana Turner and Dick Powell) of boy-genius Jonathan Shields (a composite, perhaps of David O Selznick and Orson Welles) played with total conviction and no little vigour by an emergent Kirk Douglas, these serve to lay bare, warts and all, his larger than life character by the conclusion, leaving the viewer to decide for themselves whether this golden boy with feet of clay is deserving of our admiration or derision. Of course we're steered in the former direction not only by Douglas's terrific performance but also by the clever concluding scene when Sullivan, Turner and Powell, all with ample reason to have nothing do with him, still find themselves effortlessly drawn into his comeback plans. The film is a celebration of errant genius with an appreciation that such talents are frequently flawed in character and cause casualties along the way. The acting is uniformly excellent even though Douglas' name should really be above Turner's in the titles, given the relative scale of their parts, never mind their performances. Besides the leads mentioned above, Gloria Grahame shines again as the fey Southern belle wife of the unexciting pragmatic writer played by Powell, swept off her feet by a Latin smoothie set up by Shields. Minnelli's direction is effortless, purveying numerous backstage insights on and off-camera. The story itself is highly melodramatic and improbable but nevertheless extremely entertaining and to paraphrase Bette Davis in the near contemporary classic "All About Eve", certainly a movie to strap in tight for, a bumpy ride is had by all.