‘Hollywood’: An Informed Look

“Hollywood on Hollywood” (at 10 tonight on cable’s American Movie Classics channel), which was written, produced and directed by film historian and Time magazine movie critic Richard Schickel, offers a concise and comprehensive gloss on how Hollywood has presented itself on the screen.

Narrated in engaging fashion by Ron Howard, the one-hour presentation is as informative as it is entertaining, representing through its wonderful array of clips an impressive job of research.

Schickel wisely concentrates on the 1930s, the World War II era and the postwar period, the years in which the largest number of such films were being made. With the 1937 “A Star Is Born” serving as the archetypal film of its decade, he characterizes the Hollywood that came through on the screen as “a tough town but essentially soft-hearted, and a very moral place.”

While giving the stars their just due for their contributions to the war effort, he reminds us how self-congratulatory were such films as “Follow the Boys” (1944) and especially “Hollywood Canteen” (1944), in which the stars played themselves as doing their bit for the men in uniform.

Schickel suggests that such postwar films as “Sunset Boulevard,” (1950) “The Bad and the Beautiful” (1952) and “The Big Knife” (1955) reflect the motion picture industry’s disenchantment over its huge loss of audience to television.

What’s fun about “Hollywood on Hollywood” is that Schickel hasn’t relied only on major films like “Sullivan’s Travels” and “Singin’ in the Rain” but has come up with such rarities as a Warners’ featurette called “Alice in Movieland,” in which an aspiring starlet--could it be Joan Leslie who is playing her?--gets her big break by telling off everyone on the set for having treated her so shabbily.

There are sidebars devoted to premieres, the role of fan magazines and the ubiquity of such settings as Central Casting and the moguls’ grandiose offices.

Clearly, Schickel couldn’t include everything in one hour, yet one misses a shot from King Vidor’s silent “Show People” (1928) and Mervyn LeRoy’s “Show Girl in Hollywood” (1930), which Blanche Sweet, one of the movies’s earliest stars, sings the lament, “Over the Hill in Hollywood.”