Night Life in Hollywood

Neon vomit and celluloid saints collide in 1922’s most delirious postcard from Babylon: a fever-dream reel where the Denishawn dancers gyrate like hieroglyphs of lust inside a Babylonian tent, Jack Connolly’s matinee-idol grin melts into a death-mask under klieg lights, and Elizabeth Rhodes—half Delilah, half ingénue—drifts through opium gardens, jazz cellars, and rooftop séances clutching a silver cigarette case that might be a heart or a mirror. J.L. McComas, studio fixer with the eyes of a mortician, drags bodies from the gutters of Sunset while J. Frank Glendon’s megaphone barks orders to shadows; Gale Henry’s slapstick contortions detonate like shrapnel amid Delores Hall’s torch songs, Josephine Hill’s cocaine waltz, and the constant, maddening clatter of typewriters spelling doom in capital letters. Caldwell’s script is a rosary of betrayals: a starlet drowns in a baptismal font of champagne, a cowboy stuntman swings from the letter H of the hillside sign, a negro jazz band keeps playing as the mansion burns, and the camera—drunk on its own swivel—discovers that every close-up is a confession. The plot? A Möbius strip: the more you chase glamour the quicker it loops back to devour you, until the final iris-in finds Rhodes laughing at the footage of her own funeral, the dancers stomp out the last frame, and Hollywood itself blinks like a broken neon god promising tomorrow’s ecstasy tonight.