Film Review

Writing in Headline Hollywood: A Century of Film Scandals (2001), Lucy Fischer remarks, "If Hollywood has been our quintessential Dream Factory, it has also been our premier School for Scandal" (p. 129). On the honor roll of those scandals would be the mysterious death of Hollywood director Thomas Ince in November 1924. Perhaps less well known than such scandals of the 1920s as the Fatty Arbuckle rape trials and the Wallace Reid drug exposé, the Ince affair has nonetheless continued to intrigue people over the years, not just because its principals included William Randolph Hearst, Marion Davies, and Charles Chaplin, but because the circumstances of Ince's death have remained obscure. Indeed, like Charles Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood, its enduring fascination lies in the fact that it is, somehow, unfinished (it is unknown whether he was murdered or died of natural causes) and, hence, can never be solved. And, like the Dickens book, many have subsequently contributed their own takes on the problem.

1

Now Peter Bogdanovich, with The Cat's Meow, provides his idiosyncratic interpretation of events. Bogdanovich brings impressive credentials to the project. As a filmmaker, he knows a thing or two about Hollywood history; witness his interview documentaries, his books made in collaboration with famous directors, and the film he made as an affectionate tribute to the silent cinema, Nickelodeon (1976). Moreover, he has endured scandals of his own over the years and has been the subject of truth, innuendo, and downright fiction. "Never believe anything you hear," he was told once by a Hollywood insider; "and only half of what you see!" (Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It [1997], p. 12).

. . .