Billy Wilder's Fedora and David Cronenberg's Map to the Stars

Billy Wilder is too cynical to believe even his own cynicism.
Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema, Dutton 1968

Sarris wrote before Wilder's older and more mellow period, when he made three beautiful and sometimes funny films about growing older:  The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), Avanti (1972), and Fedora (1978).  Significantly all three of these films take place outside of contemporary America and in the case of Fedora, Wilder returned to Germany (originally from Austria, he had fled Hitler) to make the film, though with mostly American actors.  It is a film about the difficulties of growing older in Hollywood, where "the kids with beards have taken over.  They don't need a script, just a hand-held camera with a zoom lens."  So says the older William Holden, star of Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950), in an effort to lure Fedora, star of the forties with whom he had had a brief fling, out of retirement to make a new version of Anna Karenina.  Holden eventually finds out that Fedora has destroyed her looks in an effort to keep her youthful appearance and had replaced herself with her daughter, whom she had trained to act like her.  Fedora is, of course, based on the elusive Garbo and Marlene Dietrich, both of them having made films for Wilder (he wrote Ninotchka, 1939, for Garbo and directed Marlene Dietrich in Witness for the Prosecution, 1958) and both of whom regularly resisted attempts to lure them out of retirement.  Fedora has a lovely Miklos Rozsa score (he also wrote the music for Wilder's Sherlock Holmes film) which captures the melancholy mood of the film as effectively as Bernard Herrman does for the similarly-themed Vertigo (1958).

If you want contemporary cynicism about Hollywood you can't do better than independent Canadian director David Cronenberg's Map to the Stars.  Cronenberg became known as a director of science fiction and horror but has lately veered away from The Fly (1986) and Dead Ringers (1988) into films about the horrors of everyday life.  A Map to the Stars is about Hollywood, where Julianne Moore plays an aging actress having difficulty finding parts and is killed by her pyromaniac assistant, who bonds with her own obnoxious child star brother.  Everyone is looking for their next part or their next scam and everybody takes advantage of everybody else in often desperate and futile pursuit of their own career.