"A wild birthday party, illegal alcohol, orgies..." what will the press make of this? Tailor-made vehicle for director Peter Bogdanovich, adapted by Steven Peros from his play, concerns a legendary (if not mythical) 1924 birthday cruise aboard the yacht Oneida owned by publishing czar William Randolph Hearst that ended with a shooting. Hearst and his mistress, silent starlet Marion Davies, host the desperately-gay gathering of the wealthy and hungry: movie mogul and birthday boy Thomas Ince, his mistress Margaret Livingston, film star Charlie Chaplin, writer Elinor Glyn and Louella Parsons, a professional gossip who works for Hearst's New York American. Ince is the unfortunate victim of the hushed-up tragedy, however he was not the intended target. As Glyn's narration states, "no two accounts of the weekend were the same," so much of the drama presented here is speculation handed down through the decades. Still, the film, which takes a while to get cooking, taps into that now-ghostly period of the '20s where wealth and power took the place of morals, and the hedonistic rich danced and drank the night away because--if they stopped for one moment and looked at themselves--they'd be lost. Provocative and well-acted, particularly by Edward Herrmann as Hearst, portrayed here as a jealous clod. **1/2 from ****
Review of The Cat's Meow
