Malice in Wonderland

This 1985 television dramedy stars Elizabeth Taylor as the much-feared legendary gossip Louella Parsons, whose enormous audience (via radio) and readership (through newspapers) made her a force for studios and stars to reckon with during Hollywood's Golden Age. Jane Alexander plays Parsons' confederate-turned-rival, Hedda Hopper, a failed actress who wins her own shot at making or breaking careers in the late 1930s and beyond. Director Gus Trikonis presents this somewhat All About Eve–like story of their war against one another in flashback form as the two meet over martinis and cracked crab, while onlookers gawk. Today it might seem startling that celebrity reputations—and even the success or failure of particular movies—could ride on rumors cultivated by such self-aggrandizing hacks as Parsons or Hopper. But Hollywood was a different world then, and Malice perfectly captures the town's paranoia about gossip. Although Taylor is a little artificial as the brassy, bossy Parsons, it's still fun to see her in one of her last roles. Alexander has the more challenging part, as Hopper passes through a series of transformations and loses a piece of her soul on the road to muckraking journalism. Richard Dysart is a hoot as apoplectic, sometimes wheedling movie mogul Louis B. Mayer, and Tim Robbins turns up as actor Joseph Cotten on the eve of Citizen Kane's troubled release. Recommended, overall. (T. Keogh)