A refreshing look at Hollywood's studio business in the 50s

Rating: 8/10 (30 March 2016)

One of the first scenes shows a man sitting in a car watching a house in the distance, rain is falling, a voice from the off says something about the time 5 a.m. and how this is sleeping time for most people but for some it is working hours... With this tribute to the film noir such as "The Naked City" (1948) the mood is set. And so it went on with tributes to pictures and movie genres. Epic films like "Ben Hur", Esther Williams with synchronised swimmers, Western movies, dancing sailors that have Gene Kelly written all over it. It has it all. Someone had already made a reference to Woody Allens "Radio Days". I agree. This has a similar feeling. The Coen Brothers, however, look at it in a satirical, not to say critical way and show the square and bourgeois way of life in the 50s. Illegitimate pregnancy or homosexuality are fatal for a career in the studios, and there is of course a reference to the McCarthy era. It is a great joke, though, that the screenplay writers who had kidnapped the movie star (Clooney) are indeed upright communists. And Clooney, typically cast as the idiot in a Coen picture, ends up studying Marx' "Kapital" with his kidnappers. The comedy in "Hail, Cesar!" is rather subtle, and the actual story is not at all complex and quickly told. Instead there are scenes, such as the aforementioned dancing sailors, that don't drive the plot forward at all. Maybe that's a reason for the mixed reviews. It didn't bother me. I enjoyed "Hail, Cesar!". A lot.