THE whipping up of Oscar hysteria begins in earnest in Hong Kong this evening as Pearl and World go head to head - as they will all week - in a concerted effort to prove that each has bigger and better rabbits in its hat than the other. The first round sees Topol in Fiddler On The Roof (Pearl, 9.30pm) up against Kirk Douglas and a fine performance from Lana Turner - some might say her best - in Vincente Minnelli's The Bad And The Beautiful (World, 9.30pm). The two films won eight of the unmentionable little statuettes between them.
If you are video-less and have to make a choice, opt for The Bad And The Beautiful, not just because it is less sentimental than the opposition, but because it is a film about Hollywood, and there is nothing more entertaining than seeing dirty washing onthe line.
Kirk Douglas is a loutish film producer who rises, falls and then rises again. Turner plays the studio star, Barry Sullivan a big-name director and Dick Powell a writer, a character many believe was based on novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. The performancesare all memorable, but the only person who picked up an Academy Award was Gloria Grahame, who plays Powell's wife.
There are other role models. Some film buffs believe that the inspiration for Douglas' character was Val Lewton, the extravagant producer of the 1940s. They make the claim because Lewton made Cat People and in the film Douglas produces a movie called TheCat Men.
The man is more likely based on mogul David B. Selznick, particularly his beginnings as a B-movie producer, his grooming of future wife Jennifer Jones and the making of a colossal civil war film which was, of course, Gone With The Wind.
But perhaps the most interesting thing about The Bad And The Beautiful is that is was a bit of a budget job. MGM was watching the pennies so carefully that it used leftover sets from previous films and had Turner's real-life hairdresser appear as himself, thus saving an actor's wages. Times were hard in 1952.