Film star Lylah Clare is dead, but her legend lives on. Movie-producer Barney Sheean (Ernest Borgnine) hires Elsa Brinkmann (Kim Novak), the living image of the late Lylah, to star in a film based on Ms. Clare's life. Barney hires director Lewis Zarkan (Peter Finch), Lylah's former husband, to transform the talentless Elsa into a facsimile of the deceased screen queen. Elsa not only learns to imitate Lylah but, at crucial junctures, becomes the dead woman. While restaging the accident that killed Lylah, the obsessed Zarkan deliberately drives Elsa to her doom -- and in so doing reveals his complicity in the death of his wife. The film ends with Lylah's onetime housekeeper (Rosella Falk), gun in hand, lying in wait for Zarkan to return home while her TV blasts forth a grotesque (and possibly symbolic) dog-food commercial. A trash masterpiece, Legend of Lylah Claire works so hard at vilifying the Old Hollywood (there's even a vicious Hedda Hopper caricature) that it's a wonder the actors could keep a straight face. The film was based on a 1962 Dupont Show of the Week TV drama co-written by Wild in the Streets creator Robert Thom.

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Hollywood picking its scabs is always a riveting sight, and never more enjoyably so than in Aldrich's supremely vulgar movie, which feeds gluttonously off movie myth and experience to create a vigorously animated Hollywood Babylon where dead stars talk and everyone's laundry is filthy. Kim Novak stars as the moulded reincarnation of Lylah Clare, whose stellar career ended in mysterious death on the night of her wedding to director Lewis Zarkan (Finch), now attempting a semi-confessional biopic on the subject, which naturally involves an outrageous gallery of grotesques and innocents in its revelatory course from concept to screen. Necrophilia, cancer, cripples, French critics, lesbianism, ignorant producers, nepotism, abortion, 'film-artists', Italian studs and TV are the tasty elements Aldrich ghoulishly (and a little masochistically) juggles into a film-fan's delight, a side-splitting charade of satire, sarcasm and sheer perverse affection.

Excerpt from TimeOut Film Guide located HERE