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Grade: B

Verdict: An old-time Hollywood scandal served up with relish.

Details: Starring Edward Herrmann and Kirsten Dunst. Directed by Peter Bogdanovich. Rated PG for mild violence and sexual situations. One hour, 52 minutes.

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Review: It's probably a safe bet that the number of people who remember the Jazz Age expression “the cat's meow” is roughly the same as the number of people who remember Peter Bogdanovich in his heyday. Too bad. Bogdanovich is a fine director, famously fallen apart after making some great early '70s films (“The Last Picture Show,” “Paper Moon,” etc.) and if his new movie, “The Cat's Meow” — originally a raffish, Roaring Twenties way of describing something that fills the bill spectacularly — doesn't quite live up to its title, it's still a solid entertainment.

“The Cat's Meow” is Bogdanovich's first movie in nine years, and his pleasure in returning to the work he loves is palpable. Add a juicy story and and you've got a movie with a good shot at giving his fallow career a lift.

You think stuff like the Britney/Justin split or Robert Downey Jr.'s on-going drug-drama are scandalous? These things pale beside what went on in Hollywood in the '20s, and specifically what went on over a weekend in late November 1924, aboard the Oneida, a 280-foot private yacht belonging to zillionaire media magnate William Randolph Hearst.

Bogdanovich first introduces us to the assorted guests that Hearst (Edward Herrmann) and his much younger but devoted mistress, Marion Davies (Kirsten Dunst), have invited for a weekend jaunt around Catalina Island. There's Charlie Chaplin (Eddie Izzard), recovering from the failure of his latest movie and entangled in a sex scandal with an underage starlet; Thomas Ince (Cary Elwes), a once-famous director and an architect of the studio system, now fallen on hard times; Louella Parsons (Jennifer Tilly), then a Manhattan-based reporter for Hearst who only dreamed of becoming Hollywood's ruling gossip columnist; and Elinor Glynn (Joanna Lumley), the wasp-tongued British novelist who dubbed Clara Bow the "It" Girl and whose tart observations frame the story.

No one's ever verified exactly what happened on that fateful cruise, but as, Glynn says, "the history of Hollywood has always been written in whispers and this is the whisper heard most."

And the whisper was ... murder, with a cover-up orchestrated by Hearst.

A lot goes on on the Oneida besides murder. Beneath his teddy-bearish manner, W.R., as Hearst was called, is a highly paranoid personality, given to peepholes and listening devices so he can spy on his guests. At the moment, his suspicions are fixated on Chaplin, whom he suspects (rightly) of trying to seduce Marion. At the same time, he's having to deflect Ince, who badly wants to go into partnership with Hearst in order to save his floundering career. A lurker, a toady and a user, Ince suggests that he could, um, supervise Marion along with the studio projects.

The movie as a whole is lightweight (though far sharper than Robert Altman's overpraised “Gosford Park,” another tale of murder among the rich). The story advances in a series of, well, whispers, as Bogdanovich jumps from a gorgeous Art Deco corridor to an equally gorgeous, lushly appointed stateroom. It feels scattered.

But it's one heck of a character study — not of Hearst or Davies but of the unique relationship between them. W.R. is, for all his monstrous power, a heartbreaking figure. He's a man who can control everything in the world except his heart. Hermann captures the tension between the mighty mogul and the sentimental overgrown boy who liked to go to costumes parties wearing a sombrero. Watching Chaplin shamelessly flirt with Marion, Herrmann has the haunted hurt look of a wounded elephant, or an abandoned child.

The surprise, however, is Dunst, who's been good in movie after movie but who's never done anything as sparkling and nuanced as this. Her Marion is adorable and, though tempted by Chaplin, still devoted, in her way, to W.R. She makes being fun-loving seem like an extension of a natural, innate goodness rather than an indication of a certain superficiality.

Bogdanovich's love for the Hollywood of yore is marvelous. It's as if he knows these people and, given his reputation as a peerless film historian, in some sense, perhaps, he does. The details matter to him. For instance, check out the bottles of catsup at dinner. As anyone who's ever been to San Simeon knows, W.R's love of catsup was almost as great as his love for Marion.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution