The film's title is rhetorical, because obviously the price is high. To succeed in Hollywood, you have to pay in blood, sweat, tears, heartbreak, and montages that look like you're being attacked by The Hypnotic Eye.
George Cukor (The Philadelphia Story, Adam's Rib) directed this black-and-white showbiz drama about waitress and aspiring actress Mary Evans (Constance Bennett). She meets alcoholic director Max Carey (Lowell Sherman), who invites her to a movie premiere. Mary does a screen test, signs a contract, and finds herself caught in a plot that resembles (and presumably inspired) A Star Is Born. Meanwhile, she meets polo player Lonny Borden (Neil Hamilton), who gets her to "agree" to a dinner date by breaking into her house, physically assaulting and kidnapping her, and force feeding her the meal. However, he is rich and handsome, so apparently the audience is supposed to consider this romantic and root for the couple to succeed.
Bennett gives a good performance - for example, she does an impressive job of showing how Evans fails her first screen test and then improves her acting for her second test - and the other performances are also good. The rest of the cast includes Gregory Ratoff as producer Julius Saxe, whose Russian accent is so thick it's hard to believe that Ratoff really was born in Russia, and Louise Beavers, who does her best with the small role of a maid who'd like to appear in the movies. The dialogue is sharp, although the banter doesn't have the rapid-fire pace of a screwball comedy; this was still the early stage of talkies when it sometimes seemed like actors were pausing for a laugh track after their one-liners. The movie also features several montages that seem a bit offbeat (in a good way) for the time; there's a short one at a dramatic point near the end of the film that's particularly effective. Overall I liked the movie except for Borden, who seemed like a creepy control freak to me.