Tag: Billy Wilder

Rapid Response: Double Indemnity

Billy Wilder’s “Double Indemnity” is one of the finest, earliest examples of American noir films.

Double Indemnity PosterWe’ve grown used to the darkness. We’ve come to expect films to not have everything plainly visible and bright on camera, to see shadows and shades of color and light in the way we experience the world naturally. We’ve also come to see our heroes and our stars to make themselves look ugly, to hide in the shadows, to transform themselves, and to help make our viewing experience something other than natural, something disturbing and unusual.

I’m currently taking a course on Neo-Noir films, and our professor Drew Casper showed us clips of “Double Indemnity”, howling at the film’s introductory shots as he did at how dark they were, how many shadows could be seen on screen, how detailed and rich the sets were, and how much it looked like a film of the German Expressionist period. “This is a Hollywood film,” he screamed. “That’s the star! And his back is to the camera!”

Is it that hard to distance ourselves from the time and era in which we’re watching a movie? Can you imagine anyone watching the opening of “Nightcrawler” (the first week’s screening) and being SHOCKED that when we first see Jake Gyllenhaal’s Louis Bloom his back is to the camera, or that his face is partially darkened in the light?

Old Hollywood though really did have a fetish for making things look gorgeous. Everything was well lit and made to look stunning, even if that meant light came from unnatural places, or even if the scene was dramatic and grim. It took a foreigner like Wilder to break everyone out of the habit. Wilder was hardly the only or the first, and “Double Indemnity” is only a seminal work because it’s one of the finest, earliest examples of the form in American cinema. It holds up wonderfully today, even if its innovations don’t leap out and grab you in the way they once did.

Roger Ebert wrote very plainly in his Great Movies review of “Double Indemnity” that “the enigma that keeps it new, is what these two people really think of one another. They strut through the routine of a noir murder plot, with the tough talk and the cold sex play. But they never seem to really like each other all that much, and they don’t seem that crazy about the money, either. What are they after?”

Barbara Stanwyck

The truth is “Double Indemnity” is a movie about greed, not about love and especially not about the perfect murder or the thrill of the pursuit. And Walter Neff and Phyllis Dietrichson (Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck each at their absolute best) find that greed through sex, wordplay and their own desire for one another, if for no reason other than they’re present. Some of my favorite dialogue turns up as soon as Neff enters the Dietrichson home and catches Phyllis after sunbathing. “It’s two F’s, like in Philadelphia… You know the story. ‘The Philadelphia Story'”.

They’re hopeless and obvious flirts, with Neff in particular going cocky and rogue without hesitation. What’s more, he’s the one who rigs their scheme to the point that it gets them caught. He demands they play it straight, but then he goes for broke by arranging for “Double Indemnity”, not just to dump the body but get double the payment by doing it on a train.

Part of what makes “Double Indemnity” such an effective noir is that the tension is not in the murder itself. We have a lot of movie left once Mr. Dietrichson is dumped on the train tracks. The dogged suspicion of the claims manager Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) is intense. He blows the movie wide open with a series of reversals that seal the couple’s fate. They don’t crumble under guilt or slip up out of a love for one another. Their greed just gets paid back big time…and double.

The Apartment (1960)

“And the girl…?”

The romantic comedy changed with those three little words in “The Apartment.” Shirley MacLaine played “the other woman,” the scandalous character who always broke up the true love. But here, she was the lonely girl forgotten by the love of her life, cast out, neglected and contemplating suicide. How did we miss her?

Billy Wilder’s “The Apartment” is one of the groundbreaking comedies of all Old Hollywood. It gave the screwball comedy severity. Its characters were lonely, depressed and scummy, and it found a funny color amidst all the blue, proving to be heartwarming and filled with emotional pathos.

Jack Lemmon plays C.C. Baxter, an office drone in a movie that would inspire the image of the working man for decades to come. The desks stretching to infinity was inspired by King Vidor’s silent film “The Crowd,” but Wilder’s numerical facts of a singular employee in a massive insurance company seem to paint a broader picture of his workforce servitude.

To move up in the world, Baxter has agreed to a deal with the executives. They can use his apartment as a haven to take their mistresses. The company’s head-honcho, Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), promotes Baxter for the same reason, but his mistress is the lovely Fran Kubelik (MacLaine), the spritely elevator girl with the short haircut Baxter has a crush on.

The interesting thing about Baxter is that he’s living a lie that he’s not actually living. His neighbors and his landlady both think he’s a rambunctious party animal bedding a new girl each night and polishing off several bottles of liquor as well. He does need to wake up and smell the coffee, but for different reasons than his neighbors believe. We see him living completely mundanely, changing the channels on TV in the hopes of watching “Grand Hotel” only to be teased with more commercials. And in the short time he earns these new promotions, he earns none of the extra money, still straining pasta with a tennis racket and washing martini glasses by hand. When he takes another lonely woman home from a bar on Christmas Eve, he’s doing so out of complete depression. He’s like the guy not invited to the party but forced to clean up afterwards. Continue reading “The Apartment (1960)”

Rapid Response: Ace in the Hole

There’s one thing today’s journalists can’t do with a computer, and that’s light a match as a typewriter slides back into place. It’s the way Chuck Tatum does it in “Ace in the Hole,” a terrific, Old Hollywood critique of the press in a grizzly, bitter noir.

Kirk Douglas plays Tatum as a smarmy, cutthroat reporter with attitude and condescending wit to his editor at the small Albuquerque newspaper, despite coming to him after being fired by a dozen newspapers on the other side of the Mississippi. Tatum craves a vicious cycle of “if it bleeds, it leads” journalism, and his belief is that one big story will break him out of New Mexico and back onto the East Coast.

He finally catches his break when a man gets trapped in a cave-in just outside a small Native American town. Tatum finds the man deep inside the cave. He says his name is Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict), and he’s thrilled that not only is someone going to rescue him, he’s going to be in the paper too. Tatum plays up the angle that Minosa is trapped in an Indian burial ground, he bribes the local authorities for exclusive access, he forces Minosa’s wife Lorraine (Jan Sterling) to stay and lap up the luxury that’s about to come in the media firestorm, and he even persuades the foreman to use an elaborate, slow and inefficient way to dig out Minosa. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Ace in the Hole”

Rapid Response: The Lost Weekend

Billy Wilder explores alcoholism in this early Best Picture winner.

It is perhaps hard to imagine today how edgy and depressing a movie like “The Lost Weekend” was in 1945. Ray Milland portrayed Don Birnam in an Oscar winning role that gave us the movie’s first drunk. Milland and Director Billy Wilder not only led this tough, gritty and realistic film to box office success but also to a Best Picture award.

“The Lost Weekend” was the first film to tackle alcoholism head-on, and it was a bold move for an audience that until then had wanted little more than to be entertained. Birnam is set to go on a detox weekend with his brother until he convinces his brother and girlfriend to delay the trip by a few hours. In that time, he scours his apartment for hidden booze and money so that he can get sloppy wasted. And after leaving more than a dozen “vicious circles” on a bar, he misses his train and is abandoned by his brother, his bartender and soon his girl. I imagined this would become a movie in which we watched a man go from bad to worse to rock bottom, but that comes later. The screenplay by Wilder and Charles Brackett actually devotes about a third of the film to developing Birnam as a writer, as a lover and as an amateur barfly. Continue reading “Rapid Response: The Lost Weekend”

Rapid Response: Witness for the Prosecution

Billy Wilder’s “Witness for the Prosecution” is an outrageous, silly and over-the-top courtroom drama that likely would blow up in its own face were it not based on an Agatha Christie play. And boy does it work.

It stars Charles Laughton in one of his best roles, a blow hard of a barrister in the English courts just getting out of the hospital, but not without a singing sense of humor and dry bout of cynicism. His constant disdain towards his nurse insisting that he not work, drink or smoke is one of the film’s great charms.

His job is to defend the innocent inventor Leonard Vole (Tyrone Power), who has been accused of murder of an elderly widow. She recently changed her will to leave everything to him, and although he constantly plays the naive fool as to how serious of trouble he is or how much his German wife Christine (Marlene Dietrich) will actually defend him, he’s a cool, confident and likeable character. He’s portrayed by one of Hollywood’s former boy toys, Tyrone Power. In this 1957 film, he was 43 and died a year later, but he had boyish good looks that landed him in numerous blockbuster A-pictures of the time. “Witness for the Prosecution” even gets cute with this when Power is seen watching “Jesse James,” the title character serving as one of his most notable roles.

And being a play, the film is almost entirely courtroom drama. There are only a few scene changes and all the extended courtroom sequences are handled with an enticing pace and levity.

But the ending surely makes the film famous. Just before and following the verdict, “Witness for the Prosecution” has more twists and turns than a pretzel, and all of them are deliciously absurd. The performances Laughton, Power and Dietrich especially are rightfully over the top and accommodate these more idiotic moments nicely.

The film was nominated for Best Picture that year, and it certainly isn’t as good as the winner “The Bridge on the River Kwai” or the fellow courtroom drama nominee “12 Angry Men.” It also arguably isn’t one of Billy Wilder’s best but it’s an enjoyable classic film with a great cast and fun story.