Tag Archives: Billy Wilder

Owais Azam on Ace in the Hole (Billy Wilder, 1951)

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Piercing through a small-town in New Mexico – a once desolate land littered with not much more than tumbleweed and the faint squeals of lonely wind – is a train transporting a parade of people. Not only is the steam radiating from the locomotive polluting the surrounding area, but so are the cheers of exhilaration from its passengers as they get off and run towards what looks like an amusement park, refusing to waste time by allowing the train to reach a steady halt. Venturing toward the bursting circus composed of Ferris wheels, food trucks, and camper vans, they sing a cheerful song with the continuous chorus, “We’re Coming, We’re Coming, Leo!”. Amid this frenzied excitement, these lines remind us that this is not just any ordinary circus. It is one built around the spectacle of one man, Leo Minosa, who has been stuck under a cave for days and is slowly dying. Whilst banners and songs rave a collective public support for Minosa and the workers trying to save him, the twisted transformation of the surrounding landscape into a place for nauseating consumerism and zestful exuberance suggests otherwise. These stark moments – captured through a singular crane shot – do well to encapsulate the cynicism of Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (1951), a bleak portrait of an almost-entirely corrupt and crooked America and its rotten capitalist core, ironically released at the height of McCarthyism.

 

Sharply orchestrating this literal and figurative media circus is our cut-throat anti-Hero, Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas). Tatum, an adept yet alcoholic and incongruously ‘anti-Truth’ newspaper reporter who has been fired from several of his previous jobs, finds himself working as a reporter for the local paper in Albuquerque. It’s a certain relegation from his previous workplace in New York, which leaves him thirsty for a “Tatum special” to leave readers and papers “rolling out the red carpet” for him. Accordingly, once Tatum happens to discover the trapped Minosa, he knows he has struck an ace in the hole; Tatum disturbingly plans to keep Minosa stuck in the cave for days so he can extract a running story directly from Minosa’s pain and suffering – a morally bankrupt scheme organised by a morally bankrupt man.

Despite initially being confronted by various people who aim to interrogate Tatum’s intentions and plot, he tries and succeeds in roping many of them along through either bribery, blackmailing, or sheer charisma. Most of Wilder’s characters in the Ace in the Hole are as corrupt as each other – the only question being what it takes for them to fold. And so, whilst Tatum epitomises both the sickening greed of capitalist profiteering and below-the-belt rotten journalism (all the more relevant in the digital age of ‘fake news’), Wilder refuses to stay clear from displaying the public’s wily desire to both indulge in exploitation for their own individual profits, and their ravenous desire to indulge in sensationalised stories about the downtrodden. Indeed, it may be Tatum selling us the ticket – but we’re the ones buying it.

Owais Azam

 

 

 

The Director by Brendan Nash, Baxter Jardine, 2022.

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I’ve spent most of the Jubilee weekend immersed in Brendan Nash’s evocation of Berlin in the 1920s. THE DIRECTOR is as much a page-turner as THE LANDLADY; the same characters re-appear, even more likeable; their movements through various spaces in the city – some still legendary; many subsequently destroyed in WWII –roots the fiction in a particular kind of historicising, where events read simultaneously as vividly alive and lost; and as the book proceed its status as historical fiction becomes clearer. It’s not just that Claire Waldorff is a substantial character in the novel; but director Billy Wilder becomes a main one, appearing right from the beginning accompanying the arrival of Paul Whiteman’s band in Berlin; with the inspiration behind his and Robert Siodmak’s PEOPLE ON SUNDAY (1930) occupying several short chapters; we also go into Babelsberg where Pieps becomes an extra in METROPOLIS; Leni Riefenstahl or someone very much based on her appears tangentially but recurringly; and Goebbels, who likes to be called ‘The Director’ appears at the very end. The book is set in Berlin in the Summer of 1926, and divided into three sections, one for each month. Politics are the background to the book’s main pre-occupation, the search for love by people who are different, in a wide array of ways, but nonetheless want to live as they imagine themselves to be. The street fights between the Nazis and the Communists are just shocking background on their way to an assignation or a day out. What I found particularly lovely about these books as historical fiction is that the focus is not on the great figures of the era, though they do appear, but on ordinary people trying to get by; some of them are taxi dancers; some of them get a scholarship to the Bauhaus; some are cleaners and gardeners, some of them end up singing with Paul Whiteman. But what makes THE DIRECTOR such a democratic iteration of historical fiction is that the stars are ordinary people, very understandable and perhaps extremely likeable for being so, who appreciate they’re living in an extraordinary place, many of them sought Berlin as a destination, a place that allows them to be. What the place was like– and more concretely what particular cafes, cinemas, restaurants, hotels and nightclubs in the Berlin of the period were like — and who these characters want to realise themselves as, is part of the fascination of these extremely likeable page-turners.

José Arroyo

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 343 – The Apartment

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Listen on the players above, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Google Podcasts, or Spotify.

As Birmingham’s Electric reopens following a protracted period of uncertainty as to whether it was gone for good, it turns to a programme of classics to invigorate its audience. We catch The Apartment there, Billy Wilder’s dark romantic comedy, which Mike has never seen and José not for years, to discuss corporate alienation, whether the suicide story structure works, the cynicism in Wilder’s work and his personal history that it can be seen as a product of, the appeal of Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine, and the takers, those who get took, and the mensches.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 298 – Witness for the Prosecution

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Billy Wilder directs this adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution, a courtroom drama concerning a man on trial for the murder of an old woman – did he do it? What’s up with his wife? Will his lawyer’s nurse catch him smoking? As with Christie’s stageplay, The Mousetrap, upon the film’s conclusion, the audience is kindly asked to refrain from revealing its twists and revelations, but we at Eavesdropping at the Movies respect no such requests. Spoilers within.

Charles Laughton is pleasingly hammy, Marlene Dietrich composed, and Tyrone Power a loud, sweaty, stressed out mess – and somehow mostly in the background, despite his central role as the accused murderer. We discuss their performances and characters, the pleasures and methods of Agatha Christie’s mysteries, and Wilder’s direction, which hopes, in that classic Hollywood style, to render technique invisible. Witness for the Prosecution is an engrossing mystery filled with interesting bits of business that enrich its characters, and a classic.

The podcast can be listened to in the players above or on iTunes.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

 

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 229 – Fedora

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Listen on the players above, on Apple Podcasts, or on Spotify.

Stardom, beauty, the machinery of Hollywood, madness, age – 1978’s Fedora sees Billy Wilder occupying much of the same thematic territory of his 1950 classic, Sunset Boulevard. William Holden’s has-been film producer attends the funeral of Fedora, a reclusive former film star, and thinks back on the recent trip he took to Corfu, attempting to track her down and coax her out of retirement. What unravels is a mystery, a conspiracy, a twisted mother-daughter relationship, and another in Mubi’s strand of “perfect failures”.

Wilder’s struggle to finance Fedora is apparent, José suggesting that in every part one can imagine a superior actor. Though that’s perhaps scant defence of the tedious visual design – Dutch angles don’t cost money, and the film is crying out for more visual expression than it offers. Mike explains his problem with the plot structure and particularly his dislike of “two weeks earlier” hooks, and we consider the way in which we’re asked to believe in Fedora’s incredible stardom while not really having it explained to us satisfactorily. And José takes particular issue with the casting of Michael York as himself, finding him a blank, while Mike is more content with it, but perhaps that’s largely because whenever someone says “Michael York” it makes him laugh.

Despite the film’s many problems, it remains an intriguing exploration of stardom, identity, the lengths to which people will go to support their own delusions. Mike suggests that Fedora and Sunset Boulevard share a low opinion of women, that their themes of self-obsession, fame and beauty are particularly aligned with their stars’ gender. José describes Fedora‘s relationship to reality, in particular the ways in which it echoes Marlene Dietrich’s extraordinary fame and subsequent withdrawal from the public eye, and how Wilder’s experience and understanding of this and other inside stories informs the film.

And finally, Mike takes a moment to bring up two things he doesn’t like about Sunset Boulevard, because he wouldn’t be doing his job if he didn’t take one look at a great masterpiece of cinema and explain what’s rubbish about it.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 135 – Double Indemnity

The film noir to end films noir, Billy Wilder’s classic crime drama Double Indemnity made its way to The Electric in Birmingham for a one-off screening, where a packed cinema ensured a great atmosphere. Mike, as usual, hadn’t seen it, while José is very familiar with it, even having taught it before.

Mike didn’t entirely click with it, though he’s able to appreciate much of what makes it a classic. Perhaps the stylistic and thematic elements that identify film noir are so perfectly employed by Double Indemnity that it leads to an ironic, detached mode of viewing – the genre, though it has existed since its inception, is strongly connected to its classical era of the Forties and Fifties, and has been parodied and pastiched more than most, burdening the film with unfair baggage to audiences not in that frame of mind. José, on the other hand, relishes the chance to see it with a paying, enthusiastic audience, finding that he notices different details and appreciates the film differently outside of an academic setting.

Unquestionable is the strength of Barbara Stanwyck’s seductive performance as the femme fatale, her Phyllis Dietrichson the archetype of the dangerous woman who bewitches her doomed victim, in this case a chump played with distracting self-importance by Fred MacMurray. And every time Edward G. Robinson appears on screen he lights it up, capturing the audience, whether with the array of witty retorts and bon mots with which the script furnishes him, or dialogue as ostensibly dull as a recitation of an actuarial table for types of suicide.

With all of this in mind, Mike is sure that a second run at the film would help him appreciate it more. There’s no doubting its place in cinema history, and that it continues to pack out cinemas with eager filmgoers is testament to that.

The podcast can be listened to in the players above or on iTunes.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

 

A favourite moment from Double Indemnity

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There are innumerable reasons to value Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, USA, 1944): it’s not only one of the great works of cinema but possibly the ur-text of what started off as a cycle of films and eventually became a genre: film noir. It’s got dialogue that still snaps, a structure so tight nothing’s extraneous, lighting so expressive it’s led critics like Richard Schickel to see the film as, ‘a drama about light, about a man lured out of the sunshine and into the shadows’. I love the actors, the badinage between Edward G. Robinson and Fred Macmurray, the tough-guy voiceover, the way the film evokes a combination of cool cynicism and overheated desire. Its influence continues to be felt. As we can see in the cabezudos scene in Almodóvar’s La mala educación/Bad Education (Pedro Almodóvar, Spain, 2004), Double Indemnity’s images are instantly recognisable, regularly re-deployed, still very evident in the culture and still wielding power (see clip below).

My own favourite moment (see clip at the very top)  is a close-up of Barbara Stanwyck in the scene where Phyllis (Stanwyck) is driving her husband to the station whilst Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) is hiding in the back seat waiting to off him. Her husband’s been haranguing her, ‘why do you turn here!’ She honks the horn. ‘What are you doing that for!’ Then, as if to answer him, the camera cuts to Walter crouched in the back and rising for the kill. The film then cuts back to a close-up of Stanwyck. ‘Why are you honking the horn!’ as we hear a thud. The camera remains on her face as her husband gets killed and it’s this moment that remains indelible to me.

What do we see on Stanwyck’s face? She bounces with apprehension at the blow that kills her husband, mouth a little open. Then, as lights ricochet past her face, what does Stanwyck convey about Phyllis’ thinking and feeling in that last close-up before the scene dissolves? Disquiet, a hardness, efficiency, a vengeful ‘he only got what he deserved’ look, the slightest glimmer of a smile; could it be glee? And could it be sexual? One feels it’s so without knowing quite why. It’s in that evocation of the precise and the evanescent, the material and that which reverberates just out of reach – it has so many associations it can’t quite be pinned down – that Stanwyck’s great artistry makes itself manifest. It’s a glorious moment, one of many, and part of the reason why, to quote Woody Allen, Double Indemnity is ‘Billy Wilder’s greatest film, practically anybody’s greatest film’.

PS In a wonderful conference on noir at the University of Warwick on 19th of May 2017 — Hardboiled History: A Noir Lens on America’s Past — Kulraj Pullar speaking on ‘Veronica Lake and L.A. Confidential: Nostalgia, anachronism and film history’ iterated a fascinating redeployment of Baldwin’s notion that the ‘negro’ is a white invention in relation to the femme fatale. I don’t identify, I didn’t create, I don’t need the negro says Baldwin: so how, when and why do white people need this term? Thus how, when and why do men need femme fatales like Stanwyck’s Phyllis?

 

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José Arroyo

 

 

 

The Merry Widow (Ernst Lubitsch, USA, 1934)

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The original Punch illustration for the film.
The original Punch illustration for the film.

The Merry Widow is a shallow masterpiece. Sonia (Jeanette MacDonald), the richest woman in Warshovia has been widowed, might be hooked by a foreigner and send the country’s economy into a tailspin. Danilo (Maurice Chevalier) gets caught by the King (George Barbier) making love to his wife and the Queen (Una Merkel) is so complimentary that he is chosen to be the one to woo and win The Merry Widow back to Marshovia. It’s a film full of delights; the magnifying glass over the map that introduces us to Marshovia (figure 1), the first meeting between Danilo and the Widow which begins by her reading the letter saying he’s terrific and ends with him following her to the palace and saying ‘I tried to bring a little moonlight into your life…..Forget me – if you can!…and Don’t include me, even in your dreams!’; The montage of black veils, shoes, corsets and dogs that signify her life and whose change in colour symbolises a decision to change that life; How the King discovers his wife is cheating on him — a scene that Billy Wilder used as an exercise with students at UCLA asking them how would they stage it and then showing how Lubitsch did it; the fabulous waltz sequence, with hundreds of dancers waltzing through a palatial hall of mirrors, a still from which illustrated countless early film books (see fig. 1); the charming prison sequence at the end; Sam Raphaelson’s witty dialogue. The film is  a delight, a joy, a mini-masterpiece of cinematic inventiveness. Barbier and Edward Everett Horton, as the Marshovian Ambassador to France, are particularly enchanting. It’s only of Lubitsch that one dares ask for more.

The film was based on Franz Léhar’s operetta and was remade by Curtis Bernhardt in 1952. I quite like the Bernhardt version with Lana Turner and Fernando Lamas but to see the two films side by side is to be convinced of Lubitsch’s genius. Both films were for MGM, the Lubitsch version, the most expensive film made to that point and, though a considerable hit, it still lost money.

Figure 1: The magnifying glass over Warshovia.
Figure 1: The magnifying glass over Warshovia.

N. T. Binh and Christian Viviani have called The Merry Widow the quintessential Lubitsch film (Lubitsch, T. &B Editores: Madrid 1991, 2005, p. 160). It contains the elements of spectacle evident in his early silent (from Carmen onwards), the operetta form of his early thirties musicals (e.g. The Smiling Lieutenant) — hugely popular then and unjustly marginalised in historical accounts of the musical genre now — the rhythmic elements evident in all of his great works (note the dance number in the silent The Oyster Princess from as early as 1919), the use of doors, the indirect way of showing, the ingeniousness and comedy that infuses the whole film, the sophisticated comedy of manners of his greatest films (Trouble in Paradise), the great dialogue of most of his great talkies (Ninotchka), the controlled, precise, and poetic imagery of is late masterpieces (the letterbox sequence from The Shop Around The Corner say). One can’t help but agree. The Merry Widow might not be the best Lubitsch – it doesn’t quite touch our hearts – but it is the quintessential Lubitsch in that it delights the eye, the ear and the mind.

Figure 2: Classic imagery from celebrated waltz sequence.
Figure 2: Classic imagery from celebrated waltz sequence.

José Arroyo