Review: Ace in the Hole (1951)

* * * *
Director: Billy Wilder
Starring: Kirk Douglas

"The circus is over!" Chuck Tatum announces towards the end of Ace in the Hole, Billy Wilder's most acidic picture. It's little surprise that the film was rejected when it was first released, attacking as it does the notion of journalistic integrity, not to mention the wholesomeness of American society itself, portrayed here as joyfully bloodthirsty, creating a reason to celebrate on a foundation of tragedy. It's also little surprise that eventually audiences found it, as its skill and power are undeniable. Without a single hint of sentimentality to it, Ace in the Hole remains one of the most searing American films ever made.

The Best Picture Countdown #33: The Apartment (1960)

Note: this post is modified from a previously published post

Director: Billy Wilder
Starring: Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray

The Apartment is perhaps the most melancholy comedy ever made. It is about lonely people, misused by those around them, clinging to the things that they think will make them happy, only to end up even more disillusioned than they were before. For Baxter (Jack Lemmon), the light at the end of the tunnel is the promise of a promotion in his future. All he has to do is keep letting the executives in his office use his apartment to meet their mistresses. Meanwhile Fran (Shirley MacLaine) is kept going by her affair with the boss, Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), and his constant promises that he’ll leave his wife… just as soon as the time is right. That Baxter and Fran belong together is something that he can see immediately, but something she doesn’t realize until it’s almost too late.

The Apartment is a romantic comedy in which Baxter and Fran stumble towards each other through various misunderstandings and past a series of romantic entanglements. It’s also a drama about the need for human beings to connect to each other (“I used to live like Robinson Crusoe,” Baxter tells Fran, “I mean, shipwrecked among eight million people. And then one day I saw a footprint in the sand and there you were”). And, finally, it’s a satire of big businesses and the men who run them. The men depicted in this film seem to be suspended in a state of arrested development, so obsessed with sex, and how to get it, and how to get more of it, that everything else in their lives is secondary. Even the sex itself is, in a way, secondary because it isn’t really the act that drives them, but the status they derive from running around with multiple women. They’re trapped in an endless game, little boys looking to dominate the world by having the most toys.

In the beginning Baxter sits at his desk in the middle of a sea of desks that look exactly the same and men who look just like him. These aren’t individual people, but a mass of parts in a machine. Baxter, however, has an edge on the other drones because he’s the go-to-guy for middle management. They call him “Buddy Boy” and promise to help him move up the ladder in exchange for him allowing them to borrow his apartment. Baxter keeps the appointments in a note book and keeps his place stocked with the liquor and food that the execs and their mistresses like. Sometimes they show up unexpectedly and Baxter is forced out of his own apartment and has to wait outside in the snow for them to finish so that he can go back upstairs and go back to bed. Because of all the activity (some of it noisy), his neighbours think he’s some kind of sex fiend. The doctor (Jack Krushen) who lives next door warns him that he won’t be able to keep up this pace much longer if he intends to live a long life. The scenes involving the doctor's reactions to Baxter's romantic entanglements are some of my favourite, never ceasing to make me laugh ("Mildred, he's at it again!" he exclaims upon hearing music from Baxter's place).

Baxter eventually gets the promised promotion and his new place in the world is symbolized by his receiving the key to the executive washroom, the ultimate status symbol. He wants to share his happiness with Fran, but finds out that not only has she been having an affair with Sheldrake, but that they’re two of the people who’ve been using his apartment. On Christmas Eve, Fran and Sheldrake meet at the apartment and he backs out of his latest promise to leave his wife. Later, and still at the apartment, she attempts suicide and Baxter finds her. The neighbours think she’s tried to kill herself because of Baxter and treat him accordingly, as does Fran’s brother-in-law, who gives Baxter a beating. Baxter, ever the gentleman, keeps the actual circumstances to himself in order to protect Fran, and she begins to realize how much she really does like him. Baxter, too, has a revelation when he sees that Sheldrake isn’t taking the situation with Fran seriously, brushing Baxter off when he tries to convince him to come and see her. Later, as a reward for keeping the truth about the situation to himself, Sheldrake offers Baxter another promotion, which Baxter turns down, not wanting to become the kind of man that social climbing makes you. This scene is played marvellously by both Lemmon and MacMurray with Baxter finally, and conclusively, standing up for himself and Sheldrake showing just how slimy he really is.

The next time Baxter and Fran meet, he’s in the process of packing up his stuff, getting ready to start his life over somewhere else, anywhere else. Fran, too, is ready to start over. There’s no great love scene, no big speeches or professions of love. Instead, they sit down to play cards, the way they did when she was staying at his place, recovering from the suicide attempt. He tells her he loves her. She looks at him. “Shut up and deal.” The ending is often the most delicate part of a movie - a bad one can drag a great film down to just being good; a good one can make a bad movie worth watching - and Billy Wilder had a knack for them, as demonstrated by this film, Some Like It Hot, Sunset Boulevard and Double Indemnity. The two lonely people connect - and it isn't schmaltzy or tacked on or unearned. It's a very genuine, very real ending that's perfectly suited to the story that unfolded before it.

The Best Picture Countdown #18: The Lost Weekend (1945)

Director: Billy Wilder
Starring: Ray Milland, Jane Wyman

The Lost Weekend is arguably Billy Wilder’s darkest film. It is almost unrelentingly grim (though it does have a happy-ish, if not entirely believable ending), swirling ever deeper into the depths as it follows protagonist Don Birnam (Ray Milland) on an odyssey of self-destruction. With his characteristic skill, Wilder guides us on this journey, ultimately winning two Oscars (for directing and writing) for his efforts.

The story begins with Don supposedly on the road to recovery. After manipulating his brother Wick (Phillip Terry) and girlfriend, Helen (Jane Wyman), into leaving him alone, however, he heads straight to one of his favourite bars. Disappointed, Wick more or less gives up on his brother and encourages Helen to do the same, but that’s easier said than done because, despite his problems, she loves him. Despite his problems, he loves her, too, and he recounts the story of how they met to a bartender. Don’s anxieties run deep, so deep that he sees himself as having been split in two: Don the writer, and Don the drunk. The two personalities are at odds with one another but intractably linked, as Don can only form ideas when he’s drunk but forgets them when he’s sober.

Don’s feelings of low self-worth drives as wedge between him and Helen, as he encourages her to break things off lest he drag her down with him, but she remains determined to stand by him, even as things get increasingly worse. He steals a woman’s purse to buy booze and is caught, he tries to pawn his typewriter, he takes a bad fall down a flight of stairs and ends up in the hospital, where he falls into the care of the alcoholics’ ward. After escaping he gets right back to drinking, suffering from horrible hallucinations, and considers suicide.

Made during the time of the Production Code, The Lost Weekend isn’t quite as brutally candid as a film like Leaving Las Vegas, but it is quite harrowing nevertheless. The scene where Don hallucinates seeing a mouse being attacked by a bat is still effective today, though of course it’s not graphic by today’s standards. Milland’s performance, entirely without vanity and full of weariness at his character’s self-defeating choices, is really excellent and certainly worthy of the Best Actor Oscar he won. Playing drunk is notoriously difficult because, of course, it invites over-acting and mugging. Milland keeps the character from becoming caricature and renders a lived-in performance that perfectly suites the seen-it-all/done-it-all attitude of the character.

For the most part the film unfolds with a gritty sense of realism (well, as gritty and real as a film made under the strict rules of the studio system could possibly be) but the ending is another matter. Don rallies, combining his two personas into one by writing about his experiences as a drunk (rather than allowing his experiences as a drunk to supplant his work as a writer) in a novel called “The Bottle.” It appears that he’s on the wagon and finally on the way to fulfilling his promise as an artist. Part of me thinks that this ending is too easy, that someone who is in as deeply as Don couldn’t crawl out just on the strength of his love for Helen and her love for him. On the other hand, I also wonder whether this is meant to be a true resolution. Perhaps this is just another occasion where Don will pull himself together for a brief period and then go right back to square one. After all, the final shot mirrors the first, focusing on the bottle of booze he has suspended outside of his window. So, is it triumph or is it another tragedy waiting to happen? I suppose that’s up to the viewer.

Review: A Foreign Affair (1948)

* * * 1/2
Director: Billy Wilder
Starring: Marlene Dietrich, Jean Arthur, John Lund

A Foreign Affair is one of my favourite Billy Wilder films, but it's surprisingly hard to get hold of. Thank God it shows up on TCM every once in a while. A romantic comedy, a post-war drama, occassionally a musical - this one's got it all. If you're a Wilder fan or a Dietrich fan, this is definitely a film you'll want to seek out if you haven't seen it already.

The story takes place in post-war Berlin and concerns a love triangle between a visiting Congresswoman, a U.S. Army Captain, and a former Nazi mistress. The Congresswoman is Phoebe Frost (Jean Arthur), who is prim and proper and determined to take people to task for the activities that tend to be the offshoots of reconstruction after war, such as black market bartering and relationships between foreign servicemen and local women that are founded on a kind of tacit prostitution. She's scandalized at every turn by what she sees around her and by the efforts of the people in charge to gloss over it rather than deal with it. Since her time in Berlin is limited she can't clean up the entire American zone, but she becomes determined to set at least one thing right by bringing Erika von Schluetow (Marlene Dietrich) to justice.

Erika is a singer in one of the underground clubs and is rumored to have been the mistress of at least one high ranking Nazi official. Thus far she has managed to elude the process of de-Nazification and a mandatory stretch in a work camp thanks largely to John Pringle (John Lund), a US Army Captain who offers her protection and provides her with some small luxuries in exchange for her favours. He does what he can to hinder Phoebe's progress in bringing Erika down and, in the process, falls in love with her. She falls in love with him, too, and starts to loosen up a little but even after Erika does Phoebe a favour by keeping US authorities from finding out that she was arrested as part of a raid in one of those clubs, Phoebe is determined to do what she sees as the right thing.

The screenplay by Charles Brackett and Richard Breen is sharp, mixing in a lot of humor while also staying on point. The story is not presented as black and white and acknowledges that in times of war, certain codes of morality tend to be suspended. Phoebe is presented as "good," but she's also presented as being a bit naive and a little too rigidly moralistic. Erika, while not "good," exactly, isn't presented as a villain either. In one of my favourite movie speeches ever, she explains her position to Phoebe:

We've all become animals with exactly one instinct left. Self-preservation. Now take me, Miss Frost. Bombed out a dozen times, everything caved in and pulled out from under me. My country, my possessions, my beliefs... yet somehow I kept going. Months and months in air raid shelters, crammed in with five thousand other people. I kept going. What do you think it was like to be a woman in this town when the Russians first swept in? I kept going.

She's a survivor. The things that she has done to survive - both while the Nazis were in power and after the Allied victory - haven't always been pretty, but she's still there, still going forward. As for John, he's done things that are questionable but, as he points out to Phoebe, it's not so easy to pull the breaks after spending years going full speed ahead to attain victory. You can't just flip a switch and go back to playing by ordinary rules. Wilder and the writers give these characters complexities that aren't always afforded to characters in romantic comedies, allowing them to seem less like "types" and more like "people."

As far as the actors go, they deliver exactly what you would expect of them. Arthur is good as the stick in the mud who slowly learns the let loose, and her facial expressions and body language whenever Phoebe is supposed to be shocked and appalled by something are excellent. She has fair chemistry with Lund, who has that roguish charm down pat. The show is stolen, of course, by Dietrich who manages to look glamorous even while brushing her teeth in a crumbling apartment. This is one of my favourite Dietrich performances and Wilder plays to all of her strengths here, allowing her to shine like a diamond in the rough. The film itself, though fairly light in spirit, nevertheless hits on certain truths about the hardships of postwar reconstruction that give it depth. People like Erika, Phoebe and John exist in places torn apart by war (though in reality they likely don't end up as happy) and some of the arial footage that opens the film is actual documentary footage of bombed out Berlin at the close of the war, giving the film a dose of realism to balance out the elements of pure movie escapism. I honestly can't recommend it more.

Great Last Scenes: Some Like It Hot

Year: 1959
Director: Billy Wilder
Great Because...: The last line of this film is, arguably, the best last line of any film ever made, which automatically elevates the whole scene. Aside from that, there’s also the fact that director Billy Wilder opts to end on a comedic, rather than a romantic note, which is a good choice. The boy gets the girl at the end of countless films, but how often do Jack Lemmon and Joe E. Brown end up together?

Joe and Jerry, having witnesses a mob hit, escape being permanently silenced by going under cover as a couple of female musicians. Everyone around them buys into their disguises despite the fact that they look unmistakeably like Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in wigs and dresses. This is great as far as staying alive is concerned, but something of a problem since Joe has his sights set on the buxom and flighty Sugar Kane, and Osgood Fielding III has set his sights on Jerry.

Joe dons a second disguise as a Cary Grant-esque impotent millionaire whom Sugar, shall we say, revives while Jerry decides to just go with the flow, allowing himself as herself to be courted by Osgood. Eventually Osgood proposes and Jerry happily accepts, much to Joe’s consternation. "You're not a girl, you're a guy," he reminds his pal. Jerry comes to his senses and his fantasies about the happy life he’ll lead as Mrs. Fielding are replaced by a determination to get out of the fix he's in. When, however, Osgood has an answer to all "Daphne's" reasons why they can't get married, Jerry rips off his wig, exclaimnig, “I’m a man!” Osgood shrugs. “Nobody’s perfect,” he assures his intended, making for an ending that’s an instant classic and delightful no matter how many times you’ve seen it.

I’m not even sure where to start with how perfect this ending is. There’s the exasperated look on Lemmon’s face, the blank, unassuming look on Brown’s face, the couple of tango beats that play over the final seconds and, of course, that line. It is also, quite possibly, the first happy ending for a same sex couple in a mainstream film. I know it’s all played for laughs and not to be taken seriously, but consider how easily Jerry took to the idea of becoming a wife and couple that with the fact that Osgood doesn’t care that his wife will actually be a husband and, I’m telling you, you’ve got the makings of a happily ever after. You’ve also got an ending that ranks amongst the most original and clever ever committed to film, and yet another proof that Wilder is one of the best film directors who ever lived.

Great Last Scenes: Sunset Boulevard

Year: 1950
Director: Billy Wilder
Great Because... not only does it provide a fittingly dramatic exit for a larger than life character, it also manages a delicate mixture of tones: it's sad, flamboyant and creepy as hell all at once (you could also argue that it's triumphant, albeit as the triumph of madness over sanity). Most importantly, it's an ending that stands up to multpile viewings:

In a fit of desperation former screen star Norma Desmond has killed her lover, Joe Gillis. In the ensuing media circus, Norma’s tenuous hold on sanity is finally and definitively broken, and she comes to believe that the hubbub in her foyer is a cast and crew preparing for a scene in her comeback vehicle.

Seeing the cameras, Norma descends the staircase into infamy and insanity, stopping only to express how much the moment means to her:

I just want to tell you all how happy I am to be back in the studio making a picture again! You don't know how much I've missed all of you. And I promise you, I'll never desert you again because after Salome we'll make another picture, and another picture! You see, this is my life. It always will be! There's nothing else - just us - and the cameras - and those wonderful people out there in the dark. All right, Mr. De Mille, I'm ready for my close-up.

Finishing her speech, Norma begins to move towards the camera - and us. Looking directly through the camera to the audience, the message become clear: Hollywood may be partially to blame for breaking Norma, but the audience is just as guilty. Fade to black.

Review: Witness For The Prosecution (1957)

* * * *
Director: Billy Wilder
Starring: Charles Laughton, Marlene Dietrich, Tyrone Power

It doesn’t get much better than this: a well-constructed courtroom drama with a great twist (crafted by Agatha Christie, no less), Charles Laughton, Marlene Dietrich, and Billy Wilder. I've seen this movie a few times and each time I find myself falling in love with it all over again. It's the mark of a good mystery that even when you know the secret, you can still feel excited watching the revelation play out again.

Charles Laughton stars as Sir Wilfred Robarts, a celebrated barrister recovering from a heart attack and now saddled with a bossy nurse (Elsa Lanchester) who is determined to break him of all his bad habits and make sure that he gets the rest he needs. However no sooner is Wilfred back home than a case comes to him that proves to be irresistible: Leonard Vole (Tyrone Power) is accused of romancing and then murdering a wealthy older woman – a crime which he insists he didn’t commit. His wife (Marlene Dietrich) backs up his protestations of innocence but does so in a manner which inspires more questions than it answers. It isn’t such a great shock, then, when she turns out to be the prosecution’s surprise witness. What is shocking is what happens next, which I wouldn’t dare reveal.

The joys of this film are myriad and begin with Laughton who brings a sharp intelligence to his crusty character. Whether he’s arguing points of law in the courtroom – which, as a slight aside, occurs with refreshing frequency here; this is easily one of the more realistic courtroom dramas I’ve ever seen – or telling his nurse to “shut up,” he brings a kind of rough charm to the role. If the film consisted entirely of just one long monologue by Laughton, it would still be entirely worth watching, listening to him is that enjoyable.

The other great performance is by Dietrich who appears coolly elegant and wholly detached but is harbouring hidden depths and secrets. Mrs. Vole is a German immigrant, rescued from the post war rubble by Leonard and brought to England for a better life. I’ve long felt that Dietrich is at her best in roles like this one and those she played in Judgment At Nuremberg and A Foreign Affair, where she plays survivors of German post war reconstruction and the filmmakers allow her to hit on subtle notes of xenophobia (part of the reason Wilfred thinks she'd make a bad witness for the defense is her accent and, indeed, the courtroom audience's reaction to her adds credence to that) and misogyny. When she and Leonard meet, she’s performing in a cabaret where the soldiers treat her like she’s up for grabs and later she and Leonard make an agreement to trade coffee for sexual favour – post war reconstruction is never a good time to be a woman, but in none of these roles does Dietrich ever seem desperate. Instead she brings a strength and grace to the roles which make it clear that she’s playing women who will always find a way to survive (one of my favourite movie speeches is her “I kept going” speech from A Foreign Affair).

Laughton earned a well deserved Oscar nomination for his role, while Dietrich was passed over for her great supporting turn (a fact which was, by all accounts, quite devastating to her because she was so convinced that she would be nominated). Both actors absolutely shine, as does Lanchester in her small role. As for Power, he’s never really quite clicked for me in this role, partly because it’s hard to buy him as an Englishman when he makes absolutely no attempt to alter his very American midwest accent. For me, though, Power is the only flaw in an otherwise perfect film.

100 Days, 100 Movies: Sunset Boulevard (1950)

Director: Billy Wilder
Starring: William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim

Sunset Boulevard is not a film that is easily defined. It features elements of noir (the voice-over by writer turned gigolo Joe Gillis is right in line with classic noir voice-overs), elements of straight drama, and elements of self-referential parody. When Joe (William Holden) turns up at the desolate mansion of silent star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), Wilder creates a finely-crafted Gothic atmosphere. From the wind that whistles through the organ like a ghostly player to the abandoned pool and tennis court, the spectre of death seems to loom over the mansion. It begins with death – Joe’s death – when we meet him for the first time floating face down in Norma’s pool. Being a writer, Joe should have known better than to stick around given how many times the words “dead” and “death” crop up in his first conversations with Norma, whom he meets over the body of her dead chimpanzee.

Norma and her house both exist in a kind of paralysis, a form of suspended animation. Internally, both Norma and the house exist in the 1920s, when Valentino danced on the ballroom floor and Norma was the greatest star in the whole world. Time stops for her in the moment that sound is introduced to film, and she remains convinced that silent films are due for a resurrection, that sound is just a passing fad. She’s written an epic screenplay for her expected comeback and hires Joe to stay on at the house and do an editing job. Or so it seems. Really, she’s hiring him into the world’s oldest profession, a fact which Joe finds distasteful but which doesn’t stop him from accepting the gifts Norma insists on giving him. In between Norma’s romantic overtures, the talk is all about the good old days and Norma’s return to the screen, which she believes to be inevitable.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that two of the best films to come out of the 1950s – this one and Singin’ In The Rain - preoccupy themselves with Hollywood’s silent era. By the beginning of the decade, the Golden Age of Hollywood was over and the studio system was dying. Never again would the studios have a stable of stars whom they would effectively own and whose careers they would dictate, and never again would there be so many big stars at one time. In light of this, it’s only natural that Hollywood filmmakers would take a look at the last bygone era with a mixture of nostalgia and cynicism, perhaps as a way to prepare for the changes yet to come.

Needless to say, Hollywood is mercilessly criticized in this film. The Great Star has gone mad in the absence of her former fame, the director is now a servant, the writer tells his best story after his death. Hollywood is characterized here as a soul-sucking machine that uses people up and leaves them shells of their former selves. The false realities created by Hollywood have generated a grotesque version of life where people don't live as much as they act out their narratives. Most obviously there’s Norma, who lives as if it is still 1927, in a house filled with photographs of herself – studio photographs, importantly (“How could she breathe in that house full of Norma Desmonds?”) – and “fan letters” written by Max (Erich von Stroheim), her butler, former director, and former husband. But there’s also Betty (Nancy Olson), the woman who captures Joe’s heart as they work together on a screenplay. They take a walk around the lot and she describes growing up at the studio, where both her parents worked. Her neighbourhood street was the lot’s false city block, the nose on her face is a surgical construction, created during a brief flirtation with acting. Even the most sincere characters are tainted by a degree of falseness.

Sunset Boulevard is like a gift for film buffs because it’s so self-referential, so full of little bits of trivia. From the first film Norma shows Joe, to the guests at Norma’s card game, Wilder stacks the film with elements of meta without letting those elements take over the story. Ever the master, Wilder skilfully controls the story, guiding it towards its conclusion. Holden, a Wilder favourite who would also appear for the director in Sabrina and Stalag 17, delivers a wonderfully understated performance, more or less allowing himself to take Swanson’s lead. As Norma, Swanson delivers an iconic performance (perhaps too iconic given that she said “I’ve got nobody floating in my swimming pool” in response to a question regarding the autobiographical nature of the film), alternately comic and terrifying. Her final descent down her staircase is a thing of beauty, breathtaking and chilling as her madness finally takes complete control and she utters her immortal speech:

I promise you I'll never desert you again because after Salome we'll make another picture and another picture. You see, this is my life! It always will be! Nothing else! Just us, the cameras, and those wonderful people out there in the dark! All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up.

No matter how many times I see this film, I’m always stunned by these final moments. It skirts so close to the edge - any closer and it would have veered wildly into the realm of insane comedy. And yet, between them, Wilder and Swanson pull it off.

100 Days, 100 Movies: Double Indemnity (1944)

Director: Billy Wilder
Starring: Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson

Why does he do it? It’s the central question of Billy Wilder’s noir classic. It’s easy to say that he’s seduced into it, but watch that scene closely. It doesn’t take much for Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) to talk him into it. As a matter of fact, it appears as if Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) has been waiting for just such an opportunity to present itself. It’s what’s always intrigued me about this film, Neff’s motives, which on a base level appears to be sex (in the form of Phyllis) and money (in the form of the money Phyllis will get from her husband’s “accidental” death), but is actually much more twisted. Neff does it simply to see if he can get away with it. The detachment that this implies, and the coldness that radiates from both Neff and his femme fatale give the film sharper edges than even your most hard-nosed noirs.

It begins with Neff, an insurance salesman, already dying, recording his confession to his boss, Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson). What’s ingenious about the way Wilder tells the story is that he allows it to play out in two different, competing ways. What we hear is the voice-over narration in which Neff relates the story to Keyes, but what we see is how Neff relates the story to himself. Both versions have the same plot – Neff and Phyllis meet, discuss insurance, come up with a plan to kill her husband, execute it and then turn on each other – but the tone is distinctly different. In the voice-over, he sounds like a man smitten, blinded by his lust for the fetching Mrs. Dietrichson who appears to him for the first time wrapped in a towel at the top of her stairs, her ankle bracelet catching his eye. “I killed him for money – and a woman – and I didn’t get the money and I didn’t get the woman,” he says, framing it as a matter of lust and greed, because while those are motives that people can understand, boredom is not.

That the true motive is boredom – on the part of both Neff and Phyllis – underlies the way they interact. The banter they engage in is charged in a different way than you usually see in noir, as if they’re just saying what people in their situation ought to say, pretending that they’re talking themselves into something that they’ve both already decided on, and pretending that they’re talking themselves into love and/or lust with each other simply because that’s what one does in this situation. These are two very cold characters, and their dialogue is clipped and crisp. There is no warmth, no tenderness between them (the only time we see either emotion from Neff is at the end when he says “I love you, too”… to Keyes), no fire when they’re playing at being in love or after they’ve turned on each other, only when they’re committing their crime (the look on Stanwyck’s face as she waits for the moment when her husband will be killed is deliciously evil).

Stanwyck and MacMurray are both perfect in their respective roles, each walking a fine line in terms of how much to give and how much to hold back. You can certainly see how Phyllis could have lured Neff into her web, had that been necessary, and you can see how Phyllis might have been attracted enough to Neff that it put the idea in her head to rid herself of her husband once and for all, because Stanwyck is just alluring enough and MacMurray is just charming enough, but they’re also just detached enough from what they’re acting out that you can believe they’re only using each other as an excuse to do something that each of them wants to do anyway. Again, what makes this film so brilliant is that Wilder presents the story in such a way that we’re seeing it both as it might have happened and as it did happen in each and every scene.

The cinematography by John Seitz is superb, giving the scenes shadows that are very severe and distinct. There is frequent use of the shadows cast by Venetian blinds, which fall across the characters faces to look like bars, suggesting just how trapped they’ve become by their own machinations. The lighting adds to the way that the scenes become increasingly claustrophobic as the story goes on. “Suddenly it came over me that everything would go wrong. It sounds crazy, Keyes, but it’s true, so help me. I could hear my own footsteps. It was the walk of a dead man.” How Neff knows it will all go wrong could be tied to his motives for committing the crime in the first place. Does he do it in order to be caught? The fact that he returns to the office in order to record his confession to Keyes seems to suggest as much. Was it part of his scheme all along, making this a long, convoluted suicide? That you can’t answer for sure is part of the film’s strength and what makes it worth coming back to time and again.

100 Days, 100 Movies: Some Like It Hot (1959)

Director: Billy Wilder
Starring: Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, Marilyn Monroe, Joe E. Brown

Even if Some Like It Hot were awful, it would be worth sitting through just to get to that final line, delivered so faultlessly by Joe E. Brown. Luckily it isn’t awful, but a sharp, tightly-wound and brilliantly executed comedy from one of the bona fide masters, Billy Wilder. Part on-the-run story, part musical, part sex comedy, with a whole lot of gender confusion mixed in, this over-the-top farce manages to do what most comedies seem incapable of now: it goes to the extremes without confusing comedy for shock value.

It begins with Joe (Tony Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemmon), two musicians forced to go on the run after witnessing a mob hit. In their desperation to save themselves, they come up with a plan to disguise themselves as women and join an all-girl band on its way to Florida. Complicating matters is one of the band’s members, the alluring Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe), with whom both men are instantly smitten, but about whom neither can do much, since they’re masquerading as women. When they get to Florida, Joe exchanges one disguise for another, now becoming Junior, an oil tycoon who intrigues Sugar by playing hard to get. Meanwhile, Jerry, still disguised as a woman, finds himself being courted by Osgood Fielding III (Joe E. Brown).

The scenes between Joe/Junior and Sugar play out as a reversal of film tropes. Junior looks the part of the debonair lover – Curtis plays it as an imitation of that most lasting of screen lovers, Cary Grant, though Grant himself apparently agreed with Jerry’s assertion in the movie that “no one talks loik thet!” – but plays it cool with Sugar, insisting that nothing will happen between them. This, of course, has the effect of making Sugar want to melt his frigid resolve, which she fairly easily accomplishes. “I’ve got a funny sensation in my toes, like someone was barbecuing them over a slow flame,” he tells her. “Let’s throw another log on the fire,” she replies. Curtis is good in his role, but in his scenes with Monroe, he almost seems superfluous, so overshadowed by her is he. There’s heat between them, yes, but Monroe had the ability to project heat with anyone – or anything. Wilder could have paired her with the ukulele she plays in the film and Monroe still could have made it convincing. She was more than an actress, she was a force of nature. “Look how she moves!” Jerry exclaims upon seeing her for the first time. You can’t help but look at Monroe in any scene, in any film, because when she’s onscreen, it’s like nothing else exists.

As much as I enjoy Monroe, my favourite scenes are those involving Lemmon - who quite rightly received an Academy Award nomination - trying to negotiate his budding relationship with Osgood. At first Jerry/Daphne plays hard to get which, as with Sugar and Junior, only makes Osgood more determined. At some point along the way, Jerry falls into Daphne’s line of thinking and decides to accept Osgood’s proposal, the revelation of which leads to the funniest exchanges between Jerry and Joe. “Who’s the lucky girl?” Joe asks, on hearing that Jerry is engaged. “I am!” Jerry says exultantly, happily shaking pair of maracas. Joe insists that this is a crazy idea. “What are you going to do on your honeymoon?” he asks. “We’ve been discussing that. He wants to go to the Riviera, but I kind of lean towards Niagara Falls.” The way that Lemmon manages to convince us that Daphne’s been utterly swept off her feet, even though she’s still Jerry, is amazing, and the interplay between Lemmon and Curtis in this scene, and between Lemmon and Brown throughout the film, is fantastic. I have yet to see any single shot that is more priceless than that which reveals the look on Jerry/Daphne’s face as he/she is turned to face the camera (flower between lips) while dancing with Osgood.

In the end we get the two pairs running off into the sunset together, Joe with Sugar, Jerry/Daphne with Osgood, leading to one of the best (if not the best) films lines ever uttered. From beginning to end, this is an absolute gem of a movie. It hasn’t aged a day since its release in 1959, remaining just as funny and perfectly executed as ever. If you’ve never seen it, you don’t know what you’re missing. But don’t feel too bad - after all, nobody’s perfect.

100 Days, 100 Movies: The Apartment (1960)

Director: Billy Wilder
Starring: Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray

The Apartment is perhaps the most melancholy comedy ever made. It is about lonely people, misused by those around them, clinging to the things that they think will make them happy, only to end up even more disillusioned than they were before. For Baxter (Jack Lemmon), the light at the end of the tunnel is the promise of a promotion in his future. All he has to do is keep letting the executives in his office use his apartment to meet their mistresses. Meanwhile Fran (Shirley MacLaine) is kept going by her affair with the boss, Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), and his constant promises that he’ll leave his wife… just as soon as the time is right. That Baxter and Fran belong together is something that he can see immediately, but something she doesn’t realize until it’s almost too late.

The Apartment is a romantic comedy in which Baxter and Fran stumble towards each other through various misunderstandings and past a series of romantic entanglements. It’s also a drama about the need for human beings to connect to each other (“I used to live like Robinson Crusoe,” Baxter tells Fran, “I mean, shipwrecked among eight million people. And then one day I saw a footprint in the sand and there you were”). And, finally, it’s a satire of big businesses and the men who run them. The men depicted in this film seem to be suspended in a state of arrested development, so obsessed with sex, and how to get it, and how to get more of it, that everything else in their lives is secondary. Even the sex itself is, in a way, secondary because it isn’t really the act that drives them, but the status they derive from running around with multiple women. They’re trapped in an endless game, little boys looking to dominate the world by having the most toys.

In the beginning, Baxter sits at his desk in the middle of a sea of desks that look exactly the same, and men who look just like him. These aren’t individual people, but a mass of parts in a machine. Baxter, however, has an edge on the other drones because he’s the go-to-guy for middle management. They call him “Buddy Boy” and promise to help him move up the ladder in exchange for him allowing them to borrow his apartment. Baxter keeps the appointments in a note book and keeps his place stocked with the liquor and food that the execs and their mistresses like. Sometimes they show up unexpectedly and Baxter is forced out of his own apartment and has to wait outside in the snow for them to finish so that he can go back upstairs and go back to bed. Because of all the activity (some of it noisy), his neighbours think he’s some kind of sex fiend. The doctor (Jack Krushen) who lives next door warns him that he won’t be able to keep up this pace much longer if he intends to live a long life. The scenes involving the doctor's reactions to Baxter's romantic entanglements are some of my favorite, never ceasing to make me laugh ("Mildred, he's at it again!" he exclaims upon hearing music from Baxter's place).

Baxter eventually gets the promised promotion and his new place in the world is symbolized by his receiving the key to the executive washroom, the ultimate status symbol. He wants to share his happiness with Fran, but finds out that not only has she been having an affair with Sheldrake, but that they’re two of the people who’ve been using his apartment. On Christmas Eve, Fran and Sheldrake meet at the apartment and he backs out of his latest promise to leave his wife. Later, and still at the apartment, she attempts suicide and Baxter finds her. The neighbours think she’s tried to kill herself because of Baxter and treat him accordingly, as does Fran’s brother-in-law, who gives Baxter a beating. Baxter, ever the gentleman, keeps the actual circumstances to himself in order to protect Fran, and she begins to realize how much she really does like him. Baxter, too, has a revelation when he sees that Sheldrake isn’t taking the situation with Fran seriously, brushing Baxter off when he tries to convince him to come and see her. Later, as a reward for keeping the truth about the situation to himself, Sheldrake offers Baxter another promotion, which Baxter turns down, not wanting to become the kind of man that social climbing makes you. This scene is played marvellously by both Lemmon and MacMurray with Baxter finally, and conclusively, standing up for himself and Sheldrake showing just how slimy he really is.

The next time Baxter and Fran meet, he’s in the process of packing up his stuff, getting ready to start his life over somewhere else, anywhere else. Fran, too, is ready to start over. There’s no great love scene, no big speeches or professions of love. Instead, they sit down to play cards, the way they did when she was staying at his place, recovering from the suicide attempt. He tells her he loves her. She looks at him. “Shut up and deal.” The ending is often the most deliciate part of a movie - a bad one can drag a great film down to just being good; a good one can make a bad movie worth watching - and Billy Wilder had a knack for them, as demonstrated by this film, Some Like It Hot, Sunset Boulevard and Double Indemnity. The two lonely people connect - and it isn't schmaltzy or tacked on or unearned. It's a very genuine, very real ending that's perfectly suited to the story that unfolded before it.