Gerald Pratley: One of the Real Guys

Gerald Pratley (1923-2011)

Before the Bell Lightbox, Cinematheque Ontario, TIFF, the Festival of Festivals, there was Gerald Pratley. Having discovered the other day that he had died from a lengthy illness in a Belleville hospital at the age of 87, I was immediately struck by the fact that I had known Gerald as both a friend and a colleague for most of my life. Over the years, we had shared a love of movie music, undervalued directors (William Wyler) and days spent at the NFB screening room watching movies destined for the Toronto Film Festival. Although I hadn't spoken with Gerald in over a year, I realized upon hearing the very sad news of his passing that I never expected a day when he wouldn't be here. For if there was one strong trait that I always admired in him, it was his ability to accept you on the grounds that you loved and cared for the work you produced.

As a film critic, it didn't really matter to him whether he agreed with you or not (as Gerald's tastes were often more conservative than mine). What mattered was your sense of integrity, or perhaps, the idea that he still had things to learn from others, just as he could impart to others much of what he knew from a different era with different values. In a profession today that has its share of poseurs and careerists, Gerald was one of the real guys. He didn't set out to be a star which may be why he doesn't have a stronger presence in contemporary film culture. (Like me, he didn't have much patience for film theory, either, which represents another pole of contemporary film culture that he's exiled from.) But Gerald Pratley did build a foundation here for film culture and Canadian movies that made possible all that we see vibrant today. Ironically, I suppose, Gerald wasn't Canadian born.

Notes and Frames: The Neglected Art of Film Music

If you ask most people, they'll tell you that they never notice the music in a film. Many will even go so far as to tell you that if they did notice it, it meant that it was likely bad music. Even classical composers, who should be the film composer's most obvious supporter, generally dismiss film music as 'hack work.' It's a thankless job, they'll say, especially since it's commonly believed a good score can never save a bad picture. How can an art form British composer Ralph Vaughn Williams once described as "containing possibilities for the combination of the arts such as Wagner never dreamed of" end up so demeaned? Especially since music and movies have been intrinsically linked since the silent era. While there's no simple answer to that question, it's possible that since the motion picture has always been a popular art form and not regarded as one of the High Arts, the use of classical music (a High Art form) has been perceived by some as a form of sacrilege. Yet despite the class snobbery, what is clear is that the movies have always needed and desired music as some part of the storytelling.

The Lost Weekend: A Brilliant Darkness

Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend (1945).

“It’s like the doctor was just telling me—delirium is a disease of the night, so good night.” – Bellevue Nurse Bim, in The Lost Weekend.

The Lost Weekend, released November 29, 1945. Paramount Pictures. Directed by Billy Wilder, Produced by Charles Brackett, Screenplay by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, based on a novel by Charles Jackson. Cinematography by John Seitz. Edited by Doane Harrison. Music by Miklos Rozsa.  Duration: 101 minutes. Featuring Ray Milland and Jane Wyman, Phillip Terry, Howard Da Silva, Doris Dowling, Frank Faylen. Wilder has explained that part of what originally drew him to this material was having worked with Raymond Chandler on the screenplay for Double Indemnity, subsequent to Brackett’s brief vacation. Chandler had been a recovering alcoholic during that stint and claimed that the stress and tumult of his working relationship with Wilder (actually not that much different from Wilder’s relationship with Brackett) caused him to start drinking again to survive the collaboration. Wilder has claimed that he made the film, about a drunk with chronic writer’s black, at least partly in order to explain Chandler to himself.

One’s Company, Two’s a Crowd: that could be the business card logo of struggling novelist Don Birnam in The Lost Weekend, but also of his real life alter ego Charles Jackson, author of the novel on which Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett based their Academy Award-winning 1945 cinematic study of the struggle to outrun your own shadow. This unsettling masterpiece of internalized noir is an example of a certain brand of dark cinema at its finest, and when it was shown recently on the TCM network we got to see exactly why that is: it’s a kind of exotic corporate merger between personal and professional angst, exploring two competing compulsions, writing and drinking, and it takes no prisoners in exposing the raw nerve inhabiting and inhibiting the urge to tell stories. Ironically, it also demonstrated to Brackett and Wilder that, at least for the time being, they were stronger working in tandem than apart, despite the fact that they could barely stand being in the same room together.