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.

So Bad It's Good?: Cruise Into Terror (1978)

Last year, on February 6^th, I wrote a brief piece on the wretched TV movie called Cruise Into Terror. Two days before, I’d inaugurated an on-again, off-again series (mostly off) called Mini Masterpieces in Mediocre Movies. The purpose was to look at one sequence in a specific film and examine why it worked and the rest didn’t. The film I did on that occasion was James Cameron’s mediocre The Abyss. During the writing, I added a sidebar on Cruise Into Terror because its last line – “That there is a devil, there is no doubt, but is he trying to get into us or is he trying to get out” – had stuck with me (in the piece, I said it was the only good thing about the film). During the editing of The Abyss post, the sidebar was just not working out, so I removed it and planned to run it as a standalone. It was so short, we decided to title it David's Mini-Masterpiece Addendum and it ran two days later.

Over the last year, this little bitty post has become one of our most popular pieces (and hopefully not because it’s so fast to read – we timed it; it takes less than 30 seconds). Often in the top 10, it returned again this past week to top five status. So, it was decided I had to see this thing again and determine why my short post was so popular. I thought I had it on video tape, but when I went through my boxed tapes (yes, I own a functioning VCR that I still use) I couldn’t find it. My colleague, Kevin Courrier, told me the whole film, in 10 minute chunks, was posted on Youtube. So, that’s how I watched it.

The Wrong Men: Innocents in Noir Nightshade

One of the cornerstones of film noir is the inevitability of fate. The deeper fear being that despite your best intentions, or your honest nature, bad things will happen to you – for no reason at all. That is, for no reason that is consciously intended. In Fritz's Lang's spiraling nightmare The Woman in the Window (1944), Edward G. Robinson's meekly self-effacing Professor Richard Wanley entertains his erotic fantasies gazing at an oil portrait of Alice Reed (Joan Bennett) in a storefront window. But when he suddenly meets Reed, in the flesh, on the street, his fantasies begin to have true consequences. After killing Alice's lover in self-defense, Wanley finds himself being pursued by Heidt (Dan Duryea), an ex-cop with blackmail on his mind. It also doesn't help that Heidt was the dead man's bodyguard. Suddenly, the milquetoast professor is stewing in primal juices he'd only dabbled in with his imagination.

That's a Wrap: The Past and Present State of Post-Apocalyptic Cinema

Bruno Lawrence in The Quiet Earth (1985)

Last month, Turner Classic Movies – after almost 19 years on the air, still the best friend a movie freak with a cable box has ever had – had a witty idea for breaking up its holiday schedule of shoving candy canes into viewers’ stockings. On December 21, 2012, the date enshrined in urban myth as the Day of Judgment as predicted by the Mayan calendar, TCM filled its daytime schedule with movies about the threat of the end of the world, or its aftermath. Watching a slew of them served to underline how much the post-apocalypse genre has changed since it ceased to be a vehicle to address nuclear anxieties. Post-apocalyptic films and TV shows now have an angry, fatalistic, nihilist attitude, with costume and set designs out of a survivalist training manual. That may sound like a no-brainer, but during the Cold War, post-apocalyptic science fiction was largely a humanistic genre. The end of the world isn’t what it used to be.

David’s Mini-Masterpiece Addendum: Cruise into Terror

Cruise Into Terror is a completely insane and stupid MOW (movie of the week) from 1978 that starred Dirk Benedict (original Battlestar Galatica's Starbuck) and, lord help him, Ray Milland. The plot? Something about an Egyptian sarcophagus aboard a luxury liner that actually contains, um, the son of Satan. His presence starts to influence those on the ship to do bad things.

I kid you not.

So, what could there possibly be in this alleged film for me to allow it into the 'pantheon' of MMWinMM? Not a scene, just one line of narration. And to save you all the trouble of actually watching this frakking catastrophe, I'm going to tell you what it is. You're welcome.

It has been so long since I've seen this (do NOT ask me why I watched it; I have no excuse), but I have always remembered the line. I don't recall who said it, or why (it may have been 'end of movie' narration), I just remember it, and it is pretty damn good (it may not be original to this MOW, but I've never found it attached to anything else).

"There is a devil, there is no doubt, but is it trying to get in, or is it trying to get out?"

It's a creepy line and someday somebody should write a screenplay or novel that tells the story of that line. And obviously, it wouldn't have to have anything to do with the supernatural or satanism.

--David Churchill is a film critic and author. He is currently putting the finishing touches on his first novel, The Empire of Death.

Movies and Time: Christian Marclay's The Clock

For those of us unrepentant film addicts who can track the passage of our lives by the movies we’ve seen, Christian Marclay’s The Clock provides a unique sort of enchantment. Marclay, a California-born visual artist and composer, has assembled a twenty-four-hour film made up of film (and some TV) clips about time. Most of them actually mark the time: the first time I caught a section of it, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art last July, my watch read 3:09 p.m. as I stepped into the projection room and as soon as I’d settled myself on one of the couches, I heard a voice from screen bemoaning the lateness of the 3:10 train to Yuma. Many of the scenes – some are as short as a single shot – contain images of clocks and watches, but Marclay’s day-long montage considers time in every conceivable form and interpretation.

Great Screen Matches: Margaret Sullavan and Jimmy Stewart

Margaret Sullavan and Jimmy Stewart in The Shop Around the Corner (1940).

Of the great Hollywood women of the 1930s, Margaret Sullavan is the forgotten one, though she was a staple in M-G-M pictures of the era. She had a firefly quality – a flickering glimmer – and the salient characteristic of her performances was the courage that kept her going in the face of her own fragility. She was a feast for the camera – her slender frame was ideal for both clinging, satiny gowns and fussy, elaborate get-ups, which she wore with a kind of gallantry. (“Gallantry” was the film critic Pauline Kael’s word for her, and it’s perfect: it expresses the exquisite tension between her tremulous lightness and her resoluteness in launching herself into the scary world.) Her voice was high and cottony, with an accent somewhere between New York and mid-Atlantic – the made-up accent, still taught in some acting schools, that’s supposed to stand for ambiguous cosmopolitanism in American performers – and the words always seemed to be pushing through some kind of obstacle, like honey dripping through the comb. 

Sullavan was brilliant opposite Herbert Marshall in The Good Fairy (directed by William Wyler, whom she later married) and opposite Henry Fonda (to whom she had been married) in The Moon’s Our Home, a marvelous romantic comedy partly written by the on-again, off-again couple Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell that cast Sullavan as a movie star and Fonda as a famous writer who meet and fall in love without knowing each other’s identity. It’s an inspired idea for a screwball comedy, since the premise of those pictures, borrowed from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, is the tension between the sexual and emotional attraction of the hero and heroine and their adversarial relationship. In The Moon’s Our Home, Fonda and Sullavan are biased against each other on principle – the pompous, posturing celebrity writer, the frivolous, narcissistic Hollywood baby – and can only see what’s beneath the surface if they can’t see the surface. But terrific as Fonda and Marshall were at partnering Sullavan, she was best with Jimmy Stewart, with whom she made four films between 1936 and 1940. 

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.