Five Unpublished Film Reviews

Five unpublished film reviews: “Some Like It Hot,” “The Lost Weekend,” “Sunset Boulevard,” “All About Eve,” “Body and Soul,” 1996 or 1997

“Some Like It Hot”

What I admire most about Billy Wilder’s films is the subjects he chooses. While his screenwriting and directing usually function within the conventions of Hollywood, his subject matter often stands apart. Whether suicide, alcoholism, insanity, suburban homicide, or transvestism, as in the case of Some Like It Hot, Wilder had a seeming disregard for taboo.

Some Like It Hot certainly did not provide audiences in 1959 their first glimpse of men in dresses. But the consistency and severity of double entendre and the sexual confusion, which nearly conspires to derail the highly farcical proceedings, have established Some Like It Hot as a milestone in a campaign carefully waged by a number of Hollywood film-makers to nudge the norms installed by the decency codes and perpetuated by priggish studio heads. Any effort in this vain had to be camouflaged, and Some Like It Hot is cloaked heavily in the tattered threads of slapstick comedy, ensuring that every line and innuendo is delivered with the utmost innocence and mirth.

There are certainly missed comedic opportunities. For one, we never get to see the boys become girls. And becoming women seems to give these men little trouble, beyond a little difficulty adjusting to heels (though not too much: by the end of the film Jack Lemmon is eluding gangsters all over the hotel in a pair of very high heels). It would also seem natural for the girls in the orchestra to have questioned Josephine (Tony Curtis) and Daphne’s (Jack Lemmon) sexual preferences–the inseparable pair being rather ungainly by comparison, and for Sugar (Marilyn Monroe) to have questioned Joe’s (Tony Curtis) when he confesses his total indifference to women. Certainly more could have been made of the apparently lesbian kiss near the film’s end. But Wilder, evidently, doesn’t wish to stray that far from convention.

Furthermore, the picture’s second half fails to meet the frantic standard of the first, threatening to unravel with the resumption of a tired gangster subplot. Three things, however, must be said. 1) Jack Lemmon is a delightfully funny man and even funnier as a woman; 2) any attention and adoration ever paid Marilyn Monroe was richly deserved; and 3) Tony Curtis is damn convincing as a dame.

Some Like It Hot was not shocking to audiences in 1959. Nor was it intended to be. Transvestism was played here the same way as it had been for many years–for laughs. And on that score, the film delivers.

“The Lost Weekend” 

The truest standard of a film like the Lost Weekend is how it stands up today. Of all films concerned with alcoholism, few do better in portraying the steep descent of an alcoholic binge with more starkness or dauntless candor than this film. Director Billy Wilder weds a seeming contempt for the subject matter to an affinity for cinematic exposé in producing a series of images each more disturbing than the last. And Wilder has the courage to actually make his “harrowing portrait” a harrowing portrait, particularly by the standard of motion pictures being made in 1945.

Ray Milland, as dipsomaniac Don Burman, leads viewers down an abject path of alcohol dependency — both in the present day and through flashback, in which Burman is first shown, three years earlier, languishing in sober unrest, having hallucinations of a bottle of liquor and acting in boorish desperation. Milland produces a brutal depiction of a man weakened by, made vulnerable and defiant by, crazed and possessed by a bottle of alcohol.

By making Burman a failed author, Wilder has furnished himself a convenient excuse for Burman’s volubility. Burman dropped out of college, convinced he was ready to make his name and fame as an author, and quickly met with a series of failures — which, inevitably, led him to seek solace with the bottle.

The film works on its most appalling level when Milland is shown alone — in his apartment groping for a hidden bottle; staggering through Manhattan, his typewriter tucked under one arm; searching fruitlessly for an open pawn shop on Yom Kippur; looking on with mortification from his cot at the dipso ward as a patient is dragged out in the shadows.

Wilder’s supporting cast provide many of the film’s most interesting, if ultimately disappointing, elements. Wick, Don’s brother, appears only twice — first in the present, preparing for a weekend trip to the country. Wick appears premature in his conviction that Don’s problems have passed, repeating his stodgy mantra, “after what you’ve been through,” even as Don is secretly reeling in a bottle of booze hanging outside the bedroom window. Wick will even admit that he has scoured the apartment in search of his brother’s stash of alcohol, but maintains this self-deception until he returns home to find Don gone, presumed on a drinking binge.

At this point, Wick turns harshly cynical, leaving for the country alone, calling his brother a “hopeless alcoholic.” In his second appearance, opposite Helen, Don’s girlfriend, we see Wick three years earlier, covering up his brother’s problem, lying and even claiming the family drinking problem to be his own. Don, who’s been hiding in the next room, listening, bursts out to tell Helen the truth. But contrary to Don’s demand that she get out while she can, Helen renews her devotion to him, vowing to “fight and fight and fight.”

Helen’s blind devotion and unfounded optimism is certainly unique, and probably strains her credibility. But despite Don’s attempts throughout the picture to both elude and exclude her, she will be his saving grace, improbably rekindling in the final scene Don’s artistic vision and initiative. This scene, however, proves problematic on several levels. Coming off too rushed and too imposed, the whole thing stinks of studio control and intervention. What could have been a brutally staunch conclusion was instead compromised by the perceived indispensability of the happy ending.

Making matters more unsettling is the Capra-esque intrusion of a soldier of fate and fortune, represented here by Nat, the bartender. Nat appears in several scenes, in all but the last holding true to his indifference, ruthlessly ejecting Don from his bar in one scene. Yet here he is, not only flashing his first smile of the picture but bearing the gift of a newly repaired typewriter. It’s all too much.

“Sunset Boulevard"

In some films we’re given a view into a character’s descent into madness, while others glimpse utter madness, the distinction being that with the latter, the character is mad to begin with. Sunset Boulevard falls into this second category, giving us all of the fall and none of the rise of Norma Desmond, a silent screen diva whose film career fell silent just as the motion picture industry was going to sound. Its theme is a familiar one, though strangely not one that has suffered overexposure in Hollywood; and certainly, if it has, not until the later ‘40s and '50s, when a generation of filmmakers one and two generations removed from that "ancient” epoch presumably sought to honor these stars, many more whose careers had perished (like the fictional Ms. Desmond’s) than thrived; or, at the very least, to document a fast-flickering age that no doubt left an impression in the formidable years of these filmmakers.

Sunset Boulevard is interested neither in honoring nor documenting but, in the most cynical terms, sensationalizing the matter. Murder and madness are surely not the components of homage. They are the components of melodrama — and of Oscar recognition.

Director Billy Wilder presents, as he did in Double Indemnity, a dim and desolate southern California city (Double Indemnity was set in L.A., Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood), coupling film noir with “backstage” drama, while pitting hard-boiled cynicism against garish vulnerability. And it might be noted that while Joe (William Holden) embodies the first (hard-boiled cynicism), he also manages the second (garish vulnerability) simply by nature of his sordid predicament. Joe’s murder is not particularly tragic, and it isn’t portrayed to be — his mordant narration twice accompanies a shot of his dead body floating facedown in a swimming pool.

Norma Desmond’s descent is clearly intended to be tragic and her character sympathetic, even if the audience may have more regard for Joe. With the exception of one scene, Desmond spends the entirety of the film in the security of a vast, inordinate mansion whose late glory and disrepair parallels her own. In that single visit outside, to Paramount’s studios, she is as isolated from reality as she is in her Sunset Blvd. home. And just as Joe had taken her estate for abandoned when he first encounters it, her fans had taken her for dead when they encounter her.

Norma Desmond is unable to respect or even recognize Joe’s feelings, thinking only of her own needs, and seems to have no concern for her servant, who is, oddly enough, also her first husband, Max (portrayed by film director and silent-era star Erich von Stroheim). It is Max, once a noted movie director whose fame is even more hazy than Ms. Desmond’s, who supplies the film’s weirdest moments, particularly in the film’s climax, where he directs Norma Desmond’s final scene before hungry newsreel cameras.

“All About Eve” 

All About Eve was a short story, adopted for the screen. The film consequently has that literary air where all the characters seem too smart for their own good, and where lines come off sounding more scripted than spontaneous. The screenplay is heavy with simile and spleen, and everyone involved is given a generous share of each.

Addison DeWitt, the virulent theater critic played by George Sanders, most aptly assesses Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter) when he tells her: “You’re an improbable person, Eve. But so am I. We have that in common. Also a contempt for humanity, an inability to love or be loved, insatiable ambition - and talent. We deserve each other.”

Ambition and talent are Eve’s most visible attributes; by virtue of the latter, she initially convinces the characters on screen (and presumably the audience) that she is possessed of only the former. It’s an unassuming ambition, dressed drably in a raincoat and floppy hat, deferential and idolatrous. She insinuates herself into the inner circle of Margo Channing, played by Bette Davis, and just as easily endears herself to the group, notable among them, Ms. Channing’s assistant Birdie (Thelma Ritter), who comes to the girl’s defense but is the first to find Eve’s sincerity transparent. Margo is the second, just as the others, her romantic interest Bill Simpson (Gary Merrill) included, are falling fully under Eve’s manipulative spell. This causes rifts in both Bill and Margo’s relationship and, later, in playwright Lloyd Richards (Hugh Marlow) and Karen Richards’ marriage, before everyone has had his or her eyes opened.

It is the relationship that develops between critic DeWitt and Eve that offers the film’s most compelling moments. DeWitt is quick to see Eve’s cunning for what it is. But instead of banishing her, he intends to capitalize on it, catapulting her to prominence in the theater while collecting the compromising information with which he can blackmail her.

The film’s ending proves a bit troubling in its sheer melodrama and tidy suggestion that everything has come full circle. This final scene does make for an interesting study, however, in the striking contrast between Eve and an ambitious young girl, revealing as startling a difference in age and vitality as had the first scenes between Eve and Margo Channing.

All About Eve won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1950, as well as for Best Supporting Actor (Sanders).

“Body and Soul”

John Garfield’s Charlie Davis is not an entirely honorable character. He doesn’t stand up for what’s right and he doesn’t fight for pride or for his people, for love or friendship, but for money. And this is what makes Body and Soul the engrossing study it (mostly) is.

To be sure, the picture has its melodrama — hammy themes (notably the Johnny Green melody from which the film derives its title), the austere immigrant mother, the steadfast and scrupulous buddy, and plenty of kissing. But the film also has grit and seaminess, some striking photography, a stunning fight sequence and ultimately hard-won dignity and a breathtakingly concise ending.

What Body and Soul also has is a humane (for 1947) depiction of a black fighter, played softly, yet tautly, by Canada Lee. Also appearing, Lili Palmer as Davis’s girlfriend and fiance, and William Conrad. Abraham Polonsky earned an Academy Award nomination for his script, as did John Garfield for his rattling portrayal of the headlong pugilist.

Mohammed Ali and Peter Lawford appeared in a regrettable 1981 remake.