How lost is this Academy-Award-winning film ?

This is a review of The Lost Weekend (1945)

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27 January (watched on DVD)

This is a review of The Lost Weekend (1945)

Probably, more of us will be familiar with the humane portrait of drinking, gluttonous and bawdy Sir John Falstaff than with the soberly (pun intended) unremitting world of Don Birnam in Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend (1945). Yet it won Academy Awards for Ray Milland (as Birnam, who is almost never off the screen), Wilder as director and co-writer (with Charles Brackett), and as best picture (as well as nominations for Miklós Rózsa's towering score (Rózsa only lost the award because of winning it himself for that of Spellbound (1945)), and for editing and cinematography).

To-night, the dark experience of Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend (1945) - Miklós Rózsa's score with saw-like theremin, and Ray Milland drunk
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 26, 2014

The theremin cut through like a saw in Miklós Rózsa's wonderful soundtrack to The Lost Weekend (1945) - deserving of its own Academy Award.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 26, 2014

Sir John is a comic character (although Orson Welles introduces or emphasizes light and shade in his Chimes at Midnight (1965)), Birnam is more complex, and we see his complexity in detail first when the duet with chorus Libiamo ne' lieti calici in a performance of La Traviata starts to get to him, but he is driven to the humorous situation of having to wait for the owner of a leopard-skin coat (Jane Wyman as Helen St. James), because their cloakroom tickets have become confused. As Sir John might, to get some sack from Mistress Quickly, he knows how to turn on the charm, having gracelessly thrown her umbrella at her feet when asked for it, but is torn between the bottle of rye whiskey in his pocket and her kind invitation to a cocktail party, until the former gets smashed (and it remains unclear whether she buys his alibi of having wanted to take it to a sick friend).

Helen's faith in Don, and why it lasts as long as it does (as does that of his curiously named brother Wick), almost certainly has to be a given, for it is not fleshed out, nor is some of the recent past. For some, there may be clues as to whether the New York setting is contemporary, but, if it is, one wonders how Wick and Don avoided the draft. In all honesty, though, Wick's job, how he manages to support Don and him, and where they are supposed to be headed for a long weekend are peripheral (as long as one realizes that 'the cider' talked of there is just apple juice, because US usage calls our cider 'hard cider'). The title, too, can remain ambiguous, whether meaning the weekend that Don does not participate in, his being lost, or how he 'loses' it - perhaps, even, that it is lost as seen from the future that the ending promises.

Don has tried to outsmart Wick at the outset, and, at the end, he tries to conceal his intentions from Helen, but both times his desire is thwarted by chance, that of, respectively, where Wick's tossed cigarette ends up, and the view afforded Helen in the mirror. In the middle part of the film (when he is on his own, with only Nat's professional company (brought to us by Howard Da Silva) to serve him), a reciprocal arrangement between pawnbrokers to close for Yom Kippur has him walking exhaustedly for blocks, checked off by the lamp-post road-markers, before finding out that there is a pattern.

In a way, It's a Wonderful Life (1946) is a mini re-run of the sort of degradation, despair and delinquency that Don is led into at the bottom until he meets a man calling himself Bim (Frank Faylen), and hears a few truths that, whatever has happened to Don before, he has been hiding from himself : Bim has seen it all before, is matter of fact, and dismisses Don's future, and that strikes home as clearly as if he had suddenly pictured himself in the downward path of Hogarth's 'Gin Lane'.

According to Wikipedia, Wilder had worked with Raymond Chandler on Double Indemnity (1944), which had sent Chandler back to drink, and Wilder had chosen to make the film to hold the mirror up to Chandler. In the film, at any rate, Bim holds a mirror up to Don, a message that eventually leads him to the film's two possible endings.

Wilder and Milland pull no punches in showing a man who will beg, demand and even steal for drink, with only the touches of charm to lighten him that seem to have kept his brother and girlfriend loyal to him. But the magic that they work, ably assisted by Rózsa's soundtrack, is to keep us loyal to him, because we have heard about how early success with writing, then over-confidence, then setbacks and the lure of a drink to steady the nerves have reeled him in : he knows all this, because he tells it to Nat as a story in the bar, but that does not help him know it in a way that offers a way out of it.

Then, and since, countless experts and other writers have given accounts of how to beat an addiction such as to alcohol (or gambling or smoking), and maybe they would have different views about what would work for Don to do it, but there is no denying that the image that we have of a man in thrall to whiskey is compelling, frightening and vividly alive, and the film merits its place in the US National Film Registry as an uncompromising look at the devastating effects of alcoholism, and to be described by The Library of Congress as culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.

Shortly after, and in the film adaptation with Albert Finney in 1984, we have Malcolm Lowry's uncompromising story of a man with a deeper debt to alcohol than Don, but, for this film, it ends as it does, with a share of ambivalence (seemingly more evident in Charles R. Jackson's original novel), and much relief. It must be open to put other meanings on the cravings that drive Don, and where they have come from, but one can also just take the film as it comes.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Made in Maida Vale

This is a review of Dial M for Murder (1954)

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2 August

This is a review of Dial M for Murder (1954)

* Contains spoilers *

Maybe it's the 3-D of Dial M for Murder (1954), but the use of stock footage of the Queen Mary (arriving) in port, and the street in Maida Vale where Ray Milland (Tony Wendice) and Grace Kelly (Margot, his wife) live, seemed relatively clunky to me, unused as I am to much 3-D : I was certainly glad that the camera did not pan more than a few times, because I really did not find it a pleasant experience¹.

I mention these aspects because they do not typify the film as it proceeds, which is almost exclusively confined to an interior - a bit as is Rear Window (1954)². It is therefore no surprise to know that this chamber work was adapted by Frederick Knott from his play, and to see how the character that Milland brings to the role is a malignant presence that dominates the modest flat in and through his manipulation of Swann (Anthony Dawson), Margot, and Chief Inspector Hubbard (John Williams).

This makes for an obsessive, almost incestuous, film. I thought that I remembered it from boyhood t.v. - as so often, such memories are unreliable*** (itself a theme of the film), but, whatever I imagined, I recalled that knotted tension when a bungled plot is twisted to serve equal ends, waiting with anxiety for it crumble, and despairing at justice when it does not.

Thinking afterwards, I am convinced that Tony must have been a strategic opponent at tennis, maybe a chess-player, and that he knows how to force errors to his advantage. However, on reflection, I do not believe that - as it appears - he wholly originates his rescue on the hoof, but rather had thought through other significant moves.

And yet, if he were a tragic hero, Tony has the flaw of relying too much on his assumptions about the world in each eventuality - that his watch will not fail him, that the phone-booth will be unoccupied, that Swann will follow his instructions exactly... Lady Luck, as they say, plays right into his hands, though, when the utter weakness of his intention that Swann should have been thought to enter through the French window is exposed by the forensics.

Of course, the galling thing, which is where Hitchcock and Knott earn their reward, is that he deserves to fail for having failed to think things through, and our smouldering resentment turns to hatred when Margot stands condemned, effectively alone. We expect things of Mark as a crime writer, and he appears to disappoint, despite the fact that a few things that did not seem to work were evident to me⁴ (they were not envisaged by the nonetheless clever script, with the maverick streak given to Hubbard).

Partly because Tony has to steer her to her peril, at which he shows himself a master when Margot will not relinquish her latch-key (and we can but guess at the behaviour of which she complained to Mark (Robert Cummings) and which led to their affair), Kelly cannot shine, but must be relatively weak and cowed, and she sobs an incoherent account of things to her indifferent husband (already working out his moves). Plus this was only the 1950s, which is why the affair is considered in a bad light according to the public standards of the day - and why a husband can speak for a woman perfectly capable of speaking for herself and put the police off questioning her till the morning.

Interestingly, though, there is nothing shown to suggest that Tony specifies the manner in which he will have Swann do the murder that blackmailing him has commissioned, which could have failed in ways less capable of remedy : a knife, a gun with a silencer, for example. (Louis Malle's Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (1958) shows another operation of failure, and it would be interesting to know how, if at all, Hitchcock influenced him.)

The brutality of the intended and actual methods of death is surely not unintended, with the chosen method of the assassin, and (for Hitchcock) the Freudian significance of the emasculating scissors - the discomfort of 3-D glasses was worth it just for the moment when Kelly's arm seems to extend beyond the end of the desk and into the auditorium, but otherwise it awkwardly tended to bring into a sharp foreground intervening objects (a row of bottles, at one point). That said, the consequence (as was that of moving a bed into the living-room) was stressing the cramped accommodation, and, with it, the extent to which Tony wanted money to be able to live better.

Whatever the reality of the criminal process in that decade, a trial is concluded in a small compass of time, symbolized by a judge's talking head, and even an appeal. Again, we wonder at what Mark is doing, but need not do so much longer, with his sharp confrontation of Tony of what he could do to save Margot. Since this is a film, and not real life, we can be left in doubt what Mark suspects in saying all this, and, more miraculously (when eventually we realize it), we have Hubbard trying the pieces in a different configuration in the background.

Hitchcock's judgement of the suspense, in collaboration with that of his screenwriter, is masterly throughout, but especially in the closing reel : apart from the drama between Margot and her assailant, with Tony holding on the line (not having, I would gather, pressed Button B), the drama is all in objects, where they are, and in words. And yet it does not ring too ill of a play put on the screen, because the limitations of the physical space add to the palpability of what is happening.

The ending itself, where Kelly can finally be cut off the rein with a wonderful speech that describes exactly the disabling and desert place that is deep depression (whereas what Mark says to her about a breakdown, as if a positive thing, rings strangely in our ears), takes us almost to the so-said wire, with Hubbard narrating Tony's puzzlement, and a closing cunning and curiosity that is his doom.

Tony, however, is remorseless, only offering the victims, with their shredded nerves and with his bravado, a drink. Hubbard, who was only playfully offered one, plays with his moustache : Milland and he really have had the scope to shine in this work, with, certainly, Swann a bit like a rabbit caught in the head-lamps, and perhaps also, though they have their moments late, Kelly and Cummings.

As has been observed, the plotting is not perfect, but Milland is beautifully hateful, and Hubbard delightfully his nemesis, taking due offence at the manners of people who do not take his hat and coat from him, and possibly seeking, if only for that reason, to worst his foe, by fair means and foul.

For this reason, I cannot quite agree with TAKE ONE's reviewer that this is 'an enjoyable, if unexceptional, entertainment' : in fairness, since I am quoting that phrase out of context, I suppose that it must depend what one's scale is, and whether one has a scale for Hitchcock that 'sets the bar high', because Dial M is probably not, as he says, the masterpiece that it was proclaimed to the world to be.



End-notes

¹ Presumably where all this talk of nausea and 48 frames per second comes from...

² Same year, same actress, and, in Milland, an actor not unlike, in appearance, James Stewart from that other film. It was one of five that were taken off release and only resurfaced in the 1980s, but nothing suggests that Stewart could have brought the smooth venom and malice of Milland to Tony.

³ Perhaps the image of the relays operating at the telephone exchange caused me to confuse this film with one where the mode of operation of that technology is crucial to the detection of the identity of a culprit.

⁴ Spoiler alert :

(1) When Tony steals Margot's handbag to obtain the undestroyed letter, it is quite clear that whoever had taken it could have had any number of latch-keys cut - all that we have to answer this point, and therefore to establish the number of keys, is Margot's plaintive insistence that she got the key back, which is no assurance when the bag was not restored to her for a fortnight. What prudent person would not have ensured that the lock was changed (after all, she definitely knows that the bag contained something with her address on it), and how and why did Tony and she manage with only one key between them in the interim ?

(2) Tony sends Margot ransom-notes that ask for £50. It is unclear what Margot entrusts to Mark at the opening, other than the notes, but there might be evidence in the form of her unclaimed letter when she goes to the premises in Brixton (it is also uncertain how she would have proved herself the sender). Even if not so, she might be able to show that the putative blackmailer took no interest in securing his reward (in his account of events, I do not recall that Tony offered his accomplice a reason, but the film requires a high level of concentration not to miss anything).

(3) In any event, a blackmailer who does not ask for £1,000 straightaway, and only seeks £50 - how does one explain asking so little in the first place, as the ransom-notes would show ?

(4) If Margot has a motive in faking an attempt on her life to cover up, what is it in taking Swann's in the first place ? If she intends it and wishes to silence him, she leaves the troublesome letter on his person, and, if not, in what circumstances does a man end up with a pair of scissors in his back and falling on them ?


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