The Lost Weekend

We're getting down to the bitter dregs of reviews I wrote for the "old" web-site, so, appropriately, here's another one directed by Billy Wilder, that—cautionary tale that it is—still manages to hold up through force of writing and some astringent direction.

The Lost Weekend (Billy Wilder, 1945) Don Birnam (Ray Milland) is an aspiring writer, drunk and sober, caught in a self-defeating loop of dependence and neurosis. His dependence on, and devotion to, alcohol has put him into a tail-spin of false confidence and self-loathing where his dreams are only out of reach because he can't pick himself off the floor. His "rye" attitude drowns his dreams and feeds his nightmares and without it, he's brittle, paranoid and living in the future, waiting for the shot-glass aimed at his destruction.

Sounds like so much fun. Sounds like a "speech" or a lecture coming on. Sounds like one of those movies "for your own good." Sounds like I'd rather have a drink. Fortunately, Billy Wilder's in charge, and yes, it's preachy at times, but most of the time, it's tough as nails and doesn't hold back on what a louse Birnam is without alcohol, and how pathetic he is with it.

But, it's not "Pity-Party: The Movie." Wilder makes it clear that Birnam is his own worst enemy and the alcoholism is just a symptom. At the movie's start with Birnam barely through a week of sobriety and packing for a trip in the clean country upstate New York with his brother (Phillip Terry), it's all he can do to keep from eyeing the bottle he has hanging out his apartment window. Milland's performance is brittle, officious—like Cary Grant without the stick pulled out. But, once his brother and girlfriend (Jane Wyman, pathetically co-dependent) are out of the way, Milland's eyes go snaky looking for alcohol in his apartment's old familiar places. Then, once he's got a burn going on, Milland is in full glory as an actor—an amazing performance, eerily reminiscent of Gloria Swanson's Norma Desmond four years in the future (and also directed by Wilder).

There are joys aplenty in this film, not just from some cracker-jack writing, but also Wilder's direction—putting Milland in front of a subtly discombobulating projection-screen for his long "wild turkey" chase to find a liquor store open on a Jewish holiday, the nightmare sequence of the alky ward and the subsequent "screamin' meemie" sequence in his apartment. There are also great performances by Howard Da Silva as a particularly wary bartender, and a wonderfully creepy performance by Frank Faylen, who is eerily complacent telling Birnam about the tortures of DT's.

Part tract, part horror film, but without the absurd homilies of Reefer Madness hysteria, The Lost Weekend lets you off with a warning this time.The Lost Weekend was a co-winner of the Grand Prix at the very first Cannes Film Festival (Ray Milland won Best Actor), and it went on to win Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Actor. Only two films in history have won both the Palme and the Best Picture Oscar.*

Premiere Magazine voted it one of it's "25 Most Dangerous Movies."**

* This was written many years ago—see the addition below—but since that time, it's only happened one other time since, with the Korean film Parasite in 2019. It's still a pretty damn rare happenstance.

* Paramount was pressured by both the alcohol industry AND temperance societies not to release the film. It did so on a very limited basis to critical acclaim, encouraging the tee-totaling studio to take a chance and open it in more theaters. I originally ended the piece by saying  "All that, and it has yet to be chosen for the National Film Registry.(What are they? Drunk?)" . It was voted into the National Film Registry in 2011

Love Story (1970)

Saturday is "Take Out the Trash" Day. And it's the last day of the Valentine Month.

Love Story (Arthur Hiller, 1970) What can you say about a 50 year old movie that manages to stay alive, despite being so much of its time? That it's maudlin, and saccharin, completely apolitical in a time of radicals, shamelessly tear-jerky, and ridiculously dishonest in its treatment of disease? That its success was completely manufactured by a marketing strategy so Machiavellian that it belied any of the inspiration that might go along with a phenomenon? That, what looked like a delicate butterfly to those enthralled with it, actually more resembled one of Disney's hippoes in a tutu.

Yeah, yeah. But, damn it, it works. (sob!)

At least, it did on me when it was first released.

Truth is, Love Story started as a screenplay that Erich Segal sold to Paramount.  Producer Robert Evans (to whom the credit for its success must assuredly go, as it was, literally, "a labor of love" for his then girl-friend Ali MacGraw). It was a low-budget film with no "buzz" and Segal was encouraged to write a "tie-in" novel to help boost its caché. Released on Valentine's Day, and bolstered by studio-engineered "block-buying," it made the New York Times Bestseller List, and, being slight and written in a punchy, simple style, mushroomed to become a "thing." The success of the movie was almost a sure-thing.

With the passage of time, the "phenom" aspect of it has disappeared and one can look at it without much prejudice. Arthur Hiller's direction is largely inelegant, combining a "caught-on-the-fly" feeling that was popular in the motorcycle-wake of Easy Rider (but without the pretentious editing tricks) with television style blocking. The film hinges on a score by Francis Lai (A Man and a Woman) that is used for a few "frolic-in-love" scenes. The acting varies in quality from professional turns by veterans Ray Milland and John Marley to the "do as little as possible and just be sincere" performance by Ryan O'Neal, and a functional one by Ali MacGraw, that started to show the cracks in her abilities that weren't apparent in Goodbye, Columbus.* 

Still, it jerks tears...if one has lost or (and probably more importantly) if one has not.  Imagined grief can sometimes be more powerful than the actual if one lives in a fantasy-world. Anyone who has lost someone to a lingering disease will be a bit perplexed by this aspect of Love Story and could righteously yell "bullshit." Roger Ebert went so far as to call what heroine Jenny succumbs to as "Ali MacGraw Disease" ("Movie illness in which the only symptom is that the sufferer grows more beautiful as death approaches"). Movie Magic in Hollywood. "She's going. I need pancake make-up STAT"

But, the part the most galling aspect of Love Story—The Book! The Movie!  The Phenomenon!—to me, personally, is its bracketing tag-line—"Love means never having to say you're sorry"—which would make a great Hallmark card if it wasn't such crap.** It would be easy if love meant never having to say you're sorry (certainly, it would be nice if it meant never having to say you're sorry that you've loved!) But the fact of the matter is that, if you're doing it right...or wrong...love really means saying you're sorry. It's common courtesy. And hopefully, you learn from having to say it, to change the behavior that demands an apology. Love cares. Love accommodates. Love humbles. And ('cause the Bible tells us so) love never dies.

Not in the real world.

Sorry.

* MacGraw and O'Neal were nominated for Oscars for Best Lead Performances that season, which seems less to do with merit than with studio electioneering. The film was nominated for 7 Academy Awards, but only won one...for Lai's score. It was Patton's year that year (and I'd argue that Jerry Goldsmith's lean score for that film has had more importance, both to its film and the legacy of film music, than Lai's). But, in a year of Patton, Five Easy Pieces and M*A*S*H, Woodstock, Let It Be, The Great White Hope, Women in Love, and Ryan's Daughter, it's a little difficult to see how Love Story could compete on any level. 

** Just found an article where even MacGraw says "it makes no sense."

From Peter Bogdanovich's What's Up, Doc?

Ministry of Fear

Ministry of Fear (Fritz Lang, 1944) So, here's the joke: a man walks out of an insane asylum and finds the world is crazier than he is.  

But, then, it usually is in Lang's films. The forces of evil or nature are such that we don't stand a chance unless our own better natures or our just plain "stick-to-it-ive-ness" allows us to survive and move through. And in Lang's directorial vision, the film frame is as much a trap as anything else, one that can be violated by unseen dangers that will drop into frame as if materialized by a malicious God out of nowhere to threaten those within it.

Ministry of Fear, based on a Graham Greene novel published the previous year, follows the dogged tracks of Stephen Neale (Ray Milland) as, having been released from Lembridge Asylum, he awaits a train to London and decides to pass the time at a charity fête supporting "The Mothers of Free Nations" where there is a booth for guessing the weights of cakes. After dropping a shilling on a wrong guess, his next stop is a fortune teller's booth, where he's astonished to find the woman giving him the exact weight of one of the cakes at the booth across the way. Neale can't resist using his knowledge (and testing the medium's prediction) and is astonished to find that he's guessed correctly and won.  

Everything's a little off-kilter in Fritz Lang's world.

Off to his train he goes, not knowing that his taking the cake has caused a commotion back at the tents and exhibits. The cake has "gone" to the wrong man, intended for another (Dan Duryea). On the train, Neale's cabin-mate is a blind man to whom he offers a slice. But, Neale is astonished to find that instead of eating his portion, he's crumbling it in his hands. The blind man is no blind man, and he attacks Neale, steals the cake and jumps off the train, pursued by Neale. But it is the time of the Blitz, and as the two chase through a field in the night, bombs begin dropping, targeting their train.

Okay. We'll stop there. But, already, things are not what they seem, people are not who they say they are, and nobody can be trusted...not even a damn pastry. It's not a cake, at all. It's a MacGuffin, the movie-making slang for the object that the players in a movie seek (and has a sliding scale of relevance and importance*). 

The subsequent fandango has Neale involved with "The Mothers of Free Nations," a seance, dodging bullets with the police and secret service, and all sorts who pretend to be something they're not. It's enough to drive a sane man crazy—if one hadn't already left an asylum.  That time in crazy-land might actually have steeled Neale for his subsequent adventure, which is no piece of cake. Lang was the master of the paranoid thriller (at least until Alan J. Pakula teamed up with Gordon Willis in the post-Watergate 70's) and his ordinary man caught in the extraordinary is the very DNA of a Hitchcock thriller—in fact, Ministry of Fear might have been one of those that "got away" from The Master of Suspense. With its seances, wolves in bureaucratic clothing and things that go boom in the night, all it needs is a national monument to be pure Hitchcock. It's a fun, terrible ride, well worth seeking out.

*