Capsule Reviews: The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Lost Weekend, Ladies of Leisure

The Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay Garnett, 1946)

On the basis of film noir, were I husband in the '40s, I'd never allow my wife to speak with another man. Not out of jealousy, mind you, merely self-preservation instinct. The Postman Always Rings Twice is a film about comeuppances both undeserved and well justified. A wife plots against her kind, if too-often drunken, husband to run away with a drifter, who has no qualms turning on her when the police put the squeeze on him. Double-crosses and the long-reach of karma arrive through cynical, razor-sharp dialogue and the always scheming faces of John Garfield and Lana Turner (even the wise prosecutor played by Leon Ames has his manipulating plots). Not as atmospheric as my favorite noirs, the Postman Always Rings Twice is nevertheless a finely crafted vision of a world where love and hate can invert on a dime and justice always catches up with the criminal, even if it has to fabricate a new crime to do so. Grade: B+

The Lost Weekend (Billy Wilder, 1945)

Marred by a simplistically moralizing final act, The Lost Weekend is nevertheless one of Wilder's most aesthetically inventive films and, for a time at least, a remarkably nonjudgmental view of a taboo that had yet to be seriously explored in cinema. From a crucial opening shot of a whiskey bottle danging outside an apartment to theremin-scored nightmares that detach our poor alcoholic from any semblance of sanity, Wilder's camera is devilish in its visualization of the despair of the alcoholic. But it's Ray Milland's agonized performance that continues to impress most of all. Milland talks fast, fidgets incessantly and constantly darts his eyes back and forth, not only seeking out the next drink but in paralyzing fear of being found out. He's the addict trying to "maintain" when everyone around him knows of his addiction and even strangers could never mistake his stumbling gait for anything less than substance abuse.

Wilder's writing is ripped from the headlines but nevertheless informed by his singular gift as a screenwriter. A lengthy monologue near the start gets at the comforting and inspiring effects of alcohol on the alcoholic, but Wilder adds comedy to it by cutting away from Don to his impatient brother and girlfriend ranting about them before returning to show Don still boring the bartender to death with his spiel. There are also some disturbingly felt scenes of true human terror, such as Don pleading with a ringing telephone to stop, not only to ease his hangover but because he assumes the person on the other end is the devoted girlfriend he cannot face. Scenes like that bring the film to the edge of greatness, and it's a shame the climax drops a top-tier Wilder picture down a rung. And who would expected the weakest part of a Wilder film, any Wilder film, to be its conclusion? Grade: B

Ladies of Leisure (Frank Capra, 1930)

Capra's first collaboration with Barbara Stanwyck makes a quick case for the fruitfulness of their relationship: she adds an edge his films lack without her, while he sentimentalizes her overpowering presence just enough to show how genuinely appealing Stanwyck is as a person, not merely a sexual virago. Capra's style is evident even in this early talkie, courtesy of Joseph Walker's backlighting of the ladies (finely honed in Stanwyck's poses for Ralph Graves' trust fund kid/aspiring painter) and tranquil nighttime shots that use diegetic sound to alternately romantic and suggestive effect. The two of them were also smart enough to ignore Harry Cohn's attempts to glamorize Stanwyck by instead making sure to capture the far more appealing realness of her look. This fine-tuning of Capra and Walker's long-running partnership is as rewarding as Stanwyck's performance, which, as Pauline Kael would later note of her effect on all melodrama, gave a naturalism to even the most saccharine treacle.

And God does this movie serve as much a demonstration of Capra's excesses as his skills. Capra came up with a first draft based on a Broadway play that screenwriter Jo Swerling found so awful he didn't even want to waste his time rewriting it, and even his best efforts fail to make the film feel like anything less than a pat emotional shortcut of a melodrama. But Capra also helped shape Stanwyck into the actress she became, catering to her first-take style even as he challenged and teased it to make sure that one take was as golden as it needed to be. And that care paid rich dividends: after misleading Stanwyck as to how Graves would play a confrontational scene, she had to play off a much tougher and angrier moment than she expected, and Stanwyck responds by tearfully holding two fingers up to Graves' mouth to silence him. The way she slowly drags her fingers down Graves' lips is more pained than any expression of hurt she just silenced with her morose gesture. A moment of visual poetry in a film that too often counteracts its unspoken grace with simple-minded plot progression and starched dialogue. Grade: C

P.S. Also enlivening this otherwise tedious narrative is Stanwyck's equally streetwise, slowly plumping roommate played by Marie Prevost. She gets the biggest laugh of the film out to dinner with a man who's gentlemanly compliments are belied by the look of concern on his face as she orders enough food to feed an entire speakeasy. She tops off the order with a cup of coffee, and the poor, dumb waiter has the thickness to asks "small or large?" Prevost picks herself up in almost aristocratic dignity and replies, "Do I look like a SMAHLLLL cup of coffee?" drawing out that "small" to hysterical effect.

Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959)

The only comedies that have stood up as agelessly as Some Cast It Hot are the works of Chaplin and Keaton, and they have the benefit of the universality of silent film. Billy Wilder's farce never lets up; even its deceptively action-packed opening is absurd (and proof of the director's capacity for visual humor in addition to his written wit), and every shot has something funny in it. The men-in-drag comedy has become an overplayed trope in the decades since the film's release, but Wilder's still stands head-and-shoulders above the rest. Unlike so many who followed in his footsteps, Wilder does not accept the premise as a joke so funny it needs no further work to make an audience laugh. Instead, he layers double- and triple-meanings into numerous lines, resorts to callbacks to make sure the crowd is paying attention and always parlays the easy joke of the hysterically transparent drag duo of Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon (Curtis looks better, if only because he's placed next to Lemmon's side-splitting hag) into a far craftier gag.

Those opening shots of a bootlegging hearse being chased by cops lead to the humorous image of liquor seeping out of a bullet ridden coffin and a host of funeral puns when the mobsters arrive at a converted funeral home. We then briefly meet musicians Joe (Curtis) and Jerry (Lemmon), who see that one of the patrons is taking out a badge and silently pack their instruments to make an escape before the raid comes crashing through the door. Later, they inadvertently witness the same gangsters who hired them gun down rival mafiosos in a garage, prompting the saps to run away from freezing, crime-ridden Chicago to sunny Miami by hiding among an all-girl band of musicians.

Lemmon and Curtis are, even by their standards, a scream. Curtis plays Josephine with a constant pout, as if the words "Well I never!" are constantly on "her" lips. In contrast, Lemmon interacts with people as Daphne with such braying, overbearing loudness it's a miracle he isn't discovered. Lemmon, who must have looked in a mirror after being dressed up as a woman, saw what a hideous creature he made and decided to go whole-hog. His wheezing laugh and toothy grin make Daphne vaguely off-putting (Lemmon kind of looks like the Joker from Batman when he smiles as Daphne), yet it's his deadpan frustration with Joe in private that makes for the funniest facial language. The faces Lemmon makes when he tells Curtis "You tore them" several times in rapid succession are so funny I continue to laugh until I have to wipe tears from my eyes.

Yet both Curtis and Lemmon nearly meet their match in Marilyn Monroe. Sugar, a ukulele player and singer, captivates both of the men to the point that they both nearly blow their covers trying to woo her. Monroe was reportedly a nightmare during production, but all one sees on-screen is that overpowering innocence peppered with sexual knowledge that made her such a knockout. She brilliantly uses Sugar's own dysfunctional sweetness to drive the men wild, perfectly positioning her body to lean in for sisterly whispers with "Josephine" and "Daphne," also subtly shoving her chest closer to them at every turn. Code limitations and Wilder's own intelligence prevent the now-requisite close-ups of the breasts, which makes the joke all the more funny; we know damn well what Joe and Jerry are really thinking, and watching Curtis and Lemmon try to keep their tongues from flopping to the floor makes for much funnier stuff than shot/reverse shot of cleavage and bug eyes.

Some Like It Hot works because, like all great broad comedies, it gets progressively zanier and more ridiculous as it goes. Wilder doesn't halt his film to get across some message, nor does he blow his best gags early: as funny as the train ride is, with its sexual tension between the two men and unsuspecting women swarming all over them in sororal friendliness, things go off the rails in Miami. Seeking to play to Sugar's dreams of marrying a kind millionaire, Joe adopts the persona of the heir to the Shell Oil fortune, speaking with a devastatingly funny and accurate Cary Grant impersonation. Meanwhile, Jerry finds himself the object of a lecherous old playboy's (Joe E. Brown) affections, despite how obviously mannish Daphne looks and how openly Jerry disdains this Osgood Fielding III. In the film's best sequence, Wilder moves with increasing tempo between Joe and Sugar on their date and Jerry and Osgood on theirs as both leads play hard to get. Of course, Joe does it to drive Sugar wild; Jerry does it to get this old man off him.

I love how everything in this film is blatantly contrived and silly, yet Wilder still takes the time to set up something as clever and well-paced as that oscillation between Joe's and Sugar's blossoming love and the lunacy of Jerry actually getting into his date with Osgood. The unmissable gags (the cross-dressing, Osgood's oblivious groping, the return of the mobsters under the guise of meeting for a society of Italian opera lovers) lose none of their luster over the years for the more low-key, sly comedy sprinkled throughout. For instance, I love that Wilder does not call explicit attention to the uselessness of Prohibition even though he shows everyone in the film constantly within reach of some kind of alcoholic beverage. I also wondered if Wilder was being a bit naughty when one of the musicians butts into a conversation Daphne and Sugar are having in Jerry's bed on the train by asking "Is this a private clambake or can I join?"

Some Like It Hot notably features as the AFI's pick for the funniest film of all time, and it seems every current evaluation of the film weighs it against that standard. It is to the film's credit that it continues to hold up under such scrutiny. I don't know that I would say it's the best comedy ever; for my money, Wilder's own The Apartment is the best-written film ever made. But, pound for pound, it may be funnier than Wilder's masterpiece. Not a single scene fails to make me laugh, either through a callback, a visual cue, a razor-sharp exchange or the terrific body language of the actors*. Culminating in perhaps the finest of Billy Wilder's treasure trove of indispensable last lines, Some Like It Hot is a farce for the ages, the best distillation of Wilder's early days as a screwball writer for other directors into the directorial craft he'd by then honed through his noir work. I don't return to the film as often as I do Wilder's more cynical works, perhaps thinking in the absences that the movie won't hold up as well upon a repeat viewing. Yet whenever I sit down with this film, I laugh as hard as I did the first time. Forget about the film's remarkable lack of dated material (especially given the clichéd, stereotypical pitfalls of the premise); the fact that it gets funnier with every viewing is the greatest testament to its legacy.


*For me, the best bit of physical acting comes when Jerry, who earlier seriously entertained the idea of dressing in drag to get the Florida job to offset his and Joe's crippling debts, realizes that Joe is finally agreeing to the plan after they witness the murders and need to escape. The slack, hungry and confused look on Lemmon's face slowly tightens, his face pulling in thirds. First, the eyebrows go up in surprise, then the cheekbones raise in understanding. Finally, the mouth upturns in approval and satisfaction with Joe's solution to their problem.

Ace in the Hole

By most accounts, Billy Wilder became a director not so much because he was interested in the visual craft of filmmaking but because he felt it the best way to ensure that what he wrote in his scripts would been seen in the final cut. Yet he's still earned himself a place in the pantheon of film directors, if for no other reason than he put Billy Wilder scripts on the big screen. Regardless, Wilder's visual talents, though certainly secondary to his calling as a writer, have been underrated by many; his style, as honed and sharp as his dialogue, serves the same purpose as illustrative passages in novels, to communicate setting and character in a way that speech cannot, complementing story and action with engaging prose.

Consider the first scene of Ace in the Hole, Wilder's disturbingly prescient look at media circuses. Chuck Tatum, disgraced big-city journalist, is stuck in New Mexico with a broken-down car. We see him being towed, a visualization of his uselessness and dilapidation, yet Tatum sits in his car lackadaisically reading his morning paper, having turned the ignominy of being unable to fix his vehicle into making the tow driver into some sort of chauffeur. Without a word, Wilder establishes the character who will subsequently walk into the office of the Albuquerque paper he was reading and proudly crow that he's a "$250-a-week newspaperman" and doesn't look a touch humbled when he offers to work for $50, even $45, as a result of his numerous firings for slander, alcoholism and other issues. Played by Kirk Douglas, Tatum exudes even more sleazy arrogance; Douglas is the reigning monarch of cinematic slime, capable of playing the noble hero (both of his films with Stanley Kubrick) but in his element playing, in his own words, "sons of bitches." He practically seeps manipulation and avarice, acting traits he somehow passed on to his son Michael, who may be the last great anti-hero.

Tatum plans to stay in Albuquerque just until he can latch onto a story to propel him back to the big leagues, at which point Wilder abruptly cuts to the cocksure journalist still stuck in town a year later. Riding out with an idealistic young photographer, Tatum still maintains his bravado but can scarcely contain the look of hunger when the two happen upon a small town where a man has become trapped in a local mine while excavating Native American relics. No one on the scene will enter the unstable cave, but Chuck immediately volunteers to enter. Upon finding the man, Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict), Tatum displays a heretofore unseen soft side, reassuring the trapped man and speaking in a higher register as if parodying the stereotypical "'50s voice" of the fresh-faced innocent. When Chuck suddenly brandishes a camera, however, he exposes his facade: he just wants this man for the story, and the smile he gives Leo is genuine, but it comes not from concern for the man but a vision of the attention his byline will receive when he starts writing about this jackpot.

Made in 1951, Ace in the Hole came out in a time when radio had set in motion a shift in newspaper writing, away from the yellow journalism wars that actually created real conflicts at the turn of the century: with radio and -- as the decade wore on -- television satisfying the demand for sensationalist news by providing sight and sound to items that always relied on dramatic thrust, papers refined their approach, sharpening writing to concise, factual bursts with just enough style to make sure people read the substance. More than ever, you could open up a paper and trust that you were reading a true story and an important one.

Into this world Wilder introduces Chuck, a 21st century muckraker having traveled back in time to wreak havoc upon the public trust. Upon reaching the Albuquerque paper, he looks at an embroidered cloth reading "Tell the Truth" hung over a desk with such mocking smugness it's a wonder he can even speak kindly of it sarcastically. He immediately turns Leo's situation into national news, aware that, if he can stretch the story into a human interest series, not only can he attract the attention of the major papers, he might put himself in for a Pulitzer. So, he commits what must surely be one of the most monstrous acts in cinematic history, one committed not by a lurking vampire or a mustache-twirling bandit but a man charged with informing the public: he strong-arms the engineer tasking with digging through to Leo to use a procedure that will take six days rather than a far quicker one that will have the man out and safe in six hours. Before you can even wrap your mind around the sheer, unabashed evil of that action, Chuck then coerces the seedy local sheriff (played by a deliciously greasy Ray Teal) into granting him exclusive access to Leo, thus giving him all the relevant stories. In one fell swoop, Wilder anticipates the sensationalist, gossip-driven media climate in which we find ourselves today, and he does not limit the attack to Chuck alone: when other reporters arrive and find themselves blocked by the authorities, their outrage seems to bubble forth from their jealousy that Chuck got there first. They don't give a damn about Leo, either, but they want their share of the circulation-increasing story. "We're all in the same boat," one journo coos to encourage Chuck to drop the blockade. "I'm in the boat," Chuck replies, "you're in the water."

Yet the most damning aspect of Wilder's misanthropy is how he prevents his story from playing as a mere screed. He does not make Tatum into a symbol so much as simply the eruption of dormant public desire for thrilling news. Critics at the time, who all would have been newspaper writers, lambasted the film for its cynicism, but would any of them deny that, if one didn't know what strings Chuck was pulling behind the scenes, that Leo's story is truly compelling? Would any one of them not read such a story -- the scenario of Leo being trapped was itself taken from the real story of one W. Floyd Collins, whose unfortunate mishap in a Kentucky cave in 1925 won writer William Burke Miller the Pulitzer -- and not be moved? No, Wilder undercuts Tatum's vile nature by making him a writer who knows what makes great news.

And boy does this story make for great news. After the first article runs in the paper, a few curious tourists show up, speaking of offering their concerns but also willing to spend money and gawk at the site. By the end of the week, thousands have converged upon the excavation site, and a literal carnival has sprung up to match the media circus. It has often been said (rightly) that gossip tabloids and the like only cater to a market fueled by public demand. If one paper refuses to engage in the current fascination with celebrity and tearing down celebrity, another five will shove their way into the gap and make money that papers can't afford to lose. We are all in this together, and when even the kind, innocent young photographer is drawn into the party atmosphere and crows that his photos might earn him a spread in Life of Look, Wilder goes far beyond any facile summary of his cynicism and into a terrifyingly realized realm that looks only more acute today.

If the shadows weren't a big giveaway -- and Wilder was one of the great masters of shadow -- that Ace in the Hole is as unorthodox yet bona fide noir as Sunset Boulevard, then the character of Leo's wife, Lorraine (Jan Sterling), proves it. Chuck is a singular anti-hero in noir, and he requires an equally original femme fatale, but Lorraine delivers in spades. When Chuck heads over to meet her while working on his first story, the young bleached blonde reveals that she's planning to use the opportunity of her husband being trapped to leave him. Chuck convinces her to stay because he needs her looking supportive to sell what must end a happy tale for maximum effect with the readers, and he sways her by pointing out how much money she can make off the visitors.

Together, Tatum and Lorraine make for a despicable pair, each filled with as much loathing for the other as they are for everyone around them. Even Tatum marvels at Lorraine's open hatred for her humdrum husband and her desire to escape him for a more rowdy life, disgusted by her glee over the matter. She smiles like a schoolgirl telling him of all the cash she's taken in, and Tatum tells her to wipe the smile off her face before going back out to face a crowd that will notice her joy. To ensure she does, he slaps her twice with such unexpected force -- there is no pullback, and Wilder only shows Sterling's face as Douglas' hand moves back and forth across it, preventing us from reading his face and anticipating the strike -- that you feel it too. This pattern of abuse turns Lorraine against Tatum, and whatever trace of vulnerability, however perverse, existed in her is purged by the time she comes to him a few minutes later and quietly but forcefully tells the writer, "Don't ever slap me again."

Sterling forms a key foil to Douglas, matching the acrobatics of his over-the-top facial expressions with an endothermic scowl. She moves with an alien stiffness, playing the part of the shocked spouse until she gathers enough cash to satisfy her before leaving. Her sinister plotting anchors Douglas and enhances both performances because the actor is free to ham it up, to visualize the sheer madness of the public fascination with death and their belated wish for everything to turn out OK, while Sterling reveals that such behavior is not the product of people like Tatum but of her. People like her start the ball rolling with their non-expressive reactions, and it snowballs until someone like Chuck has to project of all of the pent-up emotion just to vent the collective schadenfreude and avarice of the public.

Naturally, one expects good writing from a Billy Wilder film, but this may be his leanest work. Entire characters can be defined in a single line, such as Tatum pointing out that the head of the Albuquerque paper wears both a belt and suspenders, signifying that he is overly cautious and wary. Later, Chuck encourages Lorraine to go to church to keep up appearances, but she replies, "I don't go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons." These cast-off bits of wry observation fit the tone of a film about journalism: concise but powerful, telling you everything you need to know in a few sentences. (Wilder, like nearly all the great film writers of the classic age, started out as a newspaperman himself.)

It's a miracle this film got made, even with the wild success of Sunset Blvd. essentially guaranteeing Wilder whatever project he wished to make. The Hays Code office intervened, of course, forcing the director to soften the corruption of the town sheriff, but this is one of those films where you're glad someone stepped in and made sure the bad guy got what was coming to him. Chuck Tatum could very well have gotten away with all this today, plagued by a small pocket of guilt he could drink away upon returning to New York. Instead, he bleeds out just after Leo finally dies, stabbed in the gut by Lorraine after abusing her one too many times. Having finally felt some pang of remorse for his actions, Chuck nevertheless is beyond forgiveness, and he dies a moral Antichrist, his death damning his profession for all time instead of pointing the way to salvation. As ever, Wilder saves the best for the very last, as Tatum staggers back into that local paper for one final moment of self-indulgent triumph. "I'm a thousand-dollar-a-day newspaperman," he gasps defiantly at Mr. Boot, "But you can have me for nothing." Then, this wretched beast finally collapses, falling down dead and staring at the camera into the audience who will cluck and rage over the movie then fulfill its dire vision. Billy Wilder was the master of endings, but none stick with you quite like this. And thank God; one such case is haunting enough.