Category: Films

In the seminal August 1946 article which coined the expression ‘film noir’, French film-critic Nino Frank referred to five Hollywood movies as noirs: The Maltese Falcon (1941), Double Indemnity (1944), Laura (1944), Murder, My Sweet (1944), and The Lost Weekend (1945).  By coincidence in the same month, expatriate German cultural critic, Siegfried Kracauer, who had moved to America because of WW2, in Commentary magazine argued that Hollywood films like Shadow of a Doubt (1942), The Lost Weekend (1945), and The Stranger (1946), displayed a certain decadence.

In the first book on film noir, A Panorama of American Film Noir, 1941-1953, published in France in 1955, the authors, Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton, say that The Lost Weekend was only superficially a film noir, because “strangeness and crime were absent”.  In Andrew Spicer’s Film Noir (2002), The Lost Weekend does not rate a mention, and it does not merit an entry in Silver and Ward’s Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference (1992).

To my mind Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend is unequivocally a film noir. The film has a definite noir sensibility and explores the dark themes of existential angst and entrapment. While the story arc is about an alcoholic’s weekend bender which spirals out on to the edge of desperate criminality, and the portrayal of alcoholic addiction was strong enough for the liquor industry to offer Paramount a cool five million dollars to bury the picture, the underlying theme is the angst of failure, of being trapped in a life without purpose or meaning. Ray Milland is Don Birnam, a failed writer, hanging on a thread like the bottle of Rye hidden and hanging on a cord outside his bedroom window, and nothing can more powerfully express his life than when he tells his girl, Helen, why he drinks (and this excerpt from the script is testimony to the power of the screenplay penned by Wilder and long-time collaborator, Charles Brackett):

DON:
A writer. Silly, isn’t it? You see, in college I passed for a genius. They couldn’t get out the college magazine without one of my stories. Boy, was I hot. Hemingway stuff. I reached my peak when I was nineteen. Sold a piece to the Atlantic Monthly. It was reprinted in the Readers’ Digest. Who wants to stay in college when he’s Hemingway? My mother bought me a brand new typewriter, and I moved right in on New York. Well, the first thing I wrote, that didn’t quite come off. And the second I dropped. The public wasn’t ready for that one. I started a third, a fourth, only about then somebody began to look over my shoulder and whisper, in a thin, clear voice like the E-string on a violin. Don Birnam, he’d whisper, it’s not good enough. Not that way. How about a couple of drinks just to put it on its feet? So I had a couple. Oh, that was a great idea. That made all the difference. Suddenly I could see the whole thing – the tragic sweep of the great novel, beautifully proportioned. But before I could really grab it and throw it down on paper, the drink would wear off and everything be gone like a mirage. Then there was despair, and a drink to counterbalance despair, and one to counterbalance the counterbalance. I’d be sitting in front of that typewriter, trying to squeeze out a page that was halfway
decent, and that guy would pop up again.

HELEN:
What guy? Who are you talking about?

DON:
The other Don Birnam. There are two of us, you know: Don the drunk and Don the writer. And the drunk will say to the writer, Come on, you idiot.
Let’s get some good out of that portable. Let’s hock it. We’ll take it to that pawn shop over on Third Avenue. Always good for ten dollars, for another drink, another binge, another bender, another spree. Such humorous words. I tried to break away from that guy a lot of ways. No good. Once I even bought myself a gun and some bullets. (He goes to the desk) I meant to do it on my thirtieth birthday. (He opens the drawer, takes out two bullets, holds them in the palm of his hand.)

DON:
Here are the bullets. The gun went for three quarts of whiskey. That other Don wanted us to have a drink first. He always wants us to have a drink first. The flop suicide of a flop writer.

WICK [Don’s brother]:
All right, maybe you’re not a writer. Why don’t you do something else?

DON:
Yes, take a nice job. Public accountant, real estate salesman. I haven’t the guts, Helen. Most men lead lives of quiet desperation. I can’t take quiet desperation.

To complete the potent formula you have the cinematography of the great John F. Sietz, art direction by the brilliant Hans Dreier, and a deeply evocative score from Miklós Rózsa. Sietz’ fluid and lengthy takes, and moodily lit interior shots add depth to the ‘caged’ mise-en-scene of Don’s apartment: evoking a sense of desperation when Don ransacks the place searching for a bottle of Rye; and then terror at night when the DT’s take hold. On the streets of Manhattan, Sietz’ camera is in deep focus on harsh sun-lit streets of empty desperation where a staggering Don searches for an open pawn shop on Yom Kippur. Drieir elegantly furnishes Don’s tenement apartment with bookcases, sofas, lamps, and wall-hangings that disguise the places where he hides his booze. Rózsa’s score is persistent and dramatic, and he innovatively uses the early electronic instrument, the theremin, to produce an eerie and sinister motif for Don’s affliction.

Milland’s performance is masterful and he carries the picture.  Cast against type, his tranformation from a clean-shaven everyman to a dishevelled drunk hallucinating in a darkened room, where his eyes betray the depth of his obsessed decline,  is fully dramatic in it’s intensity. Jane Wyman as Helen, only comes into her own in the finale after she has lost a leopard-skin coat and her hair is wet and loose after being in the rain. Minus the coat and her perm she is a sensual and liberating influence. To Wilders’ and Brackett’s credit, the ending while positive remains open-ended: a relapse is just as likely as Don actually writing the great unfinished novel.  A solid contribution is made by b-actors Howard Da Silva and Doris Dowling.  Da Silva plays a sympathetic bartender who is a father-confessor figure ironically dispensing shots of rye instead of  Hail Maries. Dowling, who played the murdered wife in The Blue Dahlia (1946), is particularly engaging as a b-girl who is soft on Don. Veteran noir supporting actor, Frank Faylen, has a short but memorable appearance as a male nurse in a hospital drunks clinic. This harrowing sequence is shot in true noir style and with a frankness that works brilliantly to enlarge the drama from the particular to the social. The only weakness is a wooden portrayal of Don’s straight-laced brother.

This brings me to a particularly intriguing element in The Lost Weekend. Don is not a lecherous drunk: his desire for booze sublimates all other appetites, but interestingly Wilder weaves a stunning sexual frankness into the photoplay. The b-girl Gloria works out of Stan’s bar, and the nature of her work is up-front and personal. The male nurse, Bim, in the detox clinic is clearly gay, and his sermonising on the evils of drink has a surreal even sinister quality.

Early in the movie in an interlude told in flashback  Wilder’s sardonic humor takes center stage.  Don is at the Opera, and all on stage are drinking  champagne.  The whole sequence plays as a liquor ad tempting Don to leave the performance and try and grab hold of  a bottle of rye in the pocket of his checked-in overcoat.

A great Hollywood picture and a true noir.

Fritz Lang’s Human Desire, made after The Big Heat (1953), brings together the two stars from that film, Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame, in a relentlessly sordid noir melodrama of lust, infidelity, murder, and deceit played out on a wide screen.

The screenplay by Alfred Hayes, who worked on Lang’s Clash By Night (1952), is based on Emil Zola’s novel La Bête Humaine, which was first adapted for the screen by Jean Renoir in 1938 in one of the major films of the French poetic realism cycle, and starred Jean Gabin and Simone Simon. The poetic realism cycle of the late 1930s in France is considered by some film scholars a precursor to American film noir, and the eroticism of the Renoir film makes the strongest case for such a connection. That said, I see that little is to be gained by comparing Lang’s picture with Renoir’s.  Each film is grounded in a different social milieu, and Lang’s effort is more deterministic as befits a late cycle American noir.

For the first five minutes of the picture Lang introduces his story using shots of a locomotive-powered inter-urban passenger train barrelling through a flat landscape and one last tunnel before it reaches the ordered tangle of converging and diverging tracks at its destination.  From the first frame the evocative musical score of Daniele Amfitheatrof  establishes both an echo of the train’s rumbling progress and a dark counterpoint that portends the dark drama that will follow in the diesel’s wake.  Lang brilliantly uses the train’s inexorable passage and the determinism of the rails that brook no turning back or detour: fate is laid out in hard steel, and the switches and way-lays are beyond the driver’s control – all he can do is slow or speed his progress along an ineluctable pre-ordained trajectory – and even then he has a schedule to stick to.

Jeff Warren (Glenn Ford), a returning Korean war vet is shown as the driver in fast cuts to the cabin of the speeding locomotive. This  montage of scenes establishes a parallel metaphor. Jeff as the train driver is essentially passive and has no control over the train’s path, and in his life he is also happy to go with the flow, not to think too much about where his headed or why.

When he hits town his stated ambition is to keep a steady job, go fishing, and take in a movie.  A decent young girl who has been waiting for him declares herself as the ‘right woman’ to share this life, but he is passive and makes no serious effort to deepen the relationship.  Trouble starts when he meets the wrong woman on a train, soon after a murder has been committed in an adjoining carriage. Enter the erotic Gloria Grahame, sexually available and looking for a drink, but she settles for a cigarette and a languorous kiss between strangers. She is married to an insanely jealous older man, whom she does not love. But can she love any man? She is damaged goods and desperately needs help to escape not only the confines of her marriage but destroy the terrible secret hold her husband has over her. Situation dire.  Is she a femme-fatale, or a woman so used and abused by men from a young age that she is forced to use her sexuality as a weapon just to survive?   She lies but she doesn’t lie, she tells the truth but not the whole truth, and not all at once.

Grahame’s performance is powerfully convincing and Broderick Crawford is solid as the husband, but Ford lets the team down badly – rarely is his lack of depth so visible and so damaging. The strength of the climax requires more than Ford is capable of and the drama is dissipated to the extent that he needs to show terror, contempt, or real anger.

Even with this significant weakness, Lang and his cameraman, Burnett Guffey, are unrelenting in their unblinking gaze on the dark underside of modern American life.  Lang does not flinch from showing the ugliness and malevolence in a world brightly lit and without visible shadows: a man has been murdered behind a closed train compartment door – cut to a close-up of another man’s hand holding a bloodied knife wiping the blood off by rubbing the blade on his suit.

An under-rated film noir from director Fred Zinnemann, Act Of Violence is to my mind one of the great 40s noirs.  A strong story and fast-paced direction combine with brilliant moody photography from Robert Surtees to deliver a solid cinematic experience. The noir themes of the damaged war veteran and a protagonist desperately trying to break free of the past are woven into a dark scenario of entrapment.

The idyllic family life of a vet, Frank Enley (Van Heflin), living the good life in a small town outside LA but harboring a dark secret, is torn apart by another vet, Joe Parkson (Robert Ryan), with a gun and a terrible unrelenting need for vengeance.

Zinneman has compete control of his mise-en-scene. The movie’s opening scene showing a dark figure in long shot against NY harbor limping hurriedly towards a tenement in the rain at night, telegraphs the darkness to follow without a line of dialog. The tension is established when the man is seen in an apartment hastily packing a revolver and filling a suitcase before boarding a bus for LA. When he tracks down his target the bright world of a loving family, a successful business, community respect, and fishing on the lake, becomes progressively darker and dangerous, and the action moves from comfortable suburbia in daylight to dark threatening city locales at night. A fishing trip is cut short, but not before a strong wind across the lake occasions a sense of unease.  Back home, life for Frank’s unsuspecting young wife (Janet Leigh) and their small child is turned upside down when he returns a scared desperate man in terror of what lies outside his placid suburban garden.  First the lights go out, and then as each shade in the house is drawn down in turn, the dream is transformed into a nightmare.  A man with a limp shuffles outside and tries the doors of the house. In the darkness, a dripping kitchen tap which in the distraught silence is like the sound of a fast-beating heart, attests to the terror of the moment.  Later on with considerable irony, in the confines of an LA hotel fire-escape, Frank reveals to his wife the terrible truth behind this calamity, lamenting that there is nothing he can do to escape his pursuer.

Shortly after, in flight from Joe, Frank running desperately down dark desolate and dirty city streets, lands in a bar, where he hooks up with an aging b-girl played by Mary Astor. She takes him home and in a calculated act of ‘charity’ then takes Frank to a dive to meet a shyster lawyer who she says can help him. A plan is hatched with a goon to get rid of the pursuer for 10 grand, and Frank spends the night at the girl’s apartment. Next morning he comes to his senses and confronts what has to be done.

The final climactic scene is played out in long-shot and in deep focus, night-for-night on a railway platform.  The stuff noirs are made of.