Some Like It Wilder

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Some Like It Wilder Page 12

by Gene D. Phillips


  Don arrives at the cloakroom, only to discover that he has been given the wrong coat check, and he must wait until the opera is over to set things right. When Helen appears in the lobby, she and Don exchange coat checks, so that he gets his trench coat and she gets her leopard-skin coat. With that, the flashback ends. “The Wilderian ‘meet-cute’ packs a pungent punch,” writes Richard Armstrong, and it is, of course, a bit of an homage to Lubitsch.30

  In the course of Don’s chat with Nat, the bartender pointedly suggests that Don consider drying out. Nat’s philosophy is that, for an alcoholic, “One drink is too many and a hundred are not enough.” But Don disregards Nat’s advice. “I’m on a merry-go-round,” Don answers, “and I have to ride it all the way.” Don goes back to his apartment, where he finishes off a bottle of liquor he has concealed in the chandelier. The next day he endeavors to begin his confessional novel, The Bottle, but he cannot get past page 1. Don despairs of ever rekindling his writing career, and he decides to drown his sorrow in booze. He aims to pawn his typewriter for money to buy some more liquor. He is, in essence, willing to sacrifice his career to his addiction. But Don’s painful trek up Third Avenue carrying his typewriter is all in vain, because the pawnshops are closed in observance of Yom Kippur. Later on, however, Don succeeds in snatching a bottle of booze, gets smashed all over again, and falls down a flight of stairs. He comes to later in the city alcoholic ward at Bellevue.

  “Bim” Nolan (Frank Faylen), the nurse who attends Don, is a gay man who gives homosexuality a bad name. He is a leering, malevolent individual who enjoys taunting his charges about the horrors of delirium tremens (d.t.’s).31 “This is Hangover Plaza,” he tells Don. “Your blood is straight applejack—96 proof. There will be a floor show, when the guys . . . start seeing little animals. That stuff about pink elephants is the bunk; it’s little animals, like beetles, that they see.” Bim reminds Don that “delirium is a disease of the night” just before he switches off the lights and leaves Don to suffer the tortures of the damned with the other inmates of the ward. “I did manage to portray the orderly at Bellevue’s alcoholic ward as a homosexual, even though homosexuality was a taboo subject in American films in those days,” Wilder commented. “I directed the actor how to play his role as a homosexual. The film industry’s censor couldn’t nail me on it, however, because I had been subtle about it, and he couldn’t pin anything down to which he could object. The cognoscenti, those who looked and listened, got the implications of the scene.” Wilder laconically commented, “Those were different days.” Indeed they were; by 1970, he was able to make homosexuality an issue in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. But in 1945, Judy Cornes reminds us, “audiences were not prepared for any references to homosexuality in mainstream Hollywood films.”32

  Don manages to escape from Bellevue the following morning. He makes it back to his apartment, where he suffers hallucinations of “little animals” resulting from d.t.’s, just as Bim said. In this harrowing scene, Don fantasizes that a mouse is sticking its head out of a hole in the plaster on his apartment wall. Suddenly a bat swoops down and pounces on the helpless rodent, and blood oozes down the wall. In the grim world of the alcoholic portrayed in the film, there is no place for pretty pink elephants.

  Gordon Jennings, head of the special effects department at Paramount, was responsible for creating Don’s hallucination. In fact, he was given a special Academy Award at the Oscar ceremony in 1944 for his technical achievements. Jennings sometimes borrowed gimmicks that were used to produce visual tricks in stage plays. He created Don’s delirious fantasy of the ravenous bat attacking a hapless mouse by an old-fashioned method: he employed a mechanical bat attached to thin wires, which are invisible on the screen, zeroing in on a real mouse. Seen today, the sequence is as frightening as it ever was.

  Wilder had initially planned to include other surreal images in Don’s hallucination. But Brackett worried that he was going overboard with German expressionism in the sequence. Wilder said that Brackett warned him that, if he made Don’s vision any more grotesque than it already was, the sequence “would be conspicuous and out of style for this picture; and worse, people might laugh. So I settled for the bat and the mouse.”33

  As the apparition fades, Don is cowering in a chair, screaming at the predatory bat, when Helen bursts into his apartment. He pulls himself together, and before Helen realizes what he is up to, he seizes her leopard-skin coat and disappears out the door. Don is convinced that he is at the end of his rope and proceeds to pawn Helen’s coat to obtain a gun with which to commit suicide. Ironically, this is the same coat that brought them together.

  By the time Don returns to the apartment, Helen has figured out that he has swapped her missing coat for a gun, and she beseeches him not to end his life. At this point Nat, the bartender, shows up at Don’s door. He has come by to return the battered typewriter Don carelessly left behind in the bar after he failed to hock it. Nat assures Don that “it still writes pretty good,” even though it has been kicked around. He implies that the same can be said of Don himself: Don too can still write, despite what he has been through.

  After Nat leaves, Helen coaxes Don to write a novel about his lost weekend, in hopes that putting some words down on paper may keep him off the bottle. She finally convinces him that he has a powerful personal experience to write about; Don promises her that he is “going to put this whole weekend down, minute by minute.” As an emblem of his resolve to stay on the wagon, he douses a cigarette in a glass of whiskey. From now on Don intends to be running on empty. With that, Don begins to punch the keys of his portable.

  The opening shot is reversed at the end of the film so that the camera pans away from Don’s apartment and back to the New York skyline. Don says, in voice-over on the sound track, “Out there is that great big concrete jungle. I wonder how many others there are like me, poor bedeviled guys . . .”

  Cornes comments, “The movie ends . . . with an upbeat note, far different from Charles Jackson’s original, grittier, more realistic ending.”34 Unlike the movie’s Don Birnam, the novel’s Don Birnam implies that his self-destructive pattern of behavior will probably continue. He even minimizes the agony that he endured during his recent binge. “This one was over and nothing had happened at all. Why did they make such a fuss?”35 Cornes is not the only critic who finds the film’s more conventional ending unsatisfying. Stephen Farber maintains that Don’s new lease on life is not consistent with the rest of the movie. “Wilder’s eleventh hour conversions are troublesome,” writes Farber. “Certainly such conversions are possible. But Wilder is rarely successful at dramatizing them. His commitment seems to be to the cynical attitude expressed through the first three-fourths of these films; the morally uplifting conclusions are played almost invariably without conviction.”36 Sarris makes Farber’s point more bluntly: “Billy Wilder is too cynical to believe even his own cynicism.”37

  “The so-called happy ending of Lost Weekend was not something imposed on me by the studio or by the censors or anyone else,” Wilder said. He himself sees the ending of the film as ambiguous: “When Don promises his girl that he is going to stop drinking, this is not a pat happy ending at all. He says he will try not to drink anymore. The film does not imply that he will never drink again, because, for all we know, he may have gotten drunk again the next day. We end on a note of promise, that he is going to make one more attempt to reform, but that is as far as the picture goes.” Wilder concluded, “Don sees the bottle as his worst enemy, but Don Birnam is his own worst enemy.” One can say safely that the ending of any Wilder picture is just as uncompromising as the story requires, and The Lost Weekend follows this rule.

  Wilder created a fine piece of cinema with this film. The Lost Weekend is an intense and intricate story of spiritual meltdown, told with invisible dexterity and emotional acuity. But that is not how the first preview audience judged the picture. The Santa Barbara preview in early April 1945 was an unmitigated catastrophe. The audience did not know
about the novel, which had just been published and had not yet become a best-seller. Consequently, Wilder said, “they did not know the movie was going to be a serious picture about drinking”; they were not prepared for the drama that unspooled. They giggled uproariously, as if it were a comedy about a slaphappy drunk, à la W. C. Fields. When they discovered that the picture was not about a comic souse, they started walking out in droves. “Three hundred people turned into fifty,” Wilder recalled forlornly. The preview cards uniformly denounced the picture as dull and disgusting.38 Frank Freeman, Wilder’s nemesis, used the Santa Barbara movie preview as a stick to beat Wilder with. Having vehemently but unsuccessfully opposed making the picture, Freeman was now against releasing it. He pointed out that The Lost Weekend had cost $1.3 million to make; for the studio to spend another $2 million on prints and advertising would be throwing good money after bad. Freeman threatened to shelve the picture indefinitely.

  Wilder was not licked yet; he was already planning some damage control. For one thing, the print of The Lost Weekend screened in Santa Barbara had a temporary music track, since Rozsa had not yet finished his score. The temporary score comprised prerecorded music and at some points had a “jazzy, Gershwinesque” flavor, according to Rozsa, which was “disastrously inappropriate.”39 He told Wilder that he wanted to do a full symphonic score, which was what was indicated for a picture about a self-destructive alcoholic. Wilder told him to go ahead. To supply the haunting background music the movie required, Rozsa made extended use of the theremin, an electronic musical instrument that produces a high-pitched, quavering sound that perfectly augments the weird atmosphere of the picture. Rozsa had skillfully utilized the theremin for the first time in his score for Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945), and it likewise proved a highlight of his music for The Lost Weekend. For example, the bizarre quivering of the theremin helped to transform Don’s delirium tremens scene into something really bloodcurdling. Rozsa’s score “demonstrated that film music could be serious and contemporary, while still remaining within the symphonic tradition.”40

  In addition to conferring with Rozsa about the background music for The Lost Weekend, Wilder tinkered with the movie’s final cut with Harrison. Wilder on principle had always abhorred sentimentality in a movie, but Harrison reminded him that a scene could have sentiment without descending to sentimentality. A case in point was the final scene of The Lost Weekend, when Helen attempts to dissuade Don from suicide. Harrison felt that, if Wyman delivered the speech with more emotion, the entire scene would be more arresting, especially when Helen says, “I’d rather have you drunk than dead!” Harrison commented on the scene to Wilder, “You didn’t break my heart; go back and do it again.” Wilder trusted Harrison’s intuition and complied. Members of the cast and crew reconvened on April 10, 1945, to reshoot the final scene, and the production wrapped for good on April 11. Both Wilder and Harrison thought the revised scene represented a marked improvement in the final cut of the movie.41

  After The Lost Weekend was in the can, Wilder accepted the invitation of the Office of War Information (OWI) in May 1945 to join the armed forces temporarily as a liaison between the American army of occupation and the people of Germany. He knew that Paramount’s decision about the fate of The Lost Weekend would not be forthcoming, so he might as well make himself useful to the U.S. Army. During the summer of 1945, Wilder collaborated on an anti-Nazi documentary before returning to Hollywood in mid-September.

  While he was away, the liquor industry joined in lobbying against The Lost Weekend. Stanley Barr, head of public relations for Allied Liquor Industries, issued an open letter to Paramount, warning that the “professional prohibitionists” would use the movie as a weapon in their campaign to reinstate Prohibition.42 The powerful liquor lobbyists were not above double-dealing behind the scenes to get the picture buried. Mafioso Frank Costello was authorized by the liquor interests to make a clandestine offer to the studio brass of $5 million to buy the original negative of the film and all existing prints, in order to burn them. Since Freeman had already considered writing the picture off as a loss, Costello’s offer was tempting. But Balaban was not inclined to accept a bribe from the mob to destroy the picture. Balaban, never one to mince words when discussing business, overruled Freeman by declaring flatly, “Once we make a picture, we don’t just flush it down the toilet.”43

  Accordingly, on August 9, 1945, Paramount held a private screening of The Lost Weekend for members of the industry. The final cut shown included not only Wilder’s refurbished final scene but also Rozsa’s stunning score. The picture was received enthusiastically. In addition, the advance reviews in the trade papers were very favorable; they applauded the honesty with which the movie had been made, pointing out that The Lost Weekend “hasn’t any laughs; or games.” It “required courage for Paramount to violate cardinal box-office principles about what makes a hit to film it.”44

  When Wilder returned to the studio, he was greeted with the news that Paramount had officially decided to release the picture. It opened to rave reviews on November 16, 1945, almost a full year after principal photography was completed. James Agee, who was himself known in critical circles to be an avid drinking man, ended his positive notice with a little joke on himself. Referring to Barr’s open letter, Agee delivered this punch line: “I understand that the liquor interesh are rather worried about thish film. Thash tough.”45

  In the light of the movie’s success, the liquor lobbyists opted to abide by the old adage, “If you can’t beat them, join them.” The House of Seagram issued a press release declaring, “Paramount has succeeded in burning into the hearts and minds of all who see this vivid screen story our own long-held and oft-published belief that some men should not drink!”46

  For his part, Charles Jackson endorsed the movie in an interview in terms that echoed James M. Cain’s comments about Wilder’s Double Indemnity: Wilder “thought of things I wish I had thought of first.”47 There is, for example, the sardonic Wilder wit, which of course is not in the novel, as when Don “reassures” a clerk in a liquor store that he is buying alcohol to fill his cigarette lighter.

  The movie’s somber subject matter did not dissuade the mass audience from making the film a box office favorite. The Lost Weekend brought in $4.3 million in domestic rentals. One of the reasons that the movie was a commercial success across the country was that the reputation of the novel had caught up with it. The book had become a best-seller, with the help of its being a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. By the time the picture was released, audiences knew they should expect a serious picture about a dipsomaniac and not a farcical film about a slaphappy drunkard.

  Sarris summarizes the virtues of the movie by saying that its punishing portrait of an alcoholic is still shocking today. “It has stood the test of time as an expressionistic forties film noir, principally for such factors as the theremin of Miklos Rozsa’s score and the hallucinatory images of a swooping bat and a bleeding mouse.”48

  At age thirty-eight, Billy Wilder was ushered into the class of top directors by The Lost Weekend. As Wilder himself put it, “It was after this picture that people started noticing me.”49 Indeed they did. The Lost Weekend went on to become the most honored film of the year. It won the Grand Prize at the first postwar Cannes Film Festival. In addition, Academy Awards were conferred on the film for best actor, Milland; best screenplay, Brackett and Wilder; best director, Wilder; and best picture of the year, which went to Brackett as the film’s producer. Cinematographer Seitz and editor Harrison were also nominated.

  When the Academy Awards ceremony took place at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, William Wyler, Billy Wilder’s fellow immigrant, presented the best director award to him. Wilder noted afterward that Leo McCarey was nominated as best director for yet another picture with Bing Crosby as a priest, The Bells of St. Mary’s. He said jokingly that he was afraid that McCarey might trip him as he marched up the aisle to accept the award, just as he had tripped McCarey the year before. Sp
eaking seriously, Wilder said that he had a hunch that the academy named him best director for The Lost Weekend because they passed over him in 1944 for Double Indemnity. “So in 1945 they made up for it. It is very gratifying to win, because it is a validation of the work.”50

  After Milland had accepted his award, Bob Hope, the master of ceremonies, gingerly observed, “I’m surprised they just handed it to him. I thought they’d hide it in the chandelier!”51 Wilder was not surprised that Milland won. As he said years later, “I knew the guy who played the drunk would get the Academy Award.” He added, “Mr. Ray Milland was surely not an Academy Award–worthy actor. He’s dead now, so I can say it.” Wilder explained, “If you are a cripple, if you stammer, if you are an alcoholic, people think that is great acting. An actor could not win an Oscar playing Cary Grant parts,” he concluded. “There is nothing astonishing there, coming in and saying, ‘Tennis, anyone?’ ”52

  Perhaps Wilder’s fondest memory of the 1946 award ceremony was that on the following morning, as he drove onto the Paramount lot, he noticed that from every window of the writers’ building was hanging a whiskey bottle suspended on a cord.

  Die Todesmühlen (1945)

  In the late spring of 1945, Wilder had joined the film unit of the Psychological Warfare Division (PsyWar) of the U.S. Army with the rank of colonel. He flew to Europe on May 9 in a seaplane and arrived in due course at PsyWar’s headquarters in Bad Homburg, north of Frankfurt. He had a conference with two Russian officers who were assigned to help rejuvenate the German film industry. When they discovered that Colonel Wilder was an American movie director, one of them beamed and exclaimed, “Mrs. Miniver!” This 1942 film, a stiff-upper-lip movie about the British war effort on the home front, had been in fact directed by William Wyler, but Billy Wilder accepted the Russian colonel’s praise.53

 

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