Posts Tagged ‘Billy Wilder’

Your story or your life?

It’s an interesting phenomenon – cinema, down the years, has by and large served the Fourth Estate very well. Choice examples such as Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (1951), All the President’s Men (1976) by Alan J. Pakula, and Michael Mann’s The Insider (1999) are very much ancestors to Kevin McDonald’s State of Play (2009), which was itself originally a very highly rated Paul Abbott-written BBC mini-series directed by David Yates, back in 2003.

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Not-so picture perfect…

It’s time for Hollywood to get all introspective again – thankfully, director Barry Levinson is something of an old hand at being scurrilous about Tinseltown. His genuinely scathing and frequently hilarious Wag the Dog (1997) takes its rightful place among ‘films about filmmaking’ classics that include Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), Robert Altman’s The Player (1992) and Spike Jonze’s Adaptation (2002).

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Damn hot!

A critic knows a masterpiece when it drives him or her to distraction in shovelling out a new angle with each new appraisal. With an auteur like Billy Wilder at the helm, one’s pencil is going to be bitten and licked to the quick.

The hook for the studio here was, firstly, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, two rising young male leads, and also Marilyn Monroe to add jiggle factor and to offset the cross-dressing that, although it may be central to the plotting of this rambunctious black farce, might have resulted in it not playing too well in Peoria. Wilder, ever the master, and with his trusted sidekick I.A.L Diamond, is one jump ahead, with a screenplay to elevate an otherwise one-ply plot – two loser jazz musicians unwittingly witness the St Valentine’s Day massacre and flee in drag to Miami to escape mob retribution where they fetch up with an all-girl jazz-band, dominated by singing uke-player Sugar Kane (Monroe), where the Mafiosi are foiled and true love blooms.

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Bad day at the office?

Thank your luckies you’re not CC Baxter, Jack Lemmon’s resentfully downtrodden clerk in an NYC corporation, who has become so cowed by the predations of his boss and the insecurity of his position he allows his superiors use of his flat to have it off with their mistresses. He’s 9 to 5 – they’re cinq-a-sept. Baxter’s immediate overlord, Sheldrake, is a nauseatingly complacent rat played to oleaginous perfection by Fred MacMurray whose attempts to ingratiate himself with Lemmon’s character amount to no more than using the insulting and hated nickname ‘Buddy Boy’ to a man he is doubly exploiting.

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