Movie Quote of the Day (‘Some Like It Hot,’ As a Millionaire Flirts With an Unusual ‘Girl’)

Osgood Fielding III [played by Joe E. Brown]: “You must be quite a girl.”

“Daphne”/Jerry [played by Jack Lemmon]: “Wanna bet?”— Some Like It Hot (1959), screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, directed by Billy Wilder

This Day in Film History (Birth of Leo McCarey, The Man Behind Stan, Ollie, and Cary)

October 3, 1898—Leo McCarey, a three-time Oscar-winning director, screenwriter and producer whose films reflected his own considerable charm and humor, was born in Los Angeles, Calif.
 

McCarey created the rom-com-as-weepie with Love Affair and its high-gloss color remake, An Affair to Remember (and thus, indirectly inspired Nora Ephron's Sleepless in Seattle); helmed one of the archetypal “screwball comedies,” The Awful Truth; and brought together Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy as perhaps film’s most successful comedy pair.

The son of an Irish-American boxing promoter, McCarey, in his waggish recollections, stumbled into Hollywood. Having failed as a copper miner, vaudeville songwriter, and middleweight slugger, he became a lawyer at the urging of his father, only to find this, too, an uncongenial pursuit.

Then one day, in a divorce action, the young lawyer, finding out his client was a wife-beater, quit the case, whereupon he was chased out of the courtroom and down the street. “After about three blocks, I lost him and I kept running out to Hollywood.” (The young admirer to whom he related this anecdote, Peter Bogdanovich, used it to kick off his own valentine to the early movie industry, Nickelodeon, even getting his hero a name—Leo Hartigan—that echoed McCarey’s.)

To his vast amusement, McCarey discovered that the skills he had developed to sway juries also impressed studio executives. “Because of my legal education I had developed quite a vocabulary,” he recalled to Bogdanovich, in an interview collected in the latter's Who the Devil Made It, “and the heads of the studios in those days didn’t have the advantage of advanced education. And they thought I was brilliant because I used big words. So they made a director out of me at the end of the picture! I was script girl and at the end of the picture, they were measuring me for jodhpurs!”

Working with comedians such as Laurel and Hardy, Charley Chase, W.C. Fields, and the Marx Brothers honed McCarey's ability to enhance scripts through improvisation, and to coax expert performances from actors who could bedevil other directors.

Many colleagues regarded McCarey as handsome, humorous and suave as Cary Grant, but the two worked uneasily if productively on four films: The Awful Truth, My Favorite Wife, Once Upon a Honeymoon, and An Affair to Remember. “Of the sixteen hours a day when he's awake I don't think there are twenty minutes when he is not complaining,” the director griped. “I've never seen a man more constantly in turmoil.” 

Though readily acknowledging that the actor’s sense of humor was “extraordinary,” McCarey could not really get over that Grant had tried to buy his way out of The Awful Truth and that, during the making of that movie (which, incidentally, ended up winning winning McCarey a Best Director Oscar), Grant had tried to imitate his style and personality. 

As that complaint suggests, McCarey could nurse a grudge for years—so much so that, he told fellow director Edward Dmytryk, he had charged Paramount “a half-million more than it should” because the studio threw him off the lot the moment a picture he was making for them was completed.

At the same time, McCarey was friendly, without the neuroses endemic to the industry, and a devout Roman Catholic who made what became, in effect, great recruitment films for the priesthood and sisterhood, Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary's, both starring Bing Crosby.

The sunny Going My Way came out the same year (1944) as one of the darkest of all film noirs, Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity. When the Oscars came, Going My Way almost totally eclipsed its rival, and McCarey himself picked up awards for Best Screenplay and Best Director. Wilder didn't take his losses well at all: as McCarey walked up to collect his Best Director statuette, his rival stuck his foot out to trip him!

In his last two decades, McCarey’s productivity slackened because his health became more uncertain. A problem he had had with alcohol for years was now compounded by an addiction to painkillers he had developed after an auto accident in 1940. His reputation also took a hit after the release of My Son John (1952), an almost hilariously hysterical red-baiting film released at the zenith of the McCarthy era, and his appearance as a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

But at his best, he could make listeners guffaw, cry, and do both in quite succession, including his two with Bing Crosby, Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary's, and his own personal favorite, Make Way for Tomorrow, about an elderly couple forced to live on the tender mercies of their not-so-helpful adult children. In the gallery of great directors that Bogdanovich interviewed for Who the Devil Made It--including Alfred Hitchcock, George Cukor, Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh, and Otto Preminger--McCarey comes across as the funniest and most humane.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Ace in the Hole,’ on Writing the News)

“I can handle big news and little news. And if there's no news, I'll go out and bite a dog.” —Unscrupulous reporter Charles Tatum (played by Kirk Douglas), in Ace in the Hole (1951), screenplay by Billy Wilder, Lesser Samuels and Walter Newman, directed by Billy Wilder

Quote of the Day (Billy Wilder, on a Sure-Fire Way to Win an Oscar)

[To a cameraman on one of his pictures] “Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.”—Oscar-winning screenwriter-director Billy Wilder (The Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard, The Apartment), quoted in Peter Archer, The Quotable Intellectual: 1,417 Bon Mots, Ripostes, and Witticisms for Aspiring Academics, Armchair Philosophers and Anyone Else Who Wants to Sound Really Smart (2010)

This Day in Film History (‘Days of Wine and Roses,’ Drama of Addiction, Opens)

December 26, 1962—Days of Wine and Roses, perhaps the most searing drama about alcoholism put on the big screen since The Lost Weekend, opened just before a new year in which, once again, all too many people would get drunk in more than just a silly way—and in which far too few would decide that somehow, they must start their lives all over again, like Jack Lemmon’s public-relations man, Joe Clay.

Like The Lost Weekend, Days of Wine and Roses expanded the repertoires of its male star (Ray Milland, in the case of the former, and Lemmon) and directors (Billy Wilder and Blake Edwards, respectively) far beyond the comedies for which they had been primarily known. And, like that earlier film’s Don Birnam, the predicament of Joe Clay hinges on a relationship with women.

Well, in the case of The Lost Weekend, sort of. Jane Wyman’s warmly sympathetic magazine researcher could set Birnam right, maybe, if only he could open his eyes. Then again, maybe not. The original source of the Billy Wilder-Charles Brackett script, a novel by Charles Jackson, implied strongly that Birnam’s chemical addiction—and larger depression—traced back to a homosexual affair in college. With such subject matter verboten on the big screen before the Sixties, the best that Wilder and Brackett could do was drop hints about Birnam’s orderly (played by Frank Faylen) at the hospital, and to use the failed writer’s genteel artistic background and massive case of writer's block as code for lack of male virility.

Days of Wine and Roses is, on the other hand, unmistakably a love story between a man and woman, albeit one with a twist. Take the bowler hat that Lemmon wears in the photo accompanying this post. Fans of his most significant prior film, The Apartment (1960), would have recognized that little bit of stage business as the same one that junior-executive-on-the make Chuck Baxter tries out in front of the girl of his dreams, Fran Kubelik.

To his regret, Lemmon was offered the role of Clay onscreen rather than the man who had played the part originally in the 1957 teleplay by J. P. Miller, good friend, Cliff Robertson, whom producers felt did not provide sufficient box-office pull. Some critics have suggested that Robertson, Piper Laurie, and TV director John Frankenheimer created a grittier drama than the one on which Lemmon, Lee Remick and film director Blake Edwards collaborated.

But the comedy backgrounds of Lemmon and Edwards (he had done Breakfast at Tiffany’s the year before) served the film extremely well, I think. The opening scenes between Lemmon and Remick, typified by that bowler hat, look like they’re going to start a rather traditional rom-com, with the protagonists meeting cute. But they pull you in and seduce you, the way alcohol does in this film. We think we’re about to watch Pillow Talk, but instead we get Scenes From an Alcoholic Marriage. (The initial shock of that was such that there were a virtually unheard-of number of walkouts at a preview for the film. Studio execs were sure they had a disaster on their hands until someone remembered that the audience hadn't been told beforehand that they would be watching a drama--and a particularly devastating one, at that.)

Lemmon’s Clay begins by getting Remick’s Kirsten Arnasen, a teetotaling secretary with an endearing sweet tooth, to share his good times by trying a Brandy Alexander (with a doubly intoxicating mixture of brandy and creme de cocoa). By the middle of the film, she fully shares what has become his full-fledged addiction. By the film’s pull-no-punches ending, the intensity of her addiction is so bad that his only hope of extricating himself is to break away from her, no matter how much it hurts. (That is the blunt message delivered by Clay's sponsor, who, as I indicated in a post from earlier today, was played by the late, great Jack Klugman.)

The attractiveness of Lemmon and Remick is essential to keeping viewers’ interest through the rest of the film. Their characters, after all, end up doing unsavory, degrading things for the sake of the booze that becomes part of their “threesome.” This is what part of what Kim Morgan has in mind in her film blog, Sunset Gun, when she writes:

“Lemmon and Remick's most interesting characteristic is, sadly, that they are alcoholics. They can't indulge the brilliant mental gymnastics of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf's George and Martha, whose addiction and spitefulness are, in a highly dysfunctional way, disarmingly romantic and strangely heroic. Lee and Jack -- they're like a lot of people -- just regular old drunks. No wonder they drink.”

That lack of “mental gymnastics” is precisely why the humor and vivacity that Lemmon and Remick carry from their prior work is so necessary in this film. Without the sympathy generated in those opening scenes before the marriage of Joe and Kirsten, it is questionable if viewers would root for them to find a way out of their predicament.

As it turned out, many people did. In addition to a win for Best Song (the title tune, by Johnny Mercer and Henry Mancini), the film garnered nominations for Lemmon, Remick, best art direction and best costume design. (Inexplicably, it was edged out of a Best Picture nomination by the likes of Mutiny on the Bounty and The Music Man.) It was also named one of the best 400 films by the American Film Institute.

Several years ago, on a long flight back from California, I spoke with a lawyer who, despite (or, I have thought sometimes since, because of) his completely drink-besotted state, knew every word in the film’s Oscar-winning title song. Had he been alive to see it, that might have made lyricist Mercer smile at first—before he realized that this highly intelligent, charming, literate man not only shared his most humane qualities, but also his thirst for drink.

(Incidentally, nearly three decades after the film, Lemmon shocked an Inside the Actors Studio audience with his first public admission that he also—like Mercer and Miller--had been an alcoholic, offscreen as well as on.)

As with The Lost Weekend, many viewers of Days of Wine and Roses are likely to recall one scene as particularly memorable in depicting the desperate state of an alcoholic: Birnam’s Sunday search for a pawnshop where he can get enough money for a drink, versus Clay’s trashing of his father-in-law’s greenhouse in search of a bottle he firmly believes is there. Yet for me, one other scene in the Edwards film has left a much more shattering, enduring impression.

Years ago, a female friend recalled, virtually word for word, these lines from Remick toward the end, when she explains why giving up alcohol has become so difficult: “This is the way I look when I'm sober. It's enough to make a person drink, wouldn't you say? You see, the world looks so dirty to me when I'm not drinking. Joe, remember Fisherman's Wharf? The water when you looked too close? That's the way the world looks to me when I'm not drinking.”

So often when I think of my friend, those lines come to mind. Maybe that’s why I haven’t seen the film since she recalled that bit of telling dialogue: It hurts me too much to think of it.

Movie Quote of the Day (Gary Cooper, Unnerved by Barbara Stanwyck)

Professor Bertram Potts (played by Gary Cooper): “Make no mistake, I shall regret the absence of your keen mind. Unfortunately, it is inseparable from an extremely disturbing body.”—Ball of Fire (1941), written by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, based on an original story by Wilder and Thomas Monroe, directed by Howard Hawks

Today marks the 70^th anniversary of the release of Ball of Fire, which came toward the end of Hollywood’s magnificent screwball-comedy era. Five days later, Pearl Harbor would be bombed, and once Hollywood was done with its propaganda products and home-front dramas, it began to explore in earnest a genre it only began to touch this year, in The Maltese Falcon: film noir that reflected a newfound understanding of man’s darkest impulses. The world would never look so bright again.
 
Ball of Fire would be the last film that Billy Wilder, chafing under the restrictions placed on his work by the men behind the camera, would make only as a screenwriter. The following year, The Major and the Minor began his nearly 40-year career as a director. In the meantime, he convinced the studio to allow him to observe the work of Howard Hawks, whose films he greatly admired.

For all the fast-and-furious action that Hawks packed into this two-hour film about a “nightclub singer” holing up with a group of linguistic professors to avoid police questioning about her mobster boyfriend, the film really can be seen as one long wink to the audience. 

Even the quote marks in that prior sentence represent a raised eyebrow. Barbara Stanwyck’s “nightclub singer” is a stripper, one of two she would play in her long, illustrious career (the other being Lady of Burlesque, based on a mystery by Gypsy Rose Lee, whose pretensions as an intellectual exotic dancer were mocked by lyricist Lorenz Hart in the musical Pal Joey.)

The more knowing members of the audience would also catch on to the film's central satiric premise,  seven professors studying slang centered around one brassy female with an especially vivid sense of it--Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, if you will. 

And Hollywood insiders were probably beside themselves guffawing over box-office champion Gary Cooper--so laconic that Art Buchwald, in one of his funniest early columns, used the actor’s characteristic “nopes” and “yups” to respond to Coop’s own questions--as the chief linguistics professor. (How Cooper got around the formal, polysyllabic but hilarious lines above, addressed to Stanwyck, can only be imagined.)

And how can you not find a place in your heart for a stripper named Sugarpuss O’Shea?

The queen of film bloggers, Self-Styled Siren, has a characteristically astute analysis of what made this film so worthwhile here.