Movie #44: Released in 1960, 125 minutes, directed by Billy Wilder. Seen it before!

LetterBoxd Score: 4 stars

This movie is one long ache – in a good way.

It starts with exhaustion and illness, as the much put upon CC Baxter (great name) rides out his unusual situation in the rain, and then arrives at work, on time, to power through a day without sleep and with a fever. You feel it! It’s risky, because that’s not a good feeling. But this movie has a way of making bad feelings work.

After that, you move into the a deeper kind of ache, when Ms. Kubelik (great name) takes the sleeping pills. This is a really good pivotal scene; when the doctor comes in, the tension is really well done. I love his (Dr. Dreyfuss) angry demeanor; he will force his patient to live. And from then on, the rest of the movie is just heartache, watching two really pathetic people, living on the bottom of an unjust society, tossed into the same boat together, the one to take care of the other. And yet, throughout, it’s never dour or depressing. I would rewatch it tonight if I had time.

This is the second time I’ve seen this movie; it helped that I went in with expectations that it has a dark thread running through it, and isn’t primarily a funny rom-com like Shop Around the Corner. One other thing that differed from the first time I saw this is that I’ve been watching the BFI list in chronological order, so I have better context for how this movie would have played when it first appeared.

• Coming a year after Some Like It Hot, Wilder is continuing to more or less dance on the grave of the Hays code. Now we’ve got rampant adultery and open suicide.
• Having seen some other Wilder’s when I see some of the actors show up you get the thrill of a familiar face: Lemon back from Some Like it Hot, Fred MacMurry from Double Indemnity.
• Seeing this right after L’Avventura, La Dolce Vita, Breathless, and The 400 Blows, and knowing all that was released in between Some Like it Hot and this makes me revise up my views of European Arthouse cinema. This movie felt old. Behind the times. I have a better sense of how new and exciting European cinema was.

A few more stray observations:

• A mark of a successful film is that it somehow creates the feeling that a lot has happened. I don’t know what the trick is; I think it’s artfully picking what scenes to shoot and not to shoot so that we can fill in the backstory like memory. We don’t need to see how The Apartment game got going, or what Ms Kubelik’s dates with Sheldrake (great name) were like. We can infer. We can also infer there is more to the house of Dreyfuss, etc.
• I really like the courtship of Mrs. Margie MacDougall and Baxter.

Why would someone think it’s one of the ten greatest films ever made?

Wilder knows how to make a good film. This one is a perfect alchemy of sadness and humor.

This is a great thing, and I will rewatch. But when it comes to the ten greatest movies ever made, I think we can aim higher.

Next: Psycho