09/09/2002 Entry:
"One, Two, Three - Billy Wilder (1961)
Double Indemnity - Billy Wilder (1944)"

I really wanted Bethany to see One, Two, Three so I went searching for the letterboxed laser but came up empty. Thankfully someone volunteered to tape theirs for me, so thanks Dave! I just couldn't imagine seeing this in pan and scan.

A second viewing of this non-stop Billy Wilder comedy was just as satisying as the first. Since I was already familiar with where the plot was going, I was really able to concentrate on the technique. There are just some perfect compositions in this film. Wilder follows these groups of two and three as various people move into and out of the forefront of a scene. Everything is shot with deep focus and wide angles, not so wide that you get distortion, but there is definitely the feeling of depth and distance in the images. There are a lot of little touches too. In the closing scenes, everytime the cuckoo clock goes off, its song plays faster and faster, serving to heighten the tension building as the Hazeltine's arrival becomes more and more imminent.

For a film which moves so fast, there is surprisingly little cutting. I'm sure that today this would be edited like a music video, but Wilder just allows the actors to take the scenes and run with them. When you have Cagney rattling off his lists you don't need anything else.

The next night I caught another Wilder classic, Double Indemnity, on Turner Classic Movies. This had always been my favorite of the noirs, and I hadn't seen it in years. Such a contrast from One, Two, Three or even The Lost Weekend which I saw about a month ago. It is amazing to me that the same guy made all three of those movies, it is really a testament to Wilder's verstaility and skill as a filmmaker.

The print of Double Indemnity shown on TCM was pretty washed out, which stinks, but still it was great to see this again after several years. It occured to me while watching this that Edward G. Robinson's character in Double Indemnity is basically the flipside of his character in The Woman In The Window. In Double Indemnity he's tracking down the clues to find the killer, whereas in The Woman In The Window he's the one being tracked down step by step. I would love to see a better print of this now, the shots are really great but they don't have the impact they would with a deep black and bright white. I have to say that the plot doesn't hold up nearly as well in this age of ultra-advanced forensics, I kept catching myself saying "oh he can't get awy with that shit because of fibers/prints/dna/etc." Been watching too much CSI.

After this was over, Bethany and I were talking about the dialog in this movie. A lot of noirs have very scripted dialog, and its one of the things that makes them great (when its done well like in this or Out Of The Past.) Bethany was lamenting the loss of that kind of dialog, she really enjoys the wordplay that goes on in those films (for example, the scene where Fred Macmurray and Barbara Stanwyck spar during their first meeting.) I disagreed, I enjoy that when its done well, but in general I prefer a more realistic straightforward type of dialog. While that kind of verbal stylization is certainly applicable for most of the noirs I've seen, it really brings me out of the movie to a certain extent. It sounds fake, it doesn't sound real. Not that this is something I really sit and ruminate about, this is a great film and I wouldn't change a word. Sometimes I just wish a scene like that one was a little more low key.

At the time I was thinking that its actually more difficult to write the way normal people speak rather than doing heaily styilized dialog, but now I feel that both are difficult to do well. I just realized that above I was just raving about One, Two, Three and certainly one of the scenes I love in that movie is very scripted and unrealistic (the wife confrontingthe secretary in Cagney's office, the scene where the secretary is walking aroundin her underwear.) However as a slapstick comedy I guess it didn't bother me that much, it wasn't supposed to be two real people and the gags come so fast and furious you barely have time to notice.

I wrote this on the train, and its a few hours later and I'm adding it to the blog, and those last two paragraphs seem pretty stupid. Sorry