They Live by Night (Nicholas Ray, 1948)

Though usually remembered as a precursor of another, more celebrated lovers-on-the-lam movie, Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), They Live by Night stands on its own, largely because of novice director Nicholas Ray's attention to characterization and detail. This is a film with texture, rising above its melodramatic core by constantly introducing peripheral detail. Instead of opening, as a conventional movie might have, with a dramatization of the prison break by Bowie (Farley Granger), Chickamaw (Howard Da Silva), and T-Dub (Jay C. Flippen), it begins with an aerial shot of the stolen car speeding across the landscape -- a daring early use of what has become routine in filmmaking, namely, a helicopter shot. Ray continues to fill his frames with the unexpected: As Bowie hides behind a billboard, waiting for Chickamaw and T-Dub to return with another car, a small dog appears and hangs around the young fugitive. Later, when Bowie and Keechie (Cathy O'Donnell) begin their flight on a Greyhound bus, Bowie is seated beside a woman who is determined to ignore her crying, squirming baby, leaving Bowie to try to quiet the infant. Neither dog nor baby is essential to the scene, but by their very presence they lend a quality of innocence to the boyish fugitive. Bowie and Keechie decide on the spur of the moment to get married in a quickie ceremony conducted by an anything-for-a-buck justice of the peace (Ian Wolfe), who calls on his standby witnesses. After the perfunctory ceremony, the woman witness hugs Keechie, but the male witness declines because he has a cold. Again, the witness's cold is irrelevant to the plot, but it serves to add a subtle note of disorder to the scene, a hint that Bowie and Keechie will always be subject to forces as far beyond their control as the common cold. I don't know whether dog and baby and cold were present in the novel by Edward Anderson, Thieves Like Us, on which the film is based, or if they were introduced in Charles Schnee's screenplay or in Ray's revisions of it, but the fact that they were either introduced or retained in the film speaks volumes on the kind of director Ray was: one attentive to the contingencies that bring a film to life. Granger and O'Donnell are incredibly touching in their performances, and the rest of the cast rise about the stereotypes they could easily have become. Anderson's novel was filmed again, under its original title, by Robert Altman in 1974, and I remember liking that movie. But unless another viewing of Altman's version changes my mind, I think They Live by Night is better.

The Lost Weekend (Billy Wilder, 1945)

If such a thing as conscience could be ascribed to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, it might be said that giving The Lost Weekend and director Billy Wilder the best picture and best director Oscars was an attempt to atone for its failure to honor Wilder's Double Indemnity with those awards the previous year. (The awards went to Leo McCarey and his saccharine Going My Way.) The Lost Weekend is not quite as enduring a film as Double Indemnity: It pulls its punches with a "hopeful" ending, though it should be clear to any intelligent viewer that Ray Milland's Don Birnam is not going to be so easily cured of his alcoholism as he and his girlfriend, Helen St. James (Jane Wyman), seem to think. But the film also lands quite a few of its punches, thanks to Milland's Oscar-winning performance and the intelligent (and also Oscar-winning) adaptation of Charles R. Jackson's novel by Wilder and co-writer Charles Brackett. For its day, still under the watchful eyes of the Paramount front office and the Production Code, The Lost Weekend seems almost unnervingly frank about the ravages of alcoholism, then usually treated more as a subject for comedy than for semi-realistic drama. The Code prevented the film from ascribing Birnam's drinking to an attempt to cope with his homosexuality, but in some respects this can be seen today as a good change made for the wrong reason, since the roots of addiction to alcohol are far more complicated than any simplistic explanation such as self-loathing. The Code was also powerless to prevent Wilder and Brackett from finessing the suggestion that the friendly "bar girl" Gloria (Doris Dowling) is anything but an on-call prostitute. Increasingly, post-World War II films would treat audiences like the adults the Code administration wanted to prevent them from being. Wyman's Helen is a bit too noble in her persistent support of Birnam's behavior -- she moves from ignorance to denial to enabling to self-sacrifice far too swiftly and easily. But in general, the supporting cast -- Phillip Terry as Birnam's brother, Howard Da Silva as the bartender, Frank Faylen as the seen-it-all-too-often nurse in the drunk ward -- are excellent. The fine cinematography is by John F. Seitz. The score, which is laid on a bit too heavily, especially in the use of the theremin to suggest Birnam's aching need for a drink, is by Miklós Rózsa.