Word: wildernesses
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George Caldwell is not much of a hero, but once aboard the Silver Streak, a sleek train bound from Los Angeles to Chicago, he finds heroism thrust upon him. George (Gene Wilder) is the kind of guy who has his hands full even when he's not carrying anything, so he is hardly equal to the challenge. Say this for him though: he is a dogged fellow, and his blithering persistence manages to keep the villains tellingly off balance...
...MacArthur's wildman farce The Front Page by turning Hildy Johnson into a woman, and one who was trying to excise herself from the male society she had tailored herself into. She can't do it. Hecht and MacArthur's play proved that it was not indestructable when Billy Wilder made it move like a sludge barge. His Girl Friday is louder and faster than any other movie ever made. Cary Grant did everything right as Walter Burns; it must have been a great surprise to see him work in this sort of part after the more submissive work...
...Seven-Per-Cent Solution puts one wistfully in mind of Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), a lovely, melancholy evocation of the master sleuth. It was a ravishing movie, misunderstood and ignored on its first release. Now should be just the time for another look at it. The movie features portraits of Holmes (by Robert Stephens) and Watson (by Colin Blakely) that are virtually definitive and thoroughly captivating. Director Wilder showed respect for Conan Doyle, with out slavish devotion, and managed to make the two sleuths real men even as he dealt with them...
...chance to show a class of Martians any ten American comedies, this would be included in the green syllabus because, as Alex Haley might point out, of its roots. Like tumescent udders (ech!) Mel Brooks's toors hang, full of borscht and seltzer while the crazed milkmaids Mostel, Wilder, Dick Shawn and Kenneth Mars squeeze and squeeze and squeeze. So much of the American comic strain flows through this film that it makes a pallid commentary like Bob Fosse's Lenny a misrepresentation. That movie tried to deal with other, broader things, not what Lenny lived for; this does...
...Unfriendly Ten," Director Billy Wilder is often quoted as saying, "only two had any talent; the other eight were just unfriendly." Wilder is wrong--they had talent, but they were not company men in a company town. They felt self-conscious in the industry. Moss Hart, the New York playwright, once told Clifford Odets (not one of the Ten but persecuted later) that Odets's Hollywood experience had persuaded many writers to turn left and go west. "You mean," Odets asked eagerly, "my plays convert them?" "No," Hart said, "your salary...