Silver Screen in a Red Envelope: A Diary of Time Wasted

 This movie kept me up until almost two in the morning. Typically of heyday Hollywood, the plot of this film follows a pretty steady pace. Billy Wilder proved his skill in keeping the conflict to a constant level throughout. It never dips into boring, and never into "bite your nails" intense. The opening scenes are extremely and intentionally dated, but very funny. "Cuddles" Sakall stood out in a group of no-name older character actors, but they all filled their roles quite well. The script started giving me a headache after a while. Some of the slang in question has remained in our vocabulary, some is pretty obvious, and some, I suspect, was made up just to make things more interesting. Barbara Stanwyck plays a character typical for her - the slightly shady and flamboyant woman of the world (which she pulls off stunningly) - and Gary Cooper plays a mealy-mouthed professor. It seemed a little odd, because I'm so used to seeing the professor types as quick, v...

 . . . and DEATH!!! So, laughably, began this intriguing story. Although the film itself is deeply noir, and the soundtrack and camera styles all shout 40s, the style of its telling shifts distinctly into what some might name post-modernism. The tension begins, as the film, in medias res, followed by a series of long flashbacks from different perspectives brought on by various telephone conversations. Through these (very dime-novel) conversations and the revealing flashbacks, the audience slowly begins to understand the increasing tension until the final, seriously noir ending. The characters in the story, acted by Barbara Stanwyck and Burt Lancaster, are distinctly unlovable. They're protagonists without being either heroes, or anti-heroes. They have flash, glamour, and personality, but not anything larger or enlightened. Even the character actors in smaller parts struggle to make their characters anything more than just people doing their thing, which seems to ground the film ...