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

 This black-and-white film about an aging American playboy who becomes interested in some French jail-bait had the script, but not the amusement factor of Daddy Long-Legs. The lines were great, and Maurice Chevalier especially delivered them perfectly, but my interest and belief waned severely in the final scenes. Although the scene at the train-station was heart-wrenchingly beautiful, and certainly calculated to make the little sympathetic heart go pit-a-pat, Audrey Hepburn's acting showed there its greatest inconsistency. During the film, her character has Gary Cooper's character completely fooled; he knows she's a little vixen - a woman of the world, and yet, suddenly she's unable to find the strength to keep back a few tears as he leaves Paris? It's implausible, and a little frustrating to those of us who wanted to enjoy the ending. Still, Rottentomatoes gave it an 80%. We shrug.

 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...