Tag: Billy Wilder
-
‘Sunset Blvd.’: A Stranger Original Opening Sequence Was Scrapped
Erich von Stroheim, William Holden, Gloria Swanson,“Sunset Boulevard” (1950). Preview audiences were left stunned, oddly amused and utterly confused At the start of “Sunset Boulevard,” hapless screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) floats face-down in a swimming pool with several bullet holes punched into his torso. He’d been the long-term houseguest of deranged former silent screen…
-
Murderous Couples: ‘Body Heat,’ vs. ‘Double Indemnity’
After I moved to L.A. in 2008 I got together with a Meetup group that was going to see a screening of “Double Indemnity” (1944) at the ArcLight Theater in Hollywood. I was chomping at the bit in anticipation of watching one of my all-time favorite films with a group of cinema enthusiasts. I pictured…
-
Ripped From the Headlines: True Crime Inspired Film Noir
It’s no wonder that Hollywood in the 1940s and ’50s scooped up lurid true crime stories and made hard-hitting, gritty dramas out of them. Following the war, the public’s appetite for rough textured tales could not be surpassed. Cold, savage murders that bled off the front page of tabloid scandal sheets was the stuff that…
-
Meet the Press: Bullies, Brutes and News Hounds of Noir
Warning: Spoilers ahead When we see a disheveled, groggy Richard Conte breaking into his own office in the middle of the night, desperate to record a story on the company’s Dictaphone machine, you know you’re watching noir. The scene could be set in almost any kind of office but it feels most at home in…
-
‘Double Indemnity’: Two On a Conveyor Belt Toward Doom
In “Double Indemnity” (1944), housewife Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) seduces insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) and gets him to kill her husband. She’s after a big payout from a policy that Neff sold him under false pretenses. It’s a classic noir — maybe THE classic noir. The story’s got all the right stuff —…