Billy Wilder’s Sabrina (1954)

How do we account for the continued popularity of Audrey Hepburn? Ask your parents or grandparents about her and they’ll mention Roman Holiday, Funny Face, My Fair Lady, Charade, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and almost no one has anything critical to say about her. She’s beautiful. She’s fabulous. She’s Audrey.

Is it too simple just to say that she was a movie star, in that old time way that movie stars used to be larger than life, more glamorous than any star seems to achieve these days, and so she sticks in our collective consciousness? As do Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Liz Taylor, Charlton Heston.

What it boils down to for Heburn is class. Hepburn had class – style, couture, grace, savoir faire. Watch her in Sabrina. Even when she’s playing the chauffeur’s daughter, before she’s gone to Europe and hobnobbed with culture, she has that class. The only thing different about her when she comes back is she has fashion – gorgeous dresses designed by Hubert de Givenchy and Edith Head.

(You know Edith Head. She’s the fashion designer Brad Bird caricatured as Edna Mode or “E” in The Incredibles, the designer of their costumes. The real Head, a legend, designed costumes for over 400 movies, from 1927 until 1980. We don’t know if any of them had capes.)

We don’t really need to belabor the point here. To watch Hepburn in Sabrina is to see, to understand star power, to know what was so compelling about her. The other stars in the film – and they were big (Humphrey Bogart and William Holden) – seem to pale when she’s around.

Perhaps a more interesting line of inquisition is why so few Hollywood actors today can achieve this? Certainly part of it is the studio system which no longer exists. The studios controlled, rigidly, the public personae of their stars, and they were able to amplify and shape them into the gods and goddesses we remember. Today things are different; the central publicity machines are missing and the Internet is here, where anyone with a digital camera can catch you nude, overweight, and having a bad hair day on a beach, then post the pictures on their blog for everyone to see. We live in an age in which the sheer volume of personal, and often unflattering data, destroys any possibility of one’s mythologization.

Russell Crowe. Didn’t he hit some guy with a telephone? Julia Roberts is one of the highest paid actresses in Hollywood. Fans are equally aware of her movies and her tempestuous love life.

Myth cannot exist in a world of trivial minutiae that diminishes star status. This is true not only of movie stars but presidents (a 2005 book about Abraham Lincoln claimed he might have been homosexual – the claim is disputed by most historians – and recent revelations about John F. Kennedy’s indiscretions in the White House have done a bit to tarnish his Camelot image), civil rights leaders (historians have argued that some of Martin Luther King’s academic papers and speeches contained plagiarism), and sports heroes (steroids, anyone?).

If anything, watching Audrey Hepburn now allows us to return to a time when we were allowed to have movie stars, and they could exist in a bubble unpunctured by too much information. Could Audrey Hepburn, the glamorous, the embodiment of class, exist as a star today? We think not. That’s why we can revel in and honor her as the star of movies like Sabrina.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959)

Before we begin looking at a specific aspect of this film, notice that like our last film, Double Indemnity (1944), Some Like It Hot (1959) is directed by Billy Wilder. Now, the two films are vastly different – one’s a dark, cynical noirist drama, one’s a comedy; one’s a product of the war years, one’s from the boom era after the war; one tweaks our moral sense although good triumphs over evil in the end, one seems to conform to our moral sense although the end is humorously ambiguous – but it is worth asking yourself, what qualities does the director bring to both movies?

Billy Wilder is one of America’s greatest directors (he would win a Best Picture, Best Director and Best Writer/ Screenplay award for The Apartment in 1960). What, as you reflect on two of his better films, are his identifying traits? What makes him a good director? What kind of story does he like to tell? How does he tell it differently than another director might? Let us know what you come up with.

That said (or asked), let’s take a moment to look at what’s at the heart of this comedy – cross-dressing. Drag. Guys dressed up as women. In this case, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, on the run from the mob after witnessing the St. Valentine’s Day massacre, dressed up as 1920s flappers in order to pass themselves off as musicians in an all-girl band. Quick, make a list of the films in which this gimmick provides the centerpiece of the plot. Okay. Pencils down. How many of you had: Tootsie, Mrs. Doubtfire, Big Mama’s House, White Chicks, Nuns on the Run, I Was a Male War Bride? (Give yourself extra credit if you got more.) The question here is: why is this so funny?

First, a simple answer: Guys look hilarious when they’re dressed up as women. If you look closely, you’ll realize it’s never the point to make them completely feminine. Often the opposite is true. They stumble around on high heels. They walk like men. They struggle keeping their voices from being “manly.” They’re forced to adjust their bras, and girdles, and hosiery at inopportune times. Quickly we’ve descended into the comic irony – by watching men dressed as women we’re celebrating how NOT-women they are.

Which leads us to an even bigger irony. The men-in-drag technique is a particularly enjoyable form of dramatic irony. We know those guys are men, but many of the onscreen characters don’t. Consequently we hear the men’s lines two ways – the way the other characters do (a “female voice”) and the way we know it really is (the “male voice”). In Some Like It Hot, both Lemmon and Curtis try to find ways to insinuate themselves with Marilyn Monroe. So we combine this dual voicing with a lot of sexual innuendo, both ironic and otherwise, and the result is pretty comic.

One of the more interesting paradoxes of men in drag is whether it reinforces typical gender roles (men should be men, and if they try not to be they look silly and are funny) or blows them up (cross-dressing men appeals to some inner sense of desire we have, and we only drape it in comic styling to shield ourselves from our non-conformist ideas). You work it out. In the meantime, enjoy Some Like It Hot, one of Hollywood’s classic comedies.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944)

So, what the heck is feelm no-wahr, anyway? Tonight’s screening of Double Indemnity inaugurates our year long introduction to both classic and neo- noir. We’ll be showing seven films, and you get to decide what the heck noir really is. Until then, here’s a brief discussion of the matter.

First, the term film noir is French for “black film,” which is kind of ironic because in many ways film noir is a unique American style. Second, film noir isn’t really a genre of film, like westerns or romantic comedies or action flicks; rather, it’s a mood, a style, applied to a variety of film types. But even this is a bit misleading because it suggests that the classic films we now describe as examples of noir, films like The Maltese Falcon, Shadow of a Doubt, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Gun Crazy, Out of the Past, The Big Clock, The Set-Up, D.O.A., Asphalt Jungle, and Touch of Evil, were made by people who knew they were making noirist films. And they didn’t. The term itself didn’t even come around until 1946, and while some critics date the advent of the style from the end of WWII, others see it beginning as early as 1927.

Instead, these filmmakers simply captured a mood, a feeling that was in the air. It’s an urban feeling, a paranoid feeling, a feeling that everything has gone to hell, no one’s on the level, and everyone is guilty. It’s a world of moral ambiguity, and according to film archivist Hayden Guest, the hero, if one exists, “is not necessarily grounded in any sense of right or wrong.”

There’s also a look to film noir, and you’ll see it in Double Indemnity. Darkness, filtered light sliding through blinds, creating odd angles of light and dark across rooms and characters, trenchcoats, cigarettes, rain slickened streets. Really, though, the best way to get to know and to enjoy this particular style of film is to watch some. When we get to neo-noir, noirist films made after 1979, we’ll see the style make a serious comeback until we can almost find elements in every movie currently coming out of Hollywood, if not other countries. (The current cinema of South Korea, stuff like Oldboy and Shiri, is seriously noirist.)

In the meantime, you’re sitting in front of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (from a novel by edgy crime writer James M. Cain and a screenplay by hardboiled fiction writer Raymond Chandler) with Fred MacMurray and Barabara Stanwyck. Stanwyck is the classic femme fatale (“dangerous woman”), another frequent convention of noir. Watch her twist MacMurray’s character around, until he has agreed to help her murder her husband.

In the end, and we won’t give it away here, MacMurray’s character Walter Neff, is a great example of crime writer James Ellroy’s definition of film noir: “A righteous, generically American film movement that went from 1945 to 1958, and exposited one great theme and that theme is: you’re f---ed.”

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser