1950 noir, dir. Billy Wilder, William Holden, Gloria Swanson:
IMDb /
allmovie. Just back away
now, you'll end up in the same place and it'll hurt less.
It's interesting to see how this film's good ideas collide with
the attitudes of the time. Poor doomed Joe thinks he can just take
advantage of this batty ex-star to hide his car so that it doesn't get
repossessed, but soon enough he's trying to fix up her unfilmable
script, and being drawn ever deeper into her mad life. And that's all
great. But at the same time the film makes it clear that it's
intrinsically and unalterably shameful for a man to have a woman
paying for him, or for a man to be involved with a woman who's older
than him. Ah well.
It's another noir like Wilder's Double Indemnity, or indeed
Mackendrick's Sweet Smell of Success, in which nobody is really a
good guy, and the "neither tarnished nor afraid" hero who for me is an
important part of the ethos is simply absent. The closest thing we get
to that is Betty Schaefer, and even she is willing to dump her fiancé
for Joe once they start to work together. Joe appears at least a bit
less tarnished; but he goes along with each small compromise because
it seems like the best thing to do, until he's far worse off than if
he'd just given up his car in the first place.
Mulholland Drive, sometimes mentioned in connection with this since
they're both named after Los Angeles streets with the title given as
an abbreviation in a shot of a street name sign, has no business even
picking up this film's droppings.
I talk about this film further on
Ribbon of Memes.