|
The heroine ponders the sauce at the Chinese restaurant and sees the Billy Wilder worldview epitomized, "sweet and sour." Madison Avenue ups and downs, desk 861 on the 19th floor, the insurance clerk (Jack Lemmon) dreaming of the 27th floor. "Some schnook that works in the office," valuable for the bachelor pad he can provide to philandering suits looking for an anonymous playpen. The boss (Fred MacMurray) wants exclusive rights, his latest mistress (Shirley MacLaine) is the pert elevator operator the protagonist has a crush on. "I'd spell it out for you, only I can't spell." Compromise and prostitution are inescapably baked into American success, Wilder the puckish moralist takes stock in his most polished formulation. The schnook can't even watch Grand Hotel without getting defeated by TV commercials, cf. Wenders' Alice in the Cities, piles of empty champagne bottles make him a hapless Lothario in the eyes of the doctor next door (Jack Kruschen). ("Be a mensch" is the Old World advice.) The girl is grave behind her winsomeness, staring puddle-eyed at the corporate skunk who just offered her $100 on Christmas Eve. "When you're in love with a married man, you shouldn't wear mascara." Two complicated, broken souls, bonding after a suicide attempt, warding off the loneliness of the CinemaScope frame. (The screen teems with revelers as a switchboard bimbo does a striptease, the camera moves sideways and the deep-focus rectangle has Lemmon alone with row after row of vacant desks with covered typewriters.) "You know, I used to live like Robinson Crusoe. Shipwrecked, among eight million people. And then one day I saw a footprint in the sand, and there you were." The cracked mirror into the self, the spaghetti strand dangling poignantly off the tennis racket, MacLaine's sudden smile in the dark of a New Year's Eve soiree. "I guess that's the way it crumbles, cookie-wise." Ray in Jana Aranya recomposes the quandary. Cinematography by Joseph LaShelle. With Ray Walston, David Lewis, Edie Adams, Hope Holiday, Joan Shawlee, Naomi Stevens, Johnny Seven, Joyce Jameson, and Willard Waterman. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |