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The mouse and the bat and "the nice man who drinks," Billy Wilder's tragicomic vortex of addiction. Psycho's beginning originates in the New York scan that dollies into an open window, the whiskey bottle hanging by the neck is the psyche of the aspiring novelist (Ray Milland) who can't make it past page one. The genteel concern of fiancée (Jane Wyman) and brother (Phillip Terry) merely aggravates the thirsty protagonist, who falls off the wagon most spectacularly for the next four days and nights. Lubricated at the saloon, the itchy dilettante grows grandiloquent, bantering with the slangy prostitute (Doris Dowling) and marveling at the "vicious circles" on the countertop. The bartender (Howard Da Silva) lends an ear to acrid recollections: Parched at the opera (La Traviata's champagne chalices dance mockingly onstage), Milland bolts for the flask in his overcoat and bumps into the Time scribe from Ohio, a fitting meet-cute for the relationship like "clutching a razor." Life's fears call for a tonic and liquor fills the void, the liquid femme fatale rolls from under the bed and shimmers above the chandelier. (The antihero loosens his tie and grins at the bourbon-filled cup, the camera leans over and plunges into the juice.) Dry alkies and wet teetotalers forever out of balance, startlingly laid out by Wilder as a lonely metropolis' quivering nervous system. The hangover is a trudge down Third Avenue, leaden typewriter lugged like a ball-and-chain past one gated pawnshop after another (gray location shooting heightens the expressionism). The bottom of the pit is a Bellevue bedlam where the orderly (Frank Faylen) warns of tremors to come with a queeny smile: "Delirium is a disease of the night. Good night." The benefactor is not Hollywood's social-problem cycle but the Nouvelle Vague's existential side (Rohmer's Le Signe du Lion, Malle's Le Feu Follet). Cinematography by John F. Seitz. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |