Alice Adams

Don’t most girls feel vulnerable or counted out due to their socioeconomic status at some point?  There is always an emphasis on wearing the right clothes to the right places and having things or a home to reflect a high enough status to be accepted. When this film begins, Alice (Katharine Hepburn) is anxiously getting ready for a party, but cannot even afford flowers from the shop for a little corsage.  She pretends she’s only looking around, acting too good for the flowers that are too expensive for her and ends up hastily picking flowers from a local park before anyone can catch her.  If she had been caught in action this day in age, there might have been a nasty viral text, possibly with an incriminating image circulating the teen social circles.

When Alice gets home, we see that her flowers are not the only problem.  She has to wear an old frumpy dress, looking a little too childish for her age and none of the boys asked her to go as a date.  Her brother, Walter (Frank Albertson) takes her, but leaves her looking like a wallflower while he rolls dice in the coat room.  Through it all, Alice keeps her chin up and finds a way to smile.  It seems like a miracle when a dashing young man, Arthur (Fred MacMurray) genuinely asks her to dance.

Alice’s mother (Ann Shoemaker) blames the social woes Alice has to bear on her father, Virgil (Fred Stone).  He has loyally worked a local drugstore for decades with no advancement, and has been on a generous sick leave for a while.  His wife urges him, for the sake of making Alice more desirable for a suitor, to seek more money, or better yet open that glue factory he knows a secret formula for.  The way Virgil sees it, he is in no position to ask for a raise or take a huge financial risk with a glue recipe he knows is equally the property of Mr. Lamb (Charley Grapewin).  But seeing the despair and heartbreak their meager status brings his daughter may be enough for a father to risk it.

Despite Alice’s lack of status, things seem to be going well between her and Arthur.  Mrs. Adams thinks that inviting Arthur over to a nice dinner would help speed up the engagement process.  With Alice and her mother buzzing about the house to make sure everything is perfect, the dinner slowly becomes disastrous.

Hepburn portrayal of sweet, nervous Alice is moves us to like her and cheer her on, even when we want her to just relax.  Poor Alice’s intentions are good and pure, but her approach is far too forced.  She tries so hard to be perfect, whether she’s pretending to be too good for the flowers at the shop, trying not to look like a wallflower at the dance or mustering a fake smile when it seems that all the dinner plans have gone terribly.  Hepburn brings out these qualities masterfully, earning her her second Oscar nomination, but unlike her first, it was only a nomination.

The film turns into a cute lesson in being enough just the way you are, even though Booth Tarkington’s novel had a much different ending.  That’s just how 1930’s Hollywood goes.

“A penny for your thoughts.”

The Apartment

C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) has found the quickest way to rise from a nobody-clerk to an executive in hisNew Yorkinsurance company.  He lets the other executives use his apartment as a safe place to take their mistresses.  Though Baxter is often waiting outside in the cold when a date is running late, they drink all his liquor and eat all his cheese crackers, he keeps putting up with the pile of annoyances in hopes of the men acting on their promises to make him an executive.

Because of all the comings, going, loud music and empty bottles of liquor in his trash, Baxter’s neighbors assume he’s a real swinging bachelor.  His neighbor, Dr. Dreyfus (Jack Kruschen) says he can hear everything from next door and advises the young man to either slow down or donate his body to science.  With Baxter not always able to explain all the noise, the land lord starts becoming suspicious.

At work, Baxter has eyes for the pretty elevator operator, Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine).  They flirt in the elevator on his way to see Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray) about a promotion.  Part of this promotion includes letting Sheldrake use the apartment as well, but at least he has theater tickets to exchange so Baxter has somewhere to go, so Baxter asks Fran to go with him.  What Baxter doesn’t know is that Fran is Sheldrake’s mistress in a long line of mistresses.  Later, after drama ensues and Fran finds out the ugly truth about her relationship with Sheldrake, she tries something drastic in Baxter’s apartment.  Baxter becomes the only person who cares enough about Fran to help her.

Baxter is the sort of nice guy we can’t help but love, even though it’s obvious he’s a huge pushover.  He is constantly being taken advantage of by the executives just for a fast-track promotion.  Though we realize this isn’t the most honest path to rise in the company, we don’t chastise Baxter for loaning out his apartment.  Of all the scandalous ways to get ahead at this insurance firm, Baxter is keeping pretty tame and classy.  And for those of us who tsk-tsk-ed him at any point are turned completely in his favor when he unselfishly helps Fran.

Out of context, this plot may sound a little heavy.  In the film, it’s anything but.  From the start, a wonderfully light tone is set and stays consistent throughout the film.  We’ve got Jack Lemmon with all his quirky, charming comedic genius being pulled different ways.  His scene in Sheldrakes office with the nasal spray had me in stitches.  The jokes are quick, charismatic and naturally off the cuff.  And when the plot becomes heavier, that light feeling is not lost.  It becomes a wonderful charm to help ease the tension, get Fran back on her feet and moves Baxter to new levels of confidence.

You rarely find a film with this high level of comedy and an engaging plot with so much at stake.  Between the wonderful acting, which can range from slapstick comedy to life and death dramatics, and the zany yet calculable plot, The Apartment does not let up or let you down.  It was a two hour film, yet I sat back, laughed and became so engrossed it felt like it was over too quick.  I highly recommend The Apartment to all people who just want to enjoy a classic film.  Other than the horrible injustice done to Psycho (I cannot forgive the Academy on that one), Billy Wilder’s The Apartment is the best picture of 1960.

“When you’re in love with a married man, you shouldn’t wear mascara.”

Double Indemnity

There are four things a film noir must be: dark, smokey, seducing and cynical.  To write a decent piece about Double Indemnity, one of the best examples of film noir, I feel the need to pull the shades closed, put on a fedora and let cigarette smoke waft around the room.  But I don’t smoke, and with my modern computer screen blazing at me, it’s hard to strike that dark mood anymore.  It’s as if all noir retired along with the typewriter.

In the film directed by Billy Wilder, Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) is an insurance salesman and when he visits the Dietrichson household about renewing their auto policy, he gets more than he expected.  Mrs. Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) is at home, clad only in a towel on the second floor looking down to Neff in the entry way.  The attraction is instant and rather than shoo Neff away to come back when Mr. Dietrichson is around, she meets him downstairs and starts to ask questions about accident insurance.  Neff is no dope and can sense that Phyllis has murder on her mind.  Neff resists at first, but she pulls him in with lustful greed and together they concoct a plan to get Mr. Dietrichson accident insurance without him knowing and then stage a scene that looks like a train accident, because those pay double.  But Neff’s boss, Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) can sense that something isn’t right and creeps closer and closer to figuring out that Neff was in cahoots with Phyllis the whole time.

What makes this story so compelling is how we feel that Neff could be any good man and Phyllis can be any woman who chooses to use her sexuality for evil.  Neff has many chances to back out, but he’s driven by greed and lust.  Because of his inside look at the insurance business, he gets overconfident and thinks he can outsmart the system.  Meanwhile Phyllis is the face that can launch a good man into a murderous fraud scheme and keep cold and calculating enough to take that blond wig seriously.  I still can’t look at a woman with dark eyebrows and perfectly molded blond hair without thinking of Double Indemnity, and I would never trust them.

One of my favorite moments in the film is the suspenseful scene where Keyes visits Neff’s apartment at the same time that Phyllis is due to arrive.  Keyes talks about how he’s sure she was working with a partner to kill her husband and stage his death, it’s only a matter of time until the two are found together.  Meanwhile, Phyllis is listening just behind the door.  The best part is how tense everything feels as Neff realizes Phyllis is behind the door and Keyes says,  “They may think it’s twice as safe because there’s two of them, but it isn’t twice as safe. It’s ten times twice as dangerous.”  The warning goes straight to the both of them.

Sadly, Double Indemnity did not win the award for best picture, but I can understand why.  In 1945 with war raging and people trying to keep positive back home, a film dark film about murder and scheming women just isn’t what the world needed to take top honors.  A film about murderous adulterers was already controversial, so it’s not surprising that it lost to Going My Way’s story of a heartwarming singing priest.  But today, Double Indemnity is the go-to film when studying film noir.  It’s upheld in the AFI’s top 100 as #29.  And personally, it takes a great weight off my shoulders to know that my husband has finally seen it.

“How could I have known that murder could sometimes smell like honeysuckle?”