The 40s: The Story of a Decade (89 page)

DECEMBER 1, 1945 (ON
THE LOST WEEKEND
)

T
he film version of
The Lost Weekend
is every bit as impressive a tour de force as the Charles Jackson novel from which it was adapted. The suspense that Mr. Jackson managed to instill into his study of an alcoholic is tautly evident throughout the picture, and as
its protagonist, Ray Milland conveys, with a realism often overwhelming, the anguish of a man trying to find in drink a narcotic to ease the ache of failure. The problem posed by
The Lost Weekend
is a lot more important than any that Hollywood has tackled in a long, long time, and it is presented in thoroughly adult fashion, with dialogue pitched for sensible ears and photography designed for discerning eyes. Most of the outstanding episodes of Mr. Jackson’s book are here, from the sordid, drunken bout that the hero of the piece finances by withholding ten dollars from a cleaning woman to the nerve-racking night he spends in the alcoholic ward of Bellevue. In his role of a frustrated, dipsomaniac writer, Mr. Milland shows a nice appreciation of the terrors a sheet of blank paper can hold for an author, and in a scene in which he plods brokenly for miles along Third Avenue in an attempt to hock his typewriter, only to discover in the end that every pawnshop is closed for Yom Kippur, he gets hold of all the tragic irony of the situation.

While the burden of carrying
The Lost Weekend
along devolves mainly upon Mr. Milland, he receives some sturdy assistance from the rest of the cast. As a tough-tongued bartender, Howard da Silva is as convincing as anybody I’ve run across behind a beer pump, and as a spiteful, supercilious male nurse, Frank Faylen will make your hackles rise. There are excellent performances, too, by Jane Wyman, Philip Terry, Doris Dowling, and, for that matter, everybody else in the cast. While I’m scattering compliments around this way, I wouldn’t want to overlook Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, who fashioned the screen play and served, respectively, as director and producer. They can congratulate themselves on having made one of the best films of the past decade.

DECEMBER 10, 1949 (ON
THE BICYCLE THIEF
)

V
ittorio De Sica, who directed the remarkable Italian film
Shoe-Shine
, has come along with another offering, called
The Bicycle Thief
, which should establish him forthwith as the peer of any moviemaker in the world. In this one, De Sica, starting with a slender theme, winds up with a drama that is at once funny, appealing, exciting,
and sad. The picture is set in Rome, and chronicles the agitated weekend of a workman who, after holding down a new job as billposter for only part of a day, sees a crook make off with his bicycle, a necessary tool of his trade. De Sica has previously established the importance of this bicycle by showing the workman’s wife pawning the family sheets to get it out of hock, and it seems a very real catastrophe when the vehicle is stolen. The pursuit of the thief makes up the rest of the picture, and the chase leads the workman into all kinds of strange situations. Following right behind him is his small son, and the pair of them, as played by Lamberto Maggiorani and Enzo Staiola, are totally persuasive.

De Sica never slips in his direction, whether he is taking his hero and the boy through the corridors of a wonderfully realistic mission, full of battered derelicts and starchly prim workers in the Lord’s vineyard, or plunging them into the dangerous midst of the thieves and black-marketeers of Rome. No matter how tense the movement of the film becomes, he always has time to find a touch of humor in such things as the small boy’s bewilderment when, during a rainstorm, he takes cover against a wall, along with half a dozen young seminarians, all of whom are jabbering away in German, and the child’s confusion at the mission when, on peering into a confessional, he is rapped sharply on the head by the attendant cleric. And another funny scene is a glimpse of the youngster’s irritation at being compelled to wait outside a brothel while his father is inside looking around for the thief. Throughout the picture, the emotional interdependence of father and son is studied compassionately, and when, in an access of frustration, the workman denounces the boy as a nuisance and slaps him, it makes for as poignant a moment as I’ve ever experienced at the movies. Since the acting is altogether superior, it is worth remarking that there is only one professional in the cast. The man who plays the hero is a metalworker, his supposed wife is a journalist, and the boy is a seven-year-old whom De Sica happened upon while shooting a street scene. A good many of those in the supporting cast are just what they are made out to be. The photography is endlessly varied, and there is some fine visual irony in the views of the workman and his son making their way through crowds of fashionable and sporting cyclists in the hope of recovering the worn-out bicycle on which their livelihood depends. By now I imagine you will have gathered that I think the thing is a masterpiece.

A NOTE BY HILTON ALS

T
he best, most interesting criticism is produced by those writers who are willing to risk being artists themselves. Between 1940 and his death eighteen years later, Wolcott Gibbs was
The New Yorker
’s first-string theatre critic, a role he assumed after Robert Benchley hung up his visor following eleven years on the job. But Benchley, with his schnauzer eyes and commonsense wit, had a second career, as a sometime monologist or character actor in films ranging from the 1935 Oscar-winning short
How to Sleep
to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film
Foreign Correspondent.
Unlike Benchley, however, Gibbs—bespectacled, more tall than square—was temperamentally unsuited for the job of critic as public figure; his writing was his defense against a world that both entranced and bugged him.

Gibbs felt outside life’s party from the first. He was born in 1902 into a prosperous family with ties to science, industry, and politics; his father died early, when Wolcott was six. Gibbs’s alcoholic mother was incapable of taking care of the future writer and his siblings, so Wolcott was sent off to live with an uncle. Gibbs’s education was spotty; he was expelled from one boarding school and never attended college. In 1927, after a stint as a reporter at a Long Island newspaper, he joined the staff of Harold Ross’s
New Yorker
, where he worked in various capacities—editor, Talk of the Town reporter, short-story and Profile writer—for the next thirty years. (His very sweet and funny 1950 play,
Season in the Sun
, about a sort of Gibbs-like writer’s life on Fire Island, is not least among his accomplishments, and is ripe for revival.)

But Gibbs wrote about theatre more consistently than he did any other subject for the magazine; rereading his
New Yorker
theatre pieces
now is like looking at an ongoing journal about a cultural world where some things lasted and other things did not. (It is difficult to recall, for instance, how significant Elmer Rice’s politically motivated work was to the theatre landscape of the 1930s and ’40s, before Arthur Miller took his spot.) But what is consistent throughout is Gibbs’s voice. It was the voice of New York—always on the verge of giving up without forgoing optimism entirely. Take this moment from his first review as
The New Yorker
’s lead theatre critic, published February 3, 1940:

Nothing is more tedious than describing the plot of a play that one finds tedious. Gibbs was one of the first to make a game of it; indeed, it became a hallmark of his style. But when it came to the “new” theatre of the 1940s, ushered in by Tennessee Williams and Oscar Hammerstein II, among others, Gibbs acknowledged how his earlier critical style—with its Deco-like sheen and New York provincialism—would have to change in accordance with the America these and other artists were bringing to realistic, often lyrical light. In short, Gibbs would have to be more open and go deeper as a writer himself. Writing about Eugene O’Neill’s 1946 masterwork,
The Iceman Cometh
—he didn’t love it as much as the previous decade’s
Mourning Becomes Electra
—he acknowledged how the entire enterprise “was certainly enough to intimidate the most frivolous critic.” Never content with his facility, Gibbs, during the 1940s, threw it in the rumble seat of his past, and began producing some of the best work of his career, in any genre—without sacrificing any of his caricaturist’s love of the small or big gesture. In his review of the 1946 Broadway musical
Annie Get Your Gun
, he praises Ethel Merman for her

This is as beautiful and true as anything the poet Edwin Denby wrote about the dance and dancers. Like Denby, Gibbs wrote criticism that was the synthesis of everything he produced outside it, including “Eden, with Serpents,” his sad, hard short story about a clinic where people with names like Mrs. Charlie Goodenough lounge while drying out, or any number of other stories in which drinking and recovery play a part. You cannot be funny without knowing not only that great sadness is at the bottom of the precipice, but that it is actually holding up the earth you stand on. Criticism suited Gibbs because he could be alone in a crowd, immersed in the world of someone else’s vulnerability and imagination, which called on his own. That’s where he lived. And where his words continue to live, too.