Calendar: March 29

A Year: Day to Day Men: 29th of March

A London Morning

March 29, 1959 was the release date of the film “Some Like It Hot”, directed and produced by Billy Wilder and starring Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon.

“Some Like It Hot” was shot in California during the summer and autumn of 1958. Many scenes were shot at San Diego’s Hotel del Coronado which fit the look of the movie’s 1920s period and was near Hollywood. The soundtrack created by Adolph Deutsch has an authentic 1920s jazz feel using sharp, brassy strings to create tension.

For the cinematography, Billy Wilder chose to shoot the film in black and white as Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis dressed in full drag costume and make-up looked ‘unacceptably grotesque’ in early color tests. Despite Marilyn Monroe’s contract requiring color film, she agreed to film in black and white after seeing the early color tests of the make-up.

The film is notable for featuring cross dressing, and for playing with the idea of homosexuality, which led to its being produced without approval from the Motion Picture Production Code. The code had been gradually weakening in its scope during the early 1950s, due to increasing social tolerance for previously taboo topics in film, but it was still officially enforced. The overwhelming success of “Some Like It Hot” is considered one of the final nails in the coffin for the Hays Code, the moral guidelines that was in effect from 1930 to 1968.

It was voted as the top comedy film by the American Film Institute on their list ‘AFI’s 100 Years…100 Laughs’ in 2000. In 1989, this film became one of the first twenty-five films inducted into the United States National Film Registry. Though sometimes said to have been “condemned” by the Roman Catholic Church’s Legion of Decency, that body gave the film its less critical rating as “morally objectionable”. In 2017, the BBC conducted an international survey for the best comedy in film history among 253 film critics from 50 countries, which ranked “Some Like It Hot” as number one.

Note: The studio United Artists hired Barbette, a famous female impersonator, to coach Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis on gender illusion for the film. Barbette, whose greatest fame came from his performances in Europe in the 1920’s and 30’s, may have been the inspiration for the 1933 German film, “Viktor und Viktoria”, which features a plot about a woman pretending to be a female impersonator, whose gimmick was removing her wig at the end of her act (Barbette’s signature gesture).

Calendar: March 27

Year: Day to Day Men: March 27

The Slithering Snake

The twenty-seventh of March in 1902 marks the birth date of Charles Bryant Lang Jr., one of the outstanding cinematographers of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Modest and yet a perfectionist, he spent the majority of his career at Paramount Studios where he contributed to its reputation for visual style.

Born in Bluff, Utah, Charles Lang studied law at the University of Southern California, but soon joined his father, photographic technician Charles Bryant Lang Sr., at an East Los Angeles film laboratory in 1918. Lang apprenticed as a laboratory assistant and still photographer before becoming an assistant cameraman. He worked with cinematographers Harry Kinley Martin and Lesley Guy Wilky who often collaborated with William C. DeMille. Quickly promoted, Lang soon worked with William DeMille and, later, followed him to Paramount Studios.

In 1929, Lang became a full director of photography at Paramount Studios. He was part of a team of cinematographers working at the studio that included such craftsmen as Victor Milner, Karl Struss and Lee Garmes. At this time, Paramount dominated the Academy Awards for cinematography, especially in the genre of black and white romantic and period film. The style of lighting that Lang introduced in Fred Borzage’s 1932 “A Farewell to Arms” became heavily identified with all of Paramount’s films during the 1930s and 1940s.

Charles Lang excelled in the use of chiaroscuro, light and shade, and was adept at creating a mood for every genre. His film work in this period included Henry Hathaway’s 1935 drama-fantasy “Peter Ibbetson”. Frank Borzage’s 1936 comedy drama “Desire” with Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper, and Mitchell Leisen’s 1939 screwball comedy “Midnight”, scripted by Billy Wilder and starring Claudette Colbert and Don Ameche. Lang was especially appreciated by female stars, such as Dietrich, Hepburn and Helen Hayes, due to his ability to photograph them to their best advantage, often with subdued lighting and diffusion techniques.

Lang’s lighting effects adapted perfectly to the expressionist neo-realism of the 1950s film noir. His expert techniques strongly contributed to the mood in such films as Billy Wilder’s 1939 “Ace in the Hole” with Kirk Douglas as the exploitive newspaper reporter, and Sydney Boehm’s 1953 crime drama “Big Heat” with Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame. The success of such films as the 1954 “Sabrina” and the 1959 “Some Like It Hot”, all nominees for Lang’s cinematography, owed much of their success to his camera work.

Though he preferred black and white photography, Lang became equally proficient in color photography. He worked with different processes, including Cinerama and VistaVision, on richly-textured and sweeping outdoor westerns such as John Sturges’s 1960 “The Magnificent Seven” and John Ford and Henry Hathaway’s 1962 “How the West Was Won’. Lang also did the cinematography for romantic thrillers such as Stanley Donen’s 1963 romantic mystery “Charade” with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, and William Wyler’s art theft film “How to Steal a Million” with Audrey Hepburn, Peter O’Toole and Charles Boyer.

Charles Lang won an Academy Award Oscar, the second time he received a nomination, for his work on “Farewell to Arms”. He was nominated eighteen times which tied him with cinematographer Leon Shamroy who did most of his work for 20th Century Fox. In 1991, Lang received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Cinematographer for a career that included one hundred and fourteen feature films. Charles Lang died in Santa Monica, California in April of 1998 at the age of ninety-six.

Billy Wilder, “Sunset Boulevard”: Film History Series

Artist Unknown, “Sunset Boulevard” Film Gifs, Computer Graphics

“Sunset Boulevard” is a 1950 American film noir, which was co-written by Billy Wilder and novelist Charles Brackett, directed by Wilder, and produced by Brackett. The title is taken from one of the most important streets in Hollywood, a twenty-two mile artery that extends through the heart of the Greater Los Angeles area.

Starring William Holden as Joe Gillis, a struggling screenwriter, and Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond, a former silent-film star, the story begins with the body of Joe Gillis in a swimming pool and is told through Gillis’s flashback of his encounter with and developing financial dependence upon Norma Desmond. A great supporting role as Max von Mayerling, Desmond’s butler, is played by Austrian-American director Erich von Stroheim, whose 1924 film “Greed” is considered one of the most important films ever made.

Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett began working on the script in 1948, and were joined in August of that year by D. M. Marshman, Jr, who had previously written a critique of their 1948 “The Emperor Waltz”. By not disclosing full details of the story to Paramount Pictures, they were able to avoid the company’s strict self-censorship, caused by the Breen Code, and proceed with relative freedom. With only the first third of the script completed, the filming began in early May of 1949.

The dark, shadowy, black and white cinematographic work of “Sunset Boulevard” was accomplished by John F. Seitz, who had previously worked with Billy Wilder. Allowed to make his own decisions on the filming, Seitz used innovative techniques to create the gothic atmosphere of the noir genre and produce the necessary shots. For some interior shots, he sprinkled dust in front of the camera lens, a method he used for the 1944 ‘Double Indemnity”; the shot of the floating corpse in the swimming pool was achieved by placing a mirror in the bottom of the pool and shooting the body’s reflection from above. For his work on the film, John Seitz was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Cinematography.

“Sunset Boulevard” had its official world premiere at New York’s Radio City Music Hall on August 10, 1950. After a seven-week run, where it grossed over one million dollars, it was one of the Music Hall’s most successful films. Although, it was doing well in major cities, Gloria Swanson, in order to promote the film in rural areas, traveled by train on a twenty-three city tour in a few months. The box office receipts for the year 1950 totaled over two million dollars.

Described as one of Billy Wilder’s most significant works, “Sunset Boulevard” has developed lasting appeal. The film was nominated for Academy Awards in Best Motion Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Actress, and Best Supporting Actor and Actress; it won Best Story and Screenplay and Best Art Direction. The film , considered culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant by the Library of Congress, was inducted into the National Film Registry in 1989. As the film was shot using cellulose nitrate film stock, Paramount Studios digitally restored the film; the restored version was released on DVD in 2002.