Lisa Lieberman's Blog - Posts Tagged "billy-wilder"

Chandler was writing within a schlock genre, but he aimed to create art. “To exceed the limits of a formula without destroying it,” he said, “is the dream of every magazine writer who is not a hopeless hack.”

When Billy Wilder brought him in to write the screenplay of James M. Cain’s novella, Double Indemnity, Chandler got his chance.

You've gotta read the rest of the review.

But there’s Marlene Dietrich, sultry as ever, performing in the Lorelei Club—a postwar version of the seedy nightclub where the German actress was introduced to us in The Blue Angel (1930). “Falling in Love Again,” the melancholy torch song composed for her in that film by Friedrich Hollaender, feels positively upbeat when compared to the numbers Hollaender composed for this one:

They had a touch of paradise, a spell you can’t explain. For in this crazy paradise, you are in love with Pain. — “Illusions”

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