Articles by matt berman
Comedy in any medium depends a great deal upon the mixing up of messages, the deliberate switching of a communication context, and the swapping of labels on statements. Billy Wilder’s comedies generally avoid slapstick switches …
Originally branded “a dirty fairy tale,” Billy Wilder’s The Apartment combines irony, burlesque, soap opera, and truth into a morality play whose message is “be a mensch,” a Yiddish term for a human being. Filmed …
Monkey Business is a comedy about rejuvenation, a serious theme; however, director Howard Hawks’s treatment of the subject does not emphasize this seriousness. His approach is to make the situations resulting from the premise as …
Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes concerns the Hubbard clan, a ruthless, upwardly mobile family who play out their drama against a backdrop of the South in transition. Crushed by the terrors of reconstruction, the romanticism …
Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot is an outrageous, satirical spoof of the 1920′s in which Wilder deftly spends two hours milking one joke, that of two musicians on the run from Chicago mobsters, who …
The witness for the prosecution, a surprise witness, is Christine Vole (Marlene Dietrich), presumably the wife of the man on trial for murder, Leonard Vole (Tyrone Power), a ne’er-do-well gadget peddler. She claims that she …
Very few characters have struck the chord of man’s imagination with more resonance than Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll, for in his duality he represents the struggle of good and evil within the individual. It …
When Columbia first announced its purchase of Clifford Odets’ Group Theatre play Golden Boy, it seemed a strange choice, because that studio had never favored dramas of strong social significance. Odets was not hired to …
When Queen Christina opened, at the end of 1933, Greta Garbo had not appeared in a film for eighteen months, and rumors were circulating that she was ready to give up the screen—something which was …
For many years, critics and historians tended to see Love Me Tonight as an unsuccessful imitation of the great director Ernst Lubitsch. In recent years, however, this extraordinarily stylish musical has come into prominence and …
