Billy Wilder directed Sunset Blvd. with Gloria Swanson and William Holden. Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett movies Below is a list of movies on which Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder worked together as screenwriters, including efforts for which they did not receive screen credit. The Wilder-Brackett screenwriting partnership lasted from 1938 to 1949. During that time, they shared two Academy Awards for their work on The Lost Weekend (1945) and, with D.M. Marshman Jr., Sunset Blvd. (1950). More detailed information further below. Post-split years Billy Wilder would later join forces with screenwriter I.A.L. Diamond in movies such as the classic comedy Some Like It Hot (1959), the Best Picture Oscar winner The Apartment (1960), and One Two Three (1961), notable as James Cagney's last film (until a brief comeback in Milos Forman's Ragtime two decades later). Although some of these movies were quite well received, Wilder's later efforts – which also included The Seven Year Itch...
- 9/16/2015
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
I. The Rattigan Version
After his first dramatic success, The Winslow Boy, Terence Rattigan conceived a double bill of one-act plays in 1946. Producers dismissed the project, even Rattigan’s collaborator Hugh “Binkie” Beaumont. Actor John Gielgud agreed. “They’ve seen me in so much first rate stuff,” Gielgud asked Rattigan; “Do you really think they will like me in anything second rate?” Rattigan insisted he wasn’t “content writing a play to please an audience today, but to write a play that will be remembered in fifty years’ time.”
Ultimately, Rattigan paired a brooding character study, The Browning Version, with a light farce, Harlequinade. Entitled Playbill, the show was finally produced by Stephen Mitchell in September 1948, starring Eric Portman, and became a runaway hit. While Harlequinade faded into a footnote, the first half proved an instant classic. Harold Hobson wrote that “Mr. Portman’s playing and Mr. Rattigan’s writing...
After his first dramatic success, The Winslow Boy, Terence Rattigan conceived a double bill of one-act plays in 1946. Producers dismissed the project, even Rattigan’s collaborator Hugh “Binkie” Beaumont. Actor John Gielgud agreed. “They’ve seen me in so much first rate stuff,” Gielgud asked Rattigan; “Do you really think they will like me in anything second rate?” Rattigan insisted he wasn’t “content writing a play to please an audience today, but to write a play that will be remembered in fifty years’ time.”
Ultimately, Rattigan paired a brooding character study, The Browning Version, with a light farce, Harlequinade. Entitled Playbill, the show was finally produced by Stephen Mitchell in September 1948, starring Eric Portman, and became a runaway hit. While Harlequinade faded into a footnote, the first half proved an instant classic. Harold Hobson wrote that “Mr. Portman’s playing and Mr. Rattigan’s writing...
- 3/25/2015
- by Christopher Saunders
- SoundOnSight
Actor best known as the haughty department store supervisor Captain Peacock in the TV comedy Are You Being Served?
The actor Frank Thornton, who has died aged 92, had a flair for comedy derived from the subtle craftsmanship of classical stage work. However, he will be best remembered for his longstanding characters in two popular BBC television comedy series – the sniffily priggish Captain Peacock in Are You Being Served? and the pompous retired policeman Herbert "Truly" Truelove, in Roy Clarke's Last of the Summer Wine.
Robertson Hare, the great Whitehall farceur, told him: "You'll never do any good until you're 40." And, said Thornton, "he was quite right." In the event, he was 51 when David Croft, producer of another long-running British staple, Dad's Army, remembered the tall, long-faced actor from another engagement and decided to cast him as the dapper floor-walker in charge of shop assistants played by Mollie Sugden, Wendy Richard,...
The actor Frank Thornton, who has died aged 92, had a flair for comedy derived from the subtle craftsmanship of classical stage work. However, he will be best remembered for his longstanding characters in two popular BBC television comedy series – the sniffily priggish Captain Peacock in Are You Being Served? and the pompous retired policeman Herbert "Truly" Truelove, in Roy Clarke's Last of the Summer Wine.
Robertson Hare, the great Whitehall farceur, told him: "You'll never do any good until you're 40." And, said Thornton, "he was quite right." In the event, he was 51 when David Croft, producer of another long-running British staple, Dad's Army, remembered the tall, long-faced actor from another engagement and decided to cast him as the dapper floor-walker in charge of shop assistants played by Mollie Sugden, Wendy Richard,...
- 3/19/2013
- by Carole Woddis
- The Guardian - Film News
The author's stylish language will be heard once more in the movie, fifty years after he was branded as old-fashioned amid the coming of drama's angry young men
The spare, stylish dialogue of Terence Rattigan, at one time the highest-paid screenwriter in the world, will soon be heard in Britain's cinemas once more. In the final phase of a centenary year that has seen the late playwright's work revived on stages across the country, next month will bring not just a celebration of his theatrical legacy at Chichester Festival Theatre, but the release of a new film version of The Deep Blue Sea – the play regarded by many as Rattigan's masterpiece.
Director Terence Davies is due to show his film, which stars Rachel Weisz as the troubled Hester Collyer, at the Toronto Film Festival before its British premiere in November.
Davies, the acclaimed experimental screenwriter and filmmaker from Liverpool behind Distant Voices,...
The spare, stylish dialogue of Terence Rattigan, at one time the highest-paid screenwriter in the world, will soon be heard in Britain's cinemas once more. In the final phase of a centenary year that has seen the late playwright's work revived on stages across the country, next month will bring not just a celebration of his theatrical legacy at Chichester Festival Theatre, but the release of a new film version of The Deep Blue Sea – the play regarded by many as Rattigan's masterpiece.
Director Terence Davies is due to show his film, which stars Rachel Weisz as the troubled Hester Collyer, at the Toronto Film Festival before its British premiere in November.
Davies, the acclaimed experimental screenwriter and filmmaker from Liverpool behind Distant Voices,...
- 8/22/2011
- by Vanessa Thorpe
- The Guardian - Film News
Unlike his famous contemporary, Asquith struggled with the transition to sound – but his partnership with Terence Rattigan produced classic cinema and theatre
When Alfred Hitchcock, interviewed by François Truffaut, lamented the "photographs of people talking" that passed for movies, he was voicing an old commonplace. Even before the coming of sound Anthony Asquith, the director with whom Hitchcock was then routinely compared (both were young, promising, stylistically similar, socially distinct) complained of films comprising "alternate close-ups of two men talking across a table with subtitles giving their conversation sandwiched in between. That is not a real film, but a photographed play."
For the cognoscenti cinema meant movement, rhythm, Battleship Potemkin. In a word, montage. Asquith was there in February 1929 when Vsevolod Pudovkin, in front of an English audience after the London debut of The End of St Petersburg, described the "Kuleshov experiment". Its inspirational conclusion, in Asquith's paraphrase, was that...
When Alfred Hitchcock, interviewed by François Truffaut, lamented the "photographs of people talking" that passed for movies, he was voicing an old commonplace. Even before the coming of sound Anthony Asquith, the director with whom Hitchcock was then routinely compared (both were young, promising, stylistically similar, socially distinct) complained of films comprising "alternate close-ups of two men talking across a table with subtitles giving their conversation sandwiched in between. That is not a real film, but a photographed play."
For the cognoscenti cinema meant movement, rhythm, Battleship Potemkin. In a word, montage. Asquith was there in February 1929 when Vsevolod Pudovkin, in front of an English audience after the London debut of The End of St Petersburg, described the "Kuleshov experiment". Its inspirational conclusion, in Asquith's paraphrase, was that...
- 4/7/2011
- The Guardian - Film News
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