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The buddies in question here would be Billy Wilder, director extraordinaire, and hard-boiled novelist Raymond Chandler. They're all but thrown in a room—admittedly, Wilder's lavishly appointed Paramount office (chicly designed by Charlie Corcoran)—and forced to spend weeks together writing the silver-screen adaptation of James Cain's novel, Double Indemnity, which would hit theaters in 1944 starring Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, and Edward G. Robinson. No small task, this, considering that the book's plot turns on adultery and murder, the kinds of topics the enforcers in the Hayes Office frowned mightily upon. So how to show what cannot, must not, be shown? That's why these two are together. Chandler (Larry Pine) is the technician, the man with a gift for whip-cracking dialogue and wrist-slitting suspense, while Wilder (Vincent Kartheiser) is the artist who knows how to hide the most lurid acts and the most illicit feelings in plain sight. Together they should be unstoppable. Naturally, it would be a short, pointless play if they were. They don't get along, the conservative Chandler chafing against the authoritarian, manipulative Wilder, but whenever they click they produce the stuff that celluloid legends are made of. Unfortunately, the creative process is notoriously difficult to dramatize, especially when leaping over media the way Bencivenga does here. Large chunks of scenes are devoted to Chandler and Wilder describing exactly what will finally appear in the movie—or, sometimes, what they want to appear in the movie. Part of this may be to put at ease audience members unfamiliar with the film, and to some extent it's unavoidable, but its clunky, lumpy handling doesn't always make for riveting entertainment. What would is digging deep into the personalities of the two men, but aside from a couple of surface-level ghosts (Wilder loses much of his family to the Holocaust, Chandler has a history with drinking), these men are not presented as the colorful, richly detailed figures we'd love to believe they would have had to be. (The penultimate scene, set in the wake of the movie's premiere, turns on a kinship between the two that is never proved.) Nor is there much tension to be found in their situation; we know the movie was made, and without many major obstacles to overcome other than a nebulous deadline, getting there is somewhat less than half the fun. Even so, Bencivenga's treatment is relentless and amusing enough, even if the direction by present-day Hollywood scion Garry Marshall, is looser and flabbier than it should be. If we had a stronger sense that these men were caged animals who can't wait to tear each other apart, the same script would carry everyone a lot further. As it is, only Sophie von Haselberg, as Wilder's secretary, and especially Drew Gehling as the film's fast-talking, put-upon producer, summon the proper whiff of period delicacy slowly giving way to institutional rot. Pine doesn't find many ways to make Chandler a dynamic participant in the saga, and gives a reluctant-seeming, nonspecific performance that doesn't successfully define Chandler's own shrinking qualities. And though Kartheiser comes closer to unearthing what makes his character fascinating, most of Wilder seems wrapped within a greasy German accent rather than a true auteur's passion or vision. Nor does it help that Kartheiser radiates a youthfulness without the accompanying forcefulness or charisma that might explain how Wilder could so easily control his set-in-his-ways colleague. What the two ended up creating wound up a classic, no doubt, but Billy & Ray doesn't quite capture either the expectant energy of Double Indemnity's creation, or its impact afterwards. Too often, it instead feels like a B movie that could have been an A without that pesky Production Code, or with a genius who could "get around" the restrictions the way Wilder did. Bencivenga does touch on many fascinating stories, but the answer to the question of why this particular tale was one worth telling seems to have been left on the cutting-room floor.
Billy & Ray
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