Word: brackett
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...first movie from Producer Charles (Sunset Boulevard, The Lost Weekend) Brackett since Paramount split his partnership with Billy Wilder, The Mating Season is a disappointment. Among its contrivances, it tries to palm off Lund as a sympathetic character, an effort that fails despite the script's broad, last-minute gestures. Star Ritter gets most of her help from Actress Hopkins' expert playing of a bitchy lady of quality. There is also a surprisingly animated performance by Gene Tierney...
Sunset Boulevard. Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder take a clever, sardonic look at Hollywood, and Gloria Swanson makes her comeback, in the year's most consistently brilliant display of movie craftsmanship (TIME...
While there is enough good acting in "Sunset Boulevard" to put it on the "must see" list, the film suffers from several unfortunate features. The most glaring of these is an overstuffed, unbalanced script. Billy Wilder and Charlie Brackett have just laid it on too thick, a fact which becomes more and more apparent as the film draws to its climax. The outcome is never in doubt since the picture is nearly all one big flashback, narrated by the hero who is floating in a swimming pool with three bullets in his back...
...reported that Wilder and Brackett started shooting "Sunset Boulevard" with only a skeleton script and improvised as they went along. The method resulted in superior photography with a sprinkling of superb touches. This free development, however, was responsible for overburdening the movie with material which detracts from the fine acting...
...shock effect of Sunset Boulevard is at least as high as that of such earlier Brackett & Wilder productions as the alcoholic Lost Weekend. The "hero" is a kept man, the leading lady a suicidal neurotic in her 50s, and their morbid liaison leads grimly on to madness and death. Manipulated less cleverly, the effect of these characters and their story would be oppressively decadent, not to say censorable. Indeed, for all the film's finesse, it may leave some moviegoers with a bad taste in their mouths. Yet, without sentimentalizing the characters or condoning their transgressions, the movie makes...