Bottomless

A sweaty man in a suit and hat holding a ten-dollar bill stares at a row of out of focus liquor bottles in the foreground. Image is black and white.

|Patrick Clifford| This isn’t going to be easy to write. Writing about drinking is hard. And The Lost Weekend isn’t just a movie about drinking. It’s a movie about writing about drinking. Writing and drinking have always been joined at the hip. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Stephen King— Continue reading

The Lost Weekend: An Act of Understanding 

|Jackson Stern| Like many self-described “film nerds”, I grew up with a great admiration for the work of Billy Wilder. Around the time I was thirteen or fourteen, I was watching Sunset Boulevard monthly, completely enraptured by the witty dialogue, the strangeness of it… Continue reading

Read the Book First: Adaptations, Queer Coding, and the Production Code in The Big Clock 

|Reid Lemker| My dad had a rule about film adaptations. He always told my sister and me to “read the book first” when we were kids. These days, I don’t always heed this advice. However, watching John Farrow’s 1948 film The Big Clock, after reading the 1946 Kenneth Fearing novel of the same… Continue reading

Crawling Up the Walls: Set Design and the Use of Space in Dial M for Murder

|Courtney Kowalke| I lived in my last apartment for five years and ten months. When I was allowed to work from home at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, my apartment was the center of my universe. I got out plenty, taking long walks and bike rides and drives around the city. Still… Continue reading