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(United States, 1947, 104 minutes, b&w, video) The
following film notes were prepared for the New York State Writers
Institute by Kevin Jack Hagopian, Senior Lecturer in Media Studies
at Pennsylvania State University: A Double Life was the first of seven films that Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon wrote for George Cukor. The three would do seven films together, including Adam's Rib, Born Yesterday, and Pat and Mike, making it the most prolific and rewarding periods of Cukor's directing career. With the Kanins, Cukor ventured away from the security of the MGM lot. A Double Life was produced at Universal Studios, a studio which, since the petering out of its marvelous horror film cycle around 1940, had no discernible identity. In 1948, Universal was a blowzier, more raffish studio than the aristocratic MGM that had been Cukor's home since 1933. Universal was just the kind of place to make A Double Life. MGM was simply not ready to make the kind of gritty, disturbing film Cukor and the Kanins envisioned. (Indeed, it would be the success of A Double Life that would push MGM into film noir with films like 1950's The Asphalt Jungle and Mystery Street.) Cinematographer Milton Krasner could experiment with far murkier low-key lighting configurations than the high-key house style of MGM. And Universal pioneered in New York film noir location shooting; their 1948 Naked City is often cited as the most important of the postwar New York films, but A Double Life came first, its less well-known location photography making New York seem a place made of alternately tawdry low dives and claustrophobic, over-decorated Park Avenue apartments. At the behest of the Kanins, editor Robert Parrish and designer Harry Horner joined the production early, and stayed close throughout shooting. Together with cinematographer Krasner, they gave the film an eerily subjective sensibility, for although Anthony John's estrangement from reality doesn't begin until sometime near the middle of the film, the entire film is shot as if from his viewpoint. From Tony's perspective, the theater audience and the ordinary citizens of New York alike are part of the same shadowy, unreal population. A Double Life wasn't the only classic-era film noir to be set in the world of the theater. Both 1948's The Velvet Touch and Alfred Hitchcock's 1950 Stagefright both featured actors (diva types, played by Rosalind Russell and Marlene Dietrich, respectively), who, like Tony John, grew so used to playing other characters that they lost the ability to play themselves. All three of these criminal protagonists, however, also have the actor's ability to tell a great story with conviction. Cracking their stories proves difficult, because they have come to believe those stories themselves; they are their own best audiences. The Kanins, like Cukor, were people of the theater, and many of the films and plays they created together or separately would be set in the world of the theater. But unlike the play The Actress, in which Ruth Gordon remembered her girlish dreams of willingly casting of her prosaic existence in favor of the far more romantic lives of dramatic protagonists like Juliet, A Double Life imagines playacting as a dangerous walk through a swamp of fear and pathology.
To reassure Colman, Cukor told the actor that the film had been designed to get Colman a long-overdue Oscar; Colman had been nominated three times before. Then, believing his own tale, Cukor and his associates set out to make it happen that way. Cukor and the Kanins personally invited members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to see the film, and then greeted them after the screenings with enthusiastic reminders about the quality of Colman's performance. It worked. Colman's Oscar for Best Actor was regarded as entirely justified. Colman had made audiences believe that a person could be swallowed whole by his own fictional creation. — Kevin Hagopian, Penn State University For additional information, contact the Writers Institute at 518-442-5620 or online at https://www.albany.edu/writers-inst.
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