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Celebrating Charles Brackett

The Lost Weekend (1945)
January 11, 2015 - 7:00 pm
Billy Wilder Theater
In-person: 
Anthony Slide, author, "'It's the Pictures That Got Small': Charles Brackett on Billy Wilder and Hollywood's Golden Age."

In a career in Hollywood spanning more than three decades, from the silent era to the rise of television to entertainment pre-eminence, screenwriter, producer and novelist Charles Brackett provided literary material for 40-plus feature films, and for directors as varied as Robert Z. Leonard, Mitchell Leisen and Cecil B. DeMille. His numerous collaborations with writer-director Billy Wilder are legendary, and we are pleased to present these two Brackett-Wilder collaborations on the occasion of the publication of Anthony Slide's "It's the Pictures That Got Small": Charles Brackett on Billy Wilder and Hollywood's Golden Age.

Mr. Slide will sign copies of this new book beginning at 6 p.m.

The Lost Weekend  (1945)


This highly original, emotionally wrenching picture depicts a man's grueling, weekend-long crawl from drink to drink as he also attempts to write a novel about his own alcoholism. Family, friends and potential lovers endure Don Birnam's binging and lying, and when he winds up hospitalized, his withdrawals are a greater horror than he has yet known. By far the tour-de-force of Ray Milland's acting career, the film rode the cutting edge of attitudes toward the disease of alcoholism. 

Paramount Pictures, Inc. Producer: Charles Brackett. Director: Billy Wilder. Screenwriter: Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder. Cinematographer: John F. Seitz. Editor: Doane Harrison. Cast: Ray Milland, Jane Wyman, Phillip Terry, Doris Dowling, Frank Faylen.  35mm, b/w, 101 min.

Five Graves to Cairo  (1943)


John Bramble, member of a tank crew in a British Army installation in Egypt during World War II, survives a devastating German attack, barely escaping the scene alive. Seeking refuge in an Egyptian hotel, he learns that Germany's General Rommel is stationed there. Disguising himself as a hotel waiter and German sympathizer, Bramble plots sabotage and the murder of Rommel, working to maintain the trust of the Egyptian hotelier and a French chambermaid in this gripping wartime drama.

Paramount Pictures, Inc. Producer: Charles Brackett. Director: Billy Wilder. Screenwriter: Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder. Cinematographer: John F. Seitz. Editor: Doane Harrison. Cast: Franchot Tone, Anne Baxter, Akim Tamiroff, Fortunio Bonanova, Peter Van Eyck.  35mm, b/w, 96 min.

Part of: 
Archive Treasures