‘Double Solitaire: The Films of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder’
By Donald Brackett
Applause, 224 Pages

One of the better sentences in a biographical/critical study of two great collaborators who wrote classics such as “The Lost Weekend” and “Sunset Boulevard” runs as such: “It’s not an account of the individuals themselves so much as of their exotic bonding into a single creative structural unit making movies together, as well as an exploration of the meaning and value of the movies they made.”

Donald Brackett is distantly related to a screenwriter whose name once appeared on a television, a “magic flickering analog box,” intriguing Canadian teenager Donald, whose parents could give him only a vague explanation of how they were connected to the “American branch of the family who had something to do with Hollywood.”

In a prologue, Mr. Brackett tells, in perhaps more detail than one would desire, why he became interested in the fraught partnership — often called, ironically, a happy Hollywood marriage — between two fretful writers who fought and broke up and eventually stayed divorced, with each of them going on to create, separately, award-winning films.

The prologue is titled “Ready for Their Close-Up” — a nod to Gloria Swanson’s faded film star in “Sunset Boulevard” who awaits her comeback close-up, directed by the legendary Cecil B. DeMille. Mr. Brackett, like Swanson’s character, is as enraptured with movies as with the men who made them. Why he characterizes “Sunset Boulevard” as a “psychic little psalm” remains opaque to me.

I’m not sure what “little” means when applied to “Sunset Boulevard,” which is a baroque tribute to Hollywood grandeur and tawdriness, exemplified not only in Swanson but in William Holden’s struggling screenwriter character who narrates the film from his point of view as his dead body floats in one of those swimming pools that signified what success and failure meant in Hollywood terms.

After reading Mr. Brackett’s prologue, you can probably decide if you want to read on. The entire book is studded with insights and clichés. Billy Wilder, compared to Charles Brackett, is “no slouch.” In other words, what you get is a very chatty narrative that some may find charming and others cloying. I don’t like the affected chumminess of Mr. Brackett’s hookup with a cousin of his great-great-grandfather: “Together we traveled in the middle of the night in the dark, down celluloid roads.” 

I do like Mr. Brackett’s characterization of movies as “a huge part of the larger history of visual art.” But how about this aperçu: “It suddenly occurred to me one day, while off from school and pretending to have the flu but instead watching old classic movies on television as usual, that films were our contemporary cathedral murals, our stained-glass windows.” Certainly the television set, and most of the movies he was watching, were in black and white. 

Overlook such meaningless statements and you will find a fascinating account of how Wilder, an émigré, learned from Charles Brackett how to both please and challenge Hollywood producers, eventually going out on his own to write a renowned film noir, “Double Indemnity,” and many other successful dramas and comedies, as well as his share of flops.

What Mr. Brackett has to say about these two very different personalities is also a good way of explaining why playing off one another — however acrimonious that had to be — worked to their advantage, as the flamboyant, talkative Wilder was alternately curbed and charged up by his “more retiring and circumspect” but perceptive collaborator.

Whereas Wilder gave many interviews and wrote articles and memoirs, and has been the subject of several biographies, Brackett never produced his autobiography, though the author has read his personal journals that perhaps are an even better source, as they are so close to the raw experience of those trying workouts with Wilder.

So, if you can overlook language about “this broiling cauldron of cinematic creativity” that sometimes reads like the words of William Holden’s failed screenwriter, you will learn a good deal about how Brackett and Wilder made prophetic films that reflect, Mr. Brackett believes, our “weird world in which reality and actuality, news, artifice, and popular entertainment have all been blurred together in a fascinating but threatening manner, not unlike the eerie shadows of Sunset Boulevard itself.”

Hollywood is a vital presence in Mr. Rollyson’s biographies of Marilyn Monroe, Lillian Hellman, Dana Andrews, Walter Brennan, Ronald Colman, William Faulkner, and a work in progress, “Our Eve Arden.”