Auf Wiedersehen, Billy
“Subtlety in movies? Of course there’s subtleties in movies, just be sure you make them obvious.” – Billy Wilder, 1906-2002
I used to work at a venerable book shop on the corner of Rodeo Drive and “Little” Santa Monica, right in the heart of Beverly Hills, and in two years there I saw many legendary show biz folk from every era, saw, mostly, what they were like when shopping.
The list is impressive even yet, even to me, because everybody came through Hunter’s Books when they were in L.A. and it’s a little surprising to think I came that close to so many legends who are now gone: Cary Grant, in the store just three minutes before everyone, customers and employees on all three floors, knew he was there and the staring and whispers started; Laurence Olivier, quite jaunty in cowboy hat and boots, trying to find a book no one in town seemed to have; the legendary writer-director John Huston, forced by advancing emphysema to rest by the front doors while his family shopped for him, giving me a courtly smile as I stacked his art books; Barbara Stanwyck, always charming and gracious when I carted her purchases to the car for her.
Some of my fondest memories from that time, circa 1980-81, are of passing the incomparable Billy Wilder on the street while on my way to work. In those days his office was directly across Little Santa Monica from Hunter’s in a nondescript stucco building and he was still going in to work every day, getting on the phone to the studios and the agents and the investors, not yet resigned, as he would be later with characteristic irony, to having been forgotten by the cruelest business in the world. He must have known it was coming: one look at his greatest film Sunset Boulevard (1950), and there can be little doubt Billy Wilder knew where he was and how he made his living. He was a peerless hustler and schmoozer, moving seemingly without effort through a society that has no memory, that uses the unwary and the dreamers like a cat uses a mouse.
But he could also be a kind and generous man, in spite of contrary reports. One of the 20th century’s most famous cynics, Billy once endured an entire shooting schedule (while making Sabrina, 1953) without speaking to his star, Humphrey Bogart (another Top Ten Cynic), because each of them thought the other was the most unpleasant man to ever walk the planet. It’s not that he didn’t suffer foolishness gladly. He didn’t suffer it at all.
An undisputed master of the snappy comeback long before he immigrated from Nazi Germany in the 30s, he hooked up with an American novelist, Charles Brackett, in order to write comedies in English and became the acerbic half of the most sought after writing duo of the era, his penetrating mind zeroing-in on the American vernacular and firing off some of the most pricelss dialogue in screwball comedy. But Wilder had no compunction about dropping his partner when the conservative Brackett objected that his pet directing project Double Indemnity (1944) was patently immoral. Billy simply found another writing partner (the amazing, and always drunk, novelist Raymond Chandler) and made the movie anyway, morality be damned, kicking off the as-yet unnamed genre of film noir and making a film of such disturbing and entertaining poetry, and unqualified critical and commercial success, Brackett had no choice but to admit defeat and return for another six years of frenzied, unequalled work, culminating in Sunset Boulevard.
Billy was just getting started. During the two decades following Indemnity he made some of the greatest films in Hollywood history, never doing the same thing twice, always revealing a distinctive, infectiously entertaining vision of the world that could be mistaken for no one else. He had a profoundly deep understanding of human suffering, but in film after film he refused to let the darkness conquer the business of living. He looked long and hard into the abyss, and he made us look, too, made us contemplate its presence in our daily lives, but he would also trot out a lacerating wit to protect both himself and his audience, facing Depravity and Death and Despair with a defiantly funny, verbal thrust-and-parry. After he and Brackett went their separate ways in the fifties, Billy found a writing soul mate in his new partner, the erudite and serenely caustic I.A.L. Diamond (a.k.a. Izzy), and the sophistication of the Wilder vision became its own genre, the unmistakable stamp of an inimitable artist.
Only Wilder could turn the horror of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre into a brilliant cross-dressing farce (Some Like It Hot, 1959), and only Wilder could then transform a door-slamming bedroom comedy into bittersweet high drama (The Apartment, 1960). His magic, and the most enduring aspect of his art, was to meld the yin-yang of comedy and tragedy until they were indistinguishable parts of the same dramatic experience, to be savored as one.
But he also told biting truths about the motivations of our species and he never shirked his duty to skewer sentimentality wherever he found it. Occasionally, as with Ace in the Hole (1951), his least successful film at the box-office and his most vitriolic, he slipped and forgot to be openly funny and a genuine bitterness and rage at the world’s cruelty would surface, chilling in its absolute clarity. He was, above all, a survivor, with a survivor’s practical embrace of necessity, a driving need to call things exactly what they were, and his films either beat down euphemism at all cost, as with his portrait of Hollywood as a dumpster of twisted dreams (Sunset Boulevard again), or he would turn the unspeakable to his advantage, filling a movie like Some Like It Hot with so much double entendre it can’t be catalogued.
No one gets to hold onto the magic forever. Audiences changed in the sixties, seeking a different kind of entertaining truth from that offered by Billy Wilder, often something less sophisticated, and the films he made became less effective, as well. He still showed flashes of genius, like casting Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau together for the first time (in The Fortune Cookie, 1966) and helping to invent and shape their comic chemistry. But he increasingly turned to old formulas and over the next two decades the Wilder edge eventually dulled, as all edges must, his films becoming sometimes vulgar (Kiss Me Stupid, 1964), sometimes strident (The Front Page, 1974), sometimes wobbly echoes of his former glory (Fedora, 1978).
But he never gave up, and why should he? He’d already done the impossible by the age of 54, becoming Hollywood’s most celebrated and beloved outsider. Cynic or not, he’d been nominated for 21 Oscars (and had won 6) for writing, directing and producing his films. Between 1944 and 1966, he’d turned out a nearly unbroken string of box-office hits, not an easy thing to accomplish and remain sane (when asked if he thought it was an insult to be called a commercial director, he answered, “It depends on the percentage I have of the picture”), and so he continued to go to work every weekday morning for thirty more years because, genius aside, it was the work that drove him — the writing and the directing, the creation — not the result. Long after he could raise the cash to make one last film, he kept trying, because making films is what Billy Wilder did.
So, as I said, I used to pass him many mornings, on the terribly clean sidewalks of Beverly Hills. I would be headed to my lowly job as an overstock clerk in a tony book shop for the Hollywood elite and Billy would come my way from the opposite direction, a stocky, bespectacled man walking briskly toward his office, hands rocking freely at his sides, his body language full of purpose and nervous intelligence. The first time he caught me looking at him, he said, “Morning,” and I mumbled a hello and tried to process the fact Billy Wilder had just spoken to me. Later, other mornings, I ventured a smile and greeted him first.
I’m such a dope, sometimes.
I wish I could say I took advantage of this situation and got to know him. One of the all-time great raconteurs, he loved visitors. A couple of my less well-mannered co-workers went banging on his office door once with the chutzpah to ask that he autograph an unauthorized Billy Wilder biography, which he did gladly, talking with them for an hour. One of them kept harassing me to do the same, but I was still pretty starstruck and new to L.A. I hadn’t yet learned how to bother the rich and famous with my own dark neediness.
One day as I stood in line at the tobacconist’s shop down the street, Mr. Wilder came in and stood behind me. I turned and said hello as if we were, in fact, the buddies I wished we could be. We small-talked pleasantly about the weather, while just under my surface I yearned to babble, suddenly, that I loved all his films, and to prove it by listing them all right there. But I had too much impulse control at the time, an affliction that can lead to a continual litany of missed chances.
Advice to the hopeful and the doomed: if one of your favorite directors comes into a store and stands in line behind you, go ahead and risk pissing him/her off and gush your admiration for them without delay. What’s the worst that could happen? They could be insufferable and say don’t bother me, but at least you’ll know you were a mensch.
The customer ahead of us was finished and the owner of the shop looked straight through me to the bigshot Hollywood director, who had been buying cigars there for thirty years, and asked him what he wanted. I thought that was a little rude, but I was perfectly willing to let the great Billy Wilder go before me. Billy Wilder, however, reminded the sycophantic owner that I had been there first, and she impatiently sold me my $2.00 pack of cigarettes while he waited to pick out some extremely expensive cigars in the world class humidor at the back.
Just a small moment, but I still think about it every time I read or hear about what an unpleasant man Billy Wilder could be, and I smile, I am amused, because I met many unpleasant people in L.A., especially after I became a waiter, a profession in which the perpetually unpleasant are part of the daily job, and Billy Wilder just wasn‘t one of them. He was a gentleman with me and with my friends.
The experience held true with most of the truly famous and accomplished people I bumped into in that town, which you can‘t help doing if you’re there a week. It was the wanna-bes and the never-gonna-bes who behaved badly. But Cary Grant was poised, gracious and polite to every person who spoke to him, John Huston was princely in his acknowledgement of my labors, and Tony Perkins was as sweet and unassuming as his Norman Bates persona (which admittedly could make some people nervous, but which made me laugh and set me at ease — “He really is like that.”).
I think Billy Wilder probably was an unpleasant fellow — that is, if he was dealing with unpleasant, egotistical Hollywood types more interested in making a buck than in making a good movie. The town is full of them, always has been, and no doubt some were offended by his propensity for calling a fool a fool. But I’ve seen most of his movies and I can tell you that, in film after film, he celebrated the honesty and the plight of the little guy, the average schmuck, the poor bastard who goes to work every day for doodly-squat and believes happiness is possible, in spite of the evidence. No matter the heights of Tinsel Town acceptance he reached, no matter how wickedly funny his tongue, Billy Wilder could tell a hawk from a handsaw in a pinch, and he wasn’t just nice to me because he could see adoration in my eyes.
He was a singular mensch, rich and famous by default. He let me go first because that’s what people do.
Billy Wilder’s Greatest Hits
An undertow of wry humor flows through his most serious dramas, while his comedies never quite shake the specter of mortality. All of his films are written for the sensibilities of people who have moved beyond puberty. Most are available to rent on VHS, and more are being released on DVD every year. Now that he‘s gone, perhaps we‘ll finally get to see them all.
Double Indemnity (1944):
Stanwyck: I wonder if I know what you mean.
MacMurray: I wonder if you wonder.
Wilder’s third film as a director was his breakthrough, a stunning chiaroscuro journey into lust and murder, adapted by Billy and the king of forties street poetry, Raymond Chandler, from James M. Cain’s hard-boiled novel . The casting of amiable good guy Fred MacMurray as a cynical insurance hustler who is too smart for his own good was a typically Wilderian stroke of dissonant genius. Barbara Stanwyck was hardly ever sexier, and surely one of Edward G. Robinson’s greatest performances, as an avuncular claims investigator.
The Lost Weekend (1945): A landmark Hollywood drama that flouted all censorship conventions against treating addiction in the movies. Still harrowing in its depiction of alcoholism, its perpetual humiliations and petty terrors, Wilder once again casting an actor who was best known as a light comedian, this time the dapper Ray Milland as a groveling, tortured Everyman who is ravaged by his own impulses. Time and the demise of Production Code standards have taken the sharpest edges off this movie, but it is all the more startling because of that, and for what Wilder was able to slip through the censor’s net even though it wasn‘t officially allowed.
Sunset Boulevard (1950):
Holden: You’re Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big.
Swanson: I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.
At once surreal and grittily realistic, hilarious and chilling, if I was forced to pick Wilder’s masterpiece, this would be it. Still the best film about Hollywood anyone ever tried to make, Wilder captures a bitterness and despair in Tinsel Town that no one else has dared to examine, because it acknowledges the filmmaker’s own complicity in the Great Lies of show business. Filled with inside jokes that have lost some of their sting if you’re not strong in early film lore, you need to know that Gloria Swanson was indeed a forgotten beauty queen of silent cinema, and her butler Erich von Stroheim was, indeed, a great director from the early days who had been thrown on the ash heap of movie history. Cameos from many other pioneers of the art form, including the magnificently deadpan comedian Buster Keaton.
Unforgettable dialogue in every scene. If you ever wondered which was the higher art form, comedy or tragedy, the satire of Sunset Boulevard could convince you that the pinnacle of storytelling may lie somewhere in between.
Ace in the Hole (1951; a.k.a. The Big Carnival):
Douglas: They’re having a rosary at that little church this evening. I want you to be there.
Sterling: I don’t go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.
Wilder’s least popular film is also his bleakest, the tale of a hustling reporter, played by a swaggering Kirk Douglas, whose heartlessness leads him to exploit a small town tragedy by turning it into a national media circus. Decades ahead of its time, a film that fearlessly examined the underside of news media power before it was fashionable to do so (and before so many major media corporations owned movie studios). Wilder’s first film after breaking up with writing partner Charles Brackett, it’s probably his most cynical, if such a thing is possible. With Jan Sterling in her best role as a two-timing small town floozy. Currently unavailable on home video, the most likely way to see this one is on cable.
Some Like It Hot (1959):
Curtis: But you’re not a girl, you’re a guy, and why would a guy want to marry a guy?!
Lemmon: Security!
The once-and-future cross-dressing farce, don’t be dismayed if it doesn’t make you howl at first. Part of its outrageousness flows from the fact no one had ever made a film like this before, while we’ve had plenty of them since. Trust me, though: Jack Lemmon is hysterically butch in high heels while Tony Curtis is gorgeous in same, when he’s not doing a dead-on impersonation of Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby; Marilyn Monroe (as Sugar Kane) is at her most voluptuously innocent, and the sheer quantity of Wilder-Diamond one-liners beggars the outer limits of probability. Fabulous Roaring 20s atmosphere, a Who’s Who of great character actors from the 20s and 30s in bit roles, riotously choreographed chase scenes.
The Apartment (1960):
MacLaine: Why can’t I ever fall in love with somebody nice like you?
Lemmon: Yeah, well, that’s the way it crumbles. Cookie-wise.
The pinnacle of the Wilder-Diamond collaborations, Billy’s most perfect tragicomedy slides effortlessly from door-slamming lunacy to heartrending drama to exultant romance without ever missing a step or seeming to change gears. A valentine to Jack Lemmon’s dazzling versatility, casting him as the ultimate Wilderesque schmuck, a hapless Everyman just trying to survive backstage politics at a monolithic insurance company by loaning out his apartment key to executives. One of Shirley MacLaine’s finest performances as Fran Kubelik, elevator operator of Lemmon’s dreams, and Fred MacMurray returns to the Wilder universe as their irredeemably smarmy boss.
Rainy Day Wilder
Not his greatest films, but second rate Wilder is often better than first-rate anyone else:
Stalag 17 (1953): Emotionally brutal comedy-drama in a WWII prison camp, but hang in there for the unforgettable second and third acts. Great Oscar-winning performance by William Holden. The unlikely basis for TV’s Hogan’s Heroes.
Sabrina (1954): First of two Wilder tributes to the enchanting talents of Audrey Hepburn, watch her steal the show from veterans Holden and Bogart.
The Seven-Year Itch (1955): Source of the world-famous shot with Monroe holding down her skirt above a windy subway grating. Lighthearted, knowing comedy of married man going through a mid-life crisis while his wife is out of town.
Love in the Afternoon (1957): Wilder’s second Hepburn fantasy, his first collaboration with Diamond, casting aging heartthrob Gary Cooper in a May-December romance with the ultimate gamine in mid-century Paris. The mood changes are heavier than usual, but the film’s sentiment is on target.
Witness for the Prosecution (1957): Wilder does Agatha Christie in high theatrical style, with great performances by many Old Hollywood legends, including Marlene Dietrich and Tyrone Power. Charles Laughton runs off with the whole show, however, a great actor in one of his finest moments.
One, Two, Three (1961): Frantic comedy with James Cagney as a Coca-Cola executive trying to avert diplomatic disaster in Cold War era West Berlin. Silly and on the mark.
The Fortune Cookie (1966): Historic first teaming of odd couple Lemmon and Matthau, a rude comedy about a TV cameraman coerced by his unscrupulous brother-in-law into swindling an insurance company over a minor injury. The two stars are in top form and became a renowned box-office team in the wake of this movie.
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970): Intended to be a much longer film, a very personal and bittersweet speculation on the likely demons of the world’s most famous detective. Taken away by the studio and cut to pieces, it was a box-office disaster anyway. This is another Wilder film, along with Ace in the Hole, that is slowly gaining a reputation among some film historians as a lost masterwork.
Avanti! (1972): Jack Lemmon travels to Italy to bury his father, whom he discovers was conducting a long time affair with an Englishwoman, and falls in love with the daughter of his father’s mistress, played by Juliet Mills. Witty, winking good fun.
