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Auf Wiedersehen, Billy
A Billy Wilder Memorial
By Eric Barker
“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 he 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 of 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. Over the next twenty years 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, acting and producing.
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 from a popular,
hard-boiled novel, by Billy and the king of forties street
poetry, Raymond Chandler. 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 flaunted 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 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 (1958): 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 forced
into swindling an insurance company over a minor injury by
his unscrupulous brother-in-law. 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.
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