It would be near the end of his illustrious career, that Billy Wilder's films would pale in their knife-sharp edge, in what distinguished his comedies and crime efforts, and it was then that Wilder made no bones about his disconcert over the young "beards" who were starting to take Hollywood by storm ( the contemporaneous generation of Brian De Palma, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas). Wilder's thorough disenchantment was not just an old détrôné roi's jealousy, Billy Wilder's iconoclastic, pariah's view of American society, had also been thematic in his films, with a German respect for the word.
Wilder was born in the South of Poland, then, a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Fresh out of university, the budding director set up shop in Berlin , landing jobs as disparate as dancer, and local paper columnist. Coupled with Curt Siodmak, he would pen the evocative People On Sunday (1929). Both Richard Siodmak and Edgar Ulmer shared the helm of this production. Wilder would partner with Siodmak once more turning out the lugubrious crime comedy Der Mann, der seiner Morder sucht (Looking For His Murderer, 1931). Wilder, of Jewish extraction, fled for France in 1933 during the Nazi occupation, and it was there in the so-called hexagon that the carpet unrolled for his directorial debut , Bad Seed in 1934, the very same year he would emigrate to America. Ironically, and given that his whole reputation hinged on his wordplay talent, his English was underwhelming when he arrived to the States. This would not dissuade the emigre in any sense, and before long he was writing and co-creating with Charles Brackett, with whom he shared a creative partnership for over a dozen years. This was the collaboration that proved the most fruitful, producing some of the most impressive efforts of his prolific career, two of the most noted films in fact were produced in this period - The Lost Weekend (1945), and Sunset Boulevard (1950).
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| Lobby Card for Looking For His Murderer, 1931. |
Considered to be his greatest achievement in film noir was Double Indemnity (1944) which was written with iconic pulp author Raymond Chandler, whose signature was ever present in the erotically charged repartee between insurance man Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) and his calculating housewife Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck). It would be the insidiousness of the vision and at the same time the ethos-invoking humanity, that made it completely Wilder's baby. Of Wilder's quick dalliance with noir (given only four of his films would be considered of the genre), it was unarguably The Lost Weekend that would garner the most notoriety With a narrative that is rooted in the seeming real world, replete with its unrelenting and unwavering atmosphere (three of the four noir films were beautifully lit and photographed by the otherworldly John F. Seitz) it is astounding that the cinematography fails to obtrude and overtake the characters.
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| One of Wilder's few, but finest noir moments. |
After Double Indemnity, Wilder's canon consisted of sardonic visions of human avarice with almost equally black comedies, of which Some Like it Hot (1959) was truly the apogee. Although not considered a crime film per se, The Lost Weekend was informed with a profound noir sensibility as hedonistic writer Ray Milland watches his life fall apart at the seams. Similarly, in Sunset Boulevard (1950), Wilder turns his unflinching gaze on the film business itself - Gloria Swanson plays a once noted movie star, who dreams of her comeback, and hires a hack scriptwriter to help enable her delusions of grandeur. In the while he loses his own self-respect. A year after this defining moment, the auteur would return to the scene with his most sadistic film, Ace In the Hole (1951). Here Kirk Douglas gives a penetrating performance as a dyspeptic journalist who perpetually manipulates and doctors facts (are you hearing me, the gutter press)? impervious to the pain he causes various individual, anything he could maneuver for that one 'perfect story'.
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| Let this one definitely go to voice-mail. |
In Witness For The Prosecution (1958) there was an altogether new wrinkle for the crime genre by Wilder, with a perfunctory but satiating plot that was animated by husband and wife duo - Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester, playing a barrister and his persnickety nurse, respectively. It would be at this point that Wilder would partner with I.A.L. Diamond, an erstwhile mathematician . Wilder would focus all energies on comedy with some of the greatest ever to date, and quite often featuring two of his perennial favorites, the tried and true Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau.