Billy Wilder

[movieman1957]

Billy Wilder interests me on more than a level as a filmmaker. Mostly his European upbringing being so well translated to an American writer/director. With his hands, and words, involved in projects as varied as Midnight and Five Graves To Cairo to Ace In The Hole and The Spirit of St. Louis he seems to have hit on everything except a western.

There seems to be little here about him and his body of work as opposed to talking about a specific movie. I wondered what the rest of you thought about him as a writer or director. Where do you put him compared to Hawks or any other director that was so broad in different film genres.

Some of my favorites of his are the aforementioned Midnight, Some Like It Hot, Witness For The Prosecution even the recently seen Avanti was fun. (If Wilder can talk Jack Lemmon and Juliet Mills into a nude scene he must be very persuasive.)

Just curious.

[Lzcutter]

Chris,

One of my favorite directors is Billy Wilder. I love his cynical take on people, especially Ace in the Hole. Chuck Tatum is the precursor to some in today's media who will do anything for their shot at the big time, or in Chuck's case, back to the big time.

I adore Double Indemnity with all its conniving and Barbara and Fred turning on one another like vipers.

I saw The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes for the first time last month when it was on TCM's Holmes for the Holiday marathon and I very much liked the quirkiness of the film as well the sly, small homages to the Rathbone-Bruce movies.

But my favorite, hands down, is Sunset Blvd. Alternate takes of the morgue scene from the original beginning can be seen in the German documentary, Billy Wilder Speaks. It is a withering look at Hollywood and the changing tastes of the American public. I agree with a poster over at TCM City when he says every time he watches the movie he is thankful that Monty Clift turned the role down. Why? Because, for me, William Holden is Joe Gillis. Wonderful support from Erich Von Stroheim, Nancy Olsen and Jack Webb, but the movie belongs to Gloria Swanson.

Not Wilder's first choice but she was the first one to say yes without demands and she dove into the part. Only in her early 1950s and still beautiful, she makes us believe that she is less than beautiful, that her face, so beautifully unlined in real life, needs all those beauty products and gadgets to look young. She lets the cinematographer photograph her in harsh light, something most screen beauties would never do.

She so deserved the Oscar for that role as did Wilder and the film.

[charliechaplinfan]

Billy Wilder was the first director were I really recognised a common thread with some of the movies I had started to explore. Sunset Boulevard, Some Like it Hot, The Apartment, Double Indemnity. It's the first time I found myself thinking about the director rather than the stars.

I agree about Montgomery Clift, Joe Gillis is William Holden, Joe would have been a different character under Clift. I'm also glad Norma wasn't played by Mary Pickford, she would have been wrong, much as I love her.

[JackFavell]

I love Wilder, who can do light and dark equally well. He is my first recognized director as well, except for maybe Hitchcock.

I will write more later - but my favorite is also Sunset Boulevard - perfect from beginning to end. Great story, great mise en scene, great acting, great art direction, great music. Every scene is superb. You just get pulled in.

[mrsl]

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I admit I looked up Billy's directorial filmography to see what other films he did other than the well known ones, and I was surprised to learn he also directed The Lost Weekend, A Foreign Affair, Sabrina, and the Seven Year Itch. Movies of very wide scope from drama to comedy. You have to admit he pulled something out of Ray Milland's toes for The Lost Weekend, that was a frightening performance, very different from Millands norm. On the other hand, he gets his actors to do things that have you rolling on the floor. Humprhrey, the tough gangster, putting on a Freshmans cap, and strumming a ukulele in Sabrina.

The man had something, because his comedies are funny, and his dramas are sad, which is as it should be, but so many fall short of the mark.
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[ChiO]

Chris asked:

Where do you put him compared to Hawks or any other director that was so broad in different film genres.

Odd thing -- when I think of Wilder, I immediately think "comedy"; when I think of Hawks, I immediately think of action genres. But, my two favorite Hawks movies are screwball comedies (HIS GIRL FRIDAY and BRINGING UP BABY), and generally enjoy all of his comedies, but find his other movies variable. And then, I generally find Wilder's comedies to be highly variable (THE MAJOR AND THE MINOR, THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH, ONE, TWO, THREE and KISS ME, STUPID are wonderful, SOME LIKE IT HOT and AVANTI! are okay, and THE FORTUNE COOKIE, THE FRONT PAGE, and BUDDY BUDDY are...oh, let's say "unfunny" to me), but his other films to be reasonably consistently enjoyable (IRMA LA DOUCE being a major exception).

But for being a co-writer of MIDNIGHT, NINOTCHKA and BALL OF FIRE (there's Hawks again), each of which I find funnier than anything he directed, Mr. Wilder gets bonus points in this house.

[Ollie]

His large catalog of achievements is amazing to me, but also mentioned was his youth-background and its translation into Americana. How in the world did that happen? That's a remarkable issue for me - and seeing that, even at the end of his life, his speech was so heavily accented, and he so enjoyed switching into that German of his. (It's such a wonderful mixed accent, too. Not the High German or Bavarian, but this very gutteral. Almost like a Saxophone instead of a Clarinet. His laughs are so hearty.) I have this sense that he didn't really travel America very much either, but maybe so. It's not like he was taking The Red-Eye from LAX to LaGuardia every few months - he had to go by train most of his early years in America.

I wonder what kind of neighbor he was? Did he live in a secluded Hollywood setting, or was he driving around a lot? How did he get his sense of American humor? Or is it THAT common? He's got fans around the world and this makes me wonder if his humor isn't far more common than just stuck in between American shorelines.

[Lzcutter]

From the late 1970s on, he and his wife, Audrey, had a very nice condo near Beverly Hills and he drove to his office every day, no chauffeur involved until he got too old to drive. Cameron Crowe talks a bit about that in his book on Wilder.

[JackFavell]

Now that you mention it, it is kind of odd that he was funny. Excuse me for showing my complete ignorance, but there just don't seem to be that many funny Germans (or Austrians, as the case may be). There's Lubitsch and there's Wilder. I don't think there is stand-up in Germany, is there? Somehow when the German immigrants came over here, they got funny....

The fact that he could write at least eight or more great American films is just astounding.... and they are VERY well written. How did he do that? Learn English and then twist it around so well?

[charliechaplinfan]

That's a good point, Wilder and Lubitsch are two of my favorites I've never thought about their shared heritage.

[JackFavell]

I look at a film like Love in the Afternoon (one of my favorites), and see Lubitsch all over it... Wilder, to me anyway, could have been the true heir to the Lubitsch throne.

[mrsl]

.
Wow:

I just re-read my original post and I said: "The man had something, because his comedies are funny, and his dramas are sad, which is as it should be, but so many fall short of the mark."

I wanted to set the record straight that I meant so many other directors/writers fall short of the mark.
It's that old way of mine of saying something and giving the wrong intention to it.
.

[Dewey1960]

Often when I revisit a Billy Wilder film it's with the hope I'll somehow manage to enjoy it more than the time before. There's that cool and calculated quality to many of them which tends to work against what the films are about. DOUBLE INDEMNITY is way too cool, over-developed and under-felt despite the cast chemistry; Cain's novel was a hundred and six pages and took an hour, an hour and a half tops, to read. The film is a hundred and six minutes! Which means it takes longer to watch the movie than read the novel. Maybe that's not important, but it seems odd to me.
I genuinely enjoy a number of his films--SUNSET BLVD, THE APARTMENT, THE LOST WEEKEND, KISS ME STUPID, ACE IN THE HOLE, STALAG 17--they all benefit from the acrid cynicism which undermines a lot of his comedies. SOME LIKE IT HOT is iconic and surely important in more ways than imaginable, but it's long and shrill. As are ONE, TWO, THREE and IRMA LA DOUCE. Even KISS ME STUPID, which I love, is tough to take unless you're really in the mood. SABRINA suffers for the queasy casting of Bogart as Audrey Hepburn's love interest and I really don't know what to make of THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH. I've just never found Billy Wilder's films to be very funny, I guess. Except MIDNIGHT (1939) which he wrote with Brackett but was, thankfully, directed by Mitchell Leisen. I am looking forward to watching THE MAJOR AND THE MINOR which I haven't seen in many years.
The first ten minutes of KISS ME STUPID
[youtube][/youtube]

[srowley75]

I've mentioned before how easily I gravitate toward comedy of all forms. Yet when it comes to Wilder I've grown to consider him a better writer of comedy than I do a director. It seems to me that other directors who worked from Brackett/Wilder scripts possessed better instincts when it came to how to make a comedy film. Probably the best example of what I'm talking about is the highly acclaimed Some Like it Hot, which is stricken with the key problems that plague several comedies, especially his later films - it's too long and Wilder milks some jokes for all they're worth (when you first hear Curtis's take on Cary Grant, it's amusing - a few minutes later, you want him to knock it off.) I despise the immensely overrated Seven Year Itch and believe Tom Ewell to be the sleaziest, creepiest actor who ever lived. I've tried several times to view A Foreign Affair and can't make it past the first half hour. And despite Walter Matthau's good performance as the shifty lawyer, The Fortune Cookie lumbers along for over two hours. The Major and the Minor may be his only real comedy success, in my opinion - interesting because it's one of his earliest films made in Hollywood, near the same time he worked as screenwriter for comedy experts like Mitchell Leisen and Ernst Lubitsch.

On the other hand, I prefer Wilder's acerbic dramas, many of which are laced with extremely dark humor - the best example probably being Sunset Boulevard, though it's also present in The Lost Weekend and Double Indemnity as well. I consider The Apartment a black comedy, with the central plot being a variation on The Last Laugh.

[charliechaplinfan]

I'm surprised to hear so many dissenting voices,I love Some Like it Hot admitedly more for Jack Lemmon than anything, apart from The Misfits it's Marilyn's finest film. The Seven Year Itch, I know what you mean about Tom Ewell, he makes a questionable subject even more creepy, it's a great film for Marilyn lovers, she's at her most beautiful.

Two big misses for me are Irma La Douce, it does have some good scenes but doesn't sustain them and One Two Three, Cagney's one of my favorites but not in this, he's too loud, it gave me a headache.