Writer/Director Billy Wilder,
assisted by director Curtis Hanson, 2000 file photo.
Posted on 03/28/2002 1:56:53 PM PST by summer
March 28, 2002
Billy Wilder, Writer and Director of Classic Films, Is Dead at 95
By ALJEAN HARMETZ
Billy Wilder, the caustic writer and director who won six Academy Awards and international acclaim as one of the world's great filmmakers and then spent the last 21 years of his vivid life imploring Hollywood to let him make another movie, died Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles, a longtime friend told The Associated Press. He was 95.
Mr. Wilder's health had been failing in recent months and had been suffering with pneumonia recently, George Schlatter, a producer and friend of Mr. Wilder, told The A.P.
Almost all the 25 films Mr. Wilder made as a writer-director displayed his slashing wit and stinging social satire. Yet no other major filmmaker slipped so easily into so many genres.
"Double Indemnity" (1944) defined film noir. "The Lost Weekend" (1945), which took the Oscar for best picture and also won Mr. Wilder his own Academy Awards as director and co-author of the script, is still the most harrowing movie made about an alcoholic. "Sunset Boulevard" (1950) is the grandest of melodramas, a corrosive look at an aging silent-film star (Gloria Swanson) and the young screenwriter (William Holden) who becomes her kept man. "Some Like It Hot," (1959) with Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis as hapless musicians who escape gangsters by dressing up as women, endures as a great American farce, while "Sabrina" (1954) sparkles as a sophisticated romantic comedy in which a chauffeur's daughter (Audrey Hepburn) is wooed by a captain of industry (Humphrey Bogart) and his playboy brother (Mr. Holden). And "Witness for the Prosecution" (1957), based on an Agatha Christie play, was a powerfully effective courtroom thriller.
Mr. Wilder was among the last of the 1,500 members of the German film community who fled from Hitler to Hollywood between 1933 and 1939 and transformed American movies. He was one of a handful of refugees who reached the top rung of the industry ladder, a feat made more remarkable by his complete inability to speak English when he arrived in Hollywood in 1934.
"He was not just a survivor, but the survivor, our last link with the merry, wicked talk of the golden age," the film historian David Thomson once observed. "By his very being, Wilder could make old Hollywood seem like a suburb of Vienna."
Mr. Wilder skeptically probed and exposed human weakness, particularly venality and greed. He had an inventive talent for making unpleasant situations hilarious, and he had the courage to deal with traditionally taboo subjects. "Sunset Boulevard," for instance, won Mr. Wilder another Oscar, as co-writer, but it caused Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM, to shout, "You have disgraced the industry that made you and fed you."
In love with words, he sprinkled sugar laced with acid into movies whose heroes were often adulterers and gigolos. In "The Apartment" (1960), an accountant (Jack Lemmon) earns promotions by lending his apartment to executives for their extramarital romps only to fall in love with an elevator operator (Shirley MacLaine) who goes to his apartment for trysts with his boss (Fred MacMurray).
When this morally ambiguous film was named the best picture of 1960, Mr. Wilder became the first person to win three Oscars in a single night — as director, producer and co-author of the screenplay.
(Leo McCary had had similar success in 1944, when his "Going My Way" defeated Mr. Wilder's "Double Indemnity" — but since Paramount took the Best Picture Award as was the custom at that time, McCary carried only two statues home.)
In his private life, Mr. Wilder was abrasive and exuberant, with an impish face and an impertinent irascibility. A small man who was constantly in motion, he was as witty in person as on paper.
His biting one-liners included this definition of an associate producer: "the only guy who will associate with a producer."
"I would worship the ground you walked on," he told the woman who was to become his second wife, "if you lived in a better neighborhood."
As a colonel in the United States Army working on the denazification of postwar Germany, Mr. Wilder was asked by the director of the traditional Passion Play in the town of Oberammergau if a former Nazi, Anton Lang, could play Jesus. He responded, "Permission granted, but the nails have to be real."
For two decades — from the first movie he directed, "The Major and the Minor" (1942), to "Irma La Douce" (1963) — Mr. Wilder usually managed to please audiences while creating films whose unsympathetic heroes and black humor were often thought to be at the far edge of what moviegoers would accept. But "Kiss Me, Stupid" (1964), a bawdy sex farce with Dean Martin and Kim Novak, seemed to go over that edge; it failed at the box office and was condemned as an occasion of sin by the Catholic Church's Legion of Decency. Mr. Wilder was suddenly out of touch with the audiences that had made him one of the two or three most successful directors of the 1950's.
Although critics praised some of his later films, like "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes" (1970) and "Fedora" (1979), ticket buyers stayed away. Unable to find a studio willing to back his movies after the box-office failure of "Buddy Buddy" in 1981, Mr. Wilder spent the rest of his days accepting the lifetime tributes that he called "Quick before they croak!" awards.
He was given the Writers Guild Laurel Award in 1980, a tribute from the Film Society of Lincoln Center in 1982, the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award in 1986 and the Irving Thalberg Award of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1987. He had been honored by the Cannes Film Festival in 1979; at the start of the festival in 1945, his "Lost Weekend" had won the top prize, the Palme d'Or.
He once said in an interview that he probably would have traded all the awards for the chance to make one more picture.
In the 1990's, Andrew Lloyd Weber turned "Sunset Boulevard" into a stage musical that most critics felt never approached the magic of the original. "Sabrina" was remade as a Harrison Ford movie that failed with critics and audiences.
He was born Samuel Wilder on June 22, 1906, in Sucha, a village in Galicia, now part of Poland, but then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father was Max Wilder, who ran a railway cafe, and his mother was the former Eugenia Baldinger, whose family owned a resort hotel. Recalling his childhood in a big hotel, he remarked, "I learned many things about human nature — none of them favorable."
His mother, who was in love with all things American, nicknamed him Billie in honor of the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show. Smart, impudent and undisciplined, he finished high school at the Realgymnasium Juranek for problem students and then, obeying his mother's wishes, entered the University of Vienna as a law student. He lasted three months.
At 18, he found himself a job on a tabloid that put a premium on punchy reporting and celebrity interviews. A brazen young man, he was a natural in both areas, once interviewing the composer Richard Strauss, the psychiatrist Alfred Adler and the playwright Arthur Schnitzler in a single day. In 1926, an interview with Paul Whiteman, the American bandleader, changed Mr. Wilder's life. As a 19-year-old reporter, he became a Vienna tour guide for Whiteman, who took him along to Berlin, where the band was to give its next concert.
According to "Wilder Times," a biography by Kevin Lally, Mr. Wilder told his newspaper he would be back in a few days with an article on the concert. But the Berlin of the Weimar era was the most exciting city east of Paris, and Mr. Wilder had no intention of returning to Vienna.
He supported himself by writing freelance articles and by ghostwriting silent-movie scripts. For several months he worked as a professional dance partner to rich ladies at the Hotel Eden and then turned the experience into a newspaper series, "Waiter, Bring Me a Dancer," which gave him a short-lived notoriety.
Berlin was filled with talented young men, many of them Jewish writers and filmmakers whom Mr. Wilder would meet again in Hollywood. In 1929, Paul Kohner, who represented Universal Studios in Berlin, and Joe Pasternak, a future MGM producer, gave Mr. Wilder the chance to write a script under his own name. The result, "Der Teufelsreporter" ("The Demon Reporter") was an unmemorable movie about a daredevil reporter.
Mr. Wilder's next movie, "Menschen am Sonntag" ("People on Sunday"), was made on a shoestring. Since there was no money to pay actors, ordinary working Germans played ordinary working Germans as they moved through Berlin on their day off. Directed by Robert Siodmak from an idea by his younger brother, Curt, the movie, with its unusual neo-Realist style, was a major avant-garde success. In addition to Mr. Wilder and the Siodmaks, several others associated with the film went on to have important careers in Hollywood: the assistant director, Edgar G. Ulmer; the cameraman, Eugene Shufftan; and the 22-year-old camera assistant, Fred Zinnemann.
After "People on Sunday" (1930), Mr. Wilder and Robert Siodmak were hired by UFA, German's top movie studio. From 1931 to 1933, Mr. Wilder wrote or collaborated on the screenplays of nearly a dozen early sound films, including "Der Mann, der Seinen Mörder Sucht" (The Man Who Looked for His Murderer) and "Emil and the Detective" from a well-known German children's story.
But when Hitler came to power in January 1933, the 26-year-old Mr. Wilder did not hesitate.
"People said Hitler was a big loud unpleasant joke," Billy Wilder once told this reporter. "But at the UFA building, the MGM of Berlin, the elevator boy was suddenly in a storm trooper's uniform. I had a new Graham-Paige American car and a new apartment furnished in Bauhaus, and I sold everything for a few hundred dollars."
"A lot of my friends had a fear of going to a country where they didn't speak the language, so they went to Vienna or Prague," he continued. "But anybody who had listened to the speeches knew Hitler would want Austria and the Sudeten part of Czechoslovakia. I was on the train to Paris the day after the Reichstag fire."
Fluent in French, Mr. Wilder went back to ghostwriting. But he also had a chance to be a co-director, in "Mauvaise Graine" ("Bad Seed"). Another shoestring production, it was about a band of young car thieves and featured the 17-year-old Danielle Darrieux.
Joe May, a director Billy Wilder had known at UFA, was by this time producing movies in Hollywood for Columbia. Mr. Wilder sent him a story idea that became his own ticket to Hollywood. "Pam-Pam" was a musical about a gang of counterfeiters who masquerade as theatrical producers. Columbia offered a one-way ticket and $150 a week.
Mr. Wilder was met in New York by his brother, Willie, who had come to America 12 years earlier. The Wilder brothers were now safe from the Germans; their mother, grandmother and stepfather died in Auschwitz.
The only English Billy Wilder knew was pop song titles. With the help of a translator, he wrote a script for "Pam-Pam." Columbia hated it and he was out of a job. He was also out of time. His six-month visitor's visa had almost expired. He could only apply for status as an immigrant at a consulate outside the United States, so he crossed the border to Mexicali. If he couldn't talk his way back into America — and he had almost none of the necessary papers — he might have to wait years to return.
But words, even in broken English, were Billy Wilder's genius. He talked the authorities into a visa; later he wrote about those terrifying days in Mexicali in his script for "Hold Back the Dawn," the movie that won him the third of his 12 Oscar nominations as a writer, a record until Woody Allen received his 13th nomination for "Deconstructing Harry" (1997). Mr. Wilder is still ahead in combined nominations for writing and directing, 20 to 19.
As quickly as possible, Billy Wilder made himself into an American. He avoided the cafes and living rooms where refugees met to drink coffee and speak German. Instead, he lay on the bed in his rented room and listened to the radio and learned 20 new English words every day.
"Most of the refugees had a secret hope that Hitler would be defeated and they could go back home," Mr. Wilder said in an interview in 1990. "I never had that hope. This was home. I had a clear-cut vision: `This is where I am going to die.' "
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Billy Wilder!
Can anyone go full circle by using less than the four other people I used?
This line made me feel so sad...Billie Wilder was one of the greatest directors of the 20th century...why did Hollywood abandon him?
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