Posted on 03/29/2002 5:49:05 PM PST by dighton
BILLY WILDER, who has died aged 95, was one of the great directors, screenwriters and producers of the 20th century, making more than 50 films which won him half a dozen Academy Awards.
Among his best pictures were Sunset Boulevard and The Apartment; among the most popular were Some Like It Hot and The Seven Year Itch; and among the most enduringly tense and disconcertingly truthful were Double Indemnity and Ace In The Hole.
Wilder was fascinated by human folly. A small, compact, be-spectacled, brown-eyed, acid-tongued, fast-talking, round-faced Viennese Jew who chain-smoked on the set and distributed his acerbic comments impartially, he helped to write every film he made because he rated the script as a film's most vital element.
Having escaped the fate of most of his family, who perished in Hitler's concentration camps (his mother died in Auschwitz), Wilder was a pessimist who saw the irony in everything.
When asked for a definition of happiness, he answered that it meant having a doctor who also smoked two packets of cigarettes a day. As to drink, he took the credit for the plea attributed to Robert Benchley: "Let's get out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini."
When Marilyn Monroe established a Hollywood record of 59 takes before she ceased to fluff her lines during a scene in Some Like It Hot, Wilder described her as having "breasts like granite" and "a brain like a Swiss cheese - all holes".
If his later films were spoiled by a disdain for "good taste", an impish delight in vulgarity, and a tempo so racy that it ruined the gags, his writing partnerships - first with Charles Brackett and then with I A L Diamond - could be counted on to touch raw nerves in their chilly, if often funny, chronicling of the post-war American character and its attitudes to war, suicide, politics and journalism.
What amazed the rest of the film world was that Wilder's highly unconventional treatment of such subjects succeeded, for the most part, at the box office. He had a flair for making mischief with a sharp, moral edge; and because he nearly always did so amusingly, his work enjoyed a high degree of popular success, even if it seldom touched the heart.
Samuel Wilder (his mother always called him Billy) was the son of a Jewish hotel proprietor and watch importer, and was born on June 22 1906 at Sucha, in Galicia; he was educated at the Realgymnasium in Vienna, where the family had moved in 1914.
His father wanted him to be a lawyer, and he was sent to the University of Vienna. But he left after a year and set up as a journalist; he was reputed to have interviewed, for a single issue of a magazine, Arthur Schitzler, Alfred Adler and Richard Strauss.
With Berlin the fashionable centre for young intellectuals in the 1920s after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Wilder wangled himself a job on a Berlin tabloid after writing a notice of a Paul Whiteman concert in Vienna. He also worked at the Eden Hotel as a tea-dance partner - or gigolo, as he put it.
All the time he was trying to break into films as a screenwriter. When a well-known producer (so the story goes) sought panic-stricken refuge from his mistress's husband, and had to perch on a window sill outside Wilder's apartment, Wilder not only helped the adulterer to make good his escape but also seized the chance to press upon him one or two scripts.
Whether a contract was signed then and there, or later, Wilder's first produced script was for a film made in his spare time about a bunch of ordinary Berliners spending a weekend by a lake; Menshcen am Sonntag (People on Sunday) is now famous because it assembled such future Hollywood talents as Robert Siodmak and Fred Zinnemann, as well as Wilder.
In 1933, when Hitler came to power, Wilder fled to Paris. It seemed, as he said later, "the wisest thing for a Jew to do".
Borrowing money from other German-Jewish fugitives in Paris, he co-directed the French actress Danielle Darrieux in Mauvaise Graine (1933), which he had scripted with a fellow journalist from Berlin.
When another expatriate on his way to Hollywood saw the film and took with him one of Wilder's other scripts, Columbia bought it (though it was never filmed). The sale financed his move, by way of Britain and Mexico, to the United States.
After two penurious years his English improved; and when he married the daughter of a Californian lawyer he got a writing job with Paramount, earning $250 a week.
He was, however, only one of scores of writers on the payroll of that hospitable studio, and it was not until he found himself collaborating in 1938 with Charles Brackett, a former theatre critic with the New Yorker, that his career began to flourish.
Together they wrote such films as Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka (1939), in which Garbo played a Russian commissar with a nose for Western perfumes; Arise My Love (1940), a romance set in the Spanish Civil War; and Hold Back the Dawn (1941), with Charles Boyer as a European on the run trying to enter the USA by marrying an American schoolteacher (Olivia de Havilland).
Wilder was by now winning credit for possessing something of the legendary "Lubitsch touch" in his collaborations with Brackett.
Together they wrote Wilder's first two films as a director: The Major and The Minor (1942), with Ginger Rogers playing a girl on a train who pretends she is younger than she is to travel half fare; and Five Graves To Cairo (1943), with Erich von Stroheim as Rommel in the western desert during the Second World War.
Both films made money, despite Wilder's cynical touches and Brackett's dry humour. Then came the superbly tense film noir Double Indemnity (1944), which Hollywood's own censors, known as the Hays Office, indignantly described as "a blueprint for perfect murder".
This became a classic, not only as a thriller but for the acting of Barbara Stanwyck (the wife), Fred MacMurray (the lover) and Edward G Robinson (a claims investigator).
Wilder believed in stars: "A movie is a star vehicle," he said. "What good is it to have a magnificent concept for which you must have Laurence Olivier and Audrey Hepburn if they're not available?"
In The Lost Weekend (1945) he cast Ray Milland as the alcoholic. Here the Wilder-Brackett partnership excelled itself, not only in its views of New York at its grimmest, but also in its realistic treatment of the victim's aberrations. It won four Oscars - for best film, best screenplay, best direction and best actor.
Wilder spent six months in Germany in 1945 as head of the US Army's Psychological Warfare Division. During this period he supervised, in the rank of colonel, the output of theatres and radio stations.
No one was much surprised when The Emperor Waltz (1948), a lavish Viennese vehicle for Bing Crosby, was a flop; but Wilder and Brackett made amends with A Foreign Affair (1948), set amid the ruins of post-war Berlin and drawing laughter, mainly at the expense of the American Occupation, with Marlene Dietrich as a world-weary, war-weary European.
Their masterpiece, however, was their last work together, Sunset Boulevard (1950), a film at once cruel and comic, which summed up the dreams, the vanities and pain of Hollywood life in its heyday.
Gloria Swanson returned to the cinema to play the faded and psychotic movie queen Norma Desmond, while William Holden was her obliging young screenwriter-lover; the film took its grisly cue from the discovery of his corpse in a Beverly Hills swimming pool and the dead man's voice-over narration of how he came to be there.
Louis B Mayer, the head of MGM, raged of Sunset Boulevard: "We should horsewhip this Wilder! He has dirtied the nest. He has brought disgrace on the town that is feeding him!" The Academy, however, disagreed: the film was nominated for six Oscars and won three, including one for Wilder and Brackett.
Ace In The Hole (1951), Wilder's debut as a producer, was less popular because it attacked the methods and morals of the American press and, by implication, its customers.
It showed the unscrupulous efforts of a once-famous reporter (Kirk Douglas) to exploit the news of a man buried alive in a cave. For a sensational, uncertain week he kept the story, if not the man within, alive; he even contrived to delay rescue work.
By ignoring the victim, and concentrating on the journalist with his fast-gathering crowd and his paper's ever-growing readership, Wilder's film became a masterly indictment of both the press and its readers.
Before the film's release, a nervous Paramount found itself sending an army of representatives around the United States to assure editors that the picture was not an attack on the yellow press.
Wilder's next three films were derived from from stage plays. Stalag 17 (1953) was a comedy set, irreverently, in a prisoner-of-war camp, with William Holden playing a suspected traitor. It was one of Wilder's own favourites, "perhaps because there were eight minutes that were any good".
Sabrina (1954), a light, romantic comedy, was pure Hollywood and, for the most part, pure joy with its improbable casting of Audrey Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart - the latter, however, dismissed the film as "a crock of crap", and Wilder as "a kind of Prussian with a riding crop. He works with the writer and excludes the actor".
With the marital comedy The Seven Year Itch (1955), Wilder came up against another moodily self-important screen personality, Marilyn Monroe.
Best remembered for the scene in Lexington Avenue when Miss Monroe's dress was blown over her shoulders by the swirl of air from a train passing underground as she stood on a pavement grating, the episode was timed for shooting at 2 am to avoid public onlookers; in the event, some 4,000 people turned up.
Monroe's self-indulgence, unpredictability and lateness on the set did not deter Wilder from working with her again. For the film Some Like It Hot (1959) he found a co-writer, I A L Diamond, to take the place of Charles Brackett. It was to prove a formidable combination.
"You have to be orderly to shoot disorder," said Wilder of this crazy transvestite farce. Miss Monroe, who played the singer in a touring band in which Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis were a pair of seedy musicians pretending to be part of an all-girl orchestra, proved difficult to control.
Of Monroe's art and antics, Wilder said: "The question is whether Marilyn is a person at all, or one of the greatest Du Pont products ever invented. She has breasts like granite. She defies gravity. She has a brain like Swiss cheese - full of holes. She arrives late and tells you she couldn't find the studio, and she's been working there for years."
He added: "There are certain wonderful rascals in this world, like Monroe, and one day they lie down on an analyst's couch and out comes a clenched, dreary thing. It's better for Monroe not to be straightened out. The charm of her is her two left feet."
Asked about working again with Monroe at the end of shooting, Wilder said: "I have discussed this with my doctor and my psychiatrist, and they tell me I'm too old to go through this again."
When Monroe's husband, the playwright Arthur Miller, insisted on an apology, Wilder sought to make amends; but his name was struck off Monroe's list of "acceptable" directors.
Between the Monroe films, Wilder made Love In The Afternoon (1957), a Lubitsch-style romance for Gary Cooper and Audrey Hepburn; Spirit of St Louis (1957), with James Stewart as Charles Lindbergh, the first non-stop transatlantic flyer; and Witness For The Prosecution (1958), the Agatha Christie courtroom drama with Charles Laughton as everyone's idea of the eccentric but unfailingly successful lawyer.
By general consent The Apartment (1960) was Wilder's best film since Sunset Boulevard. With Jack Lemmon as a harassed office worker whose only hope of promotion is to lend his flat to his bosses for their extra-marital assignments, it won five Academy Awards (including three for Wilder).
Then began the decline. If Some Like It Hot had hinted at Wilder's love of cheaper and cheaper gags and an excessive, farcical pace, One, Two, Three (1961), smacked of self-parody with its all too snappy and cynical treatment of the Cold War and the American military presence in Berlin.
After a lavish but non-musical version of Irma La Douce (1963), which again teamed Lemmon and MacLaine, Wilder's devil-may-care attitude in questions of taste and pace grew more evident: Kiss Me, Stupid (1964) was an almost embarrassingly vulgar treatment of adultery.
The Fortune Cookie (1966), released in Britain as Meet Whiplash Willie, seemed like a return to form by the famous Wilder-Diamond partnership; and Avanti! (1972) was a warm and witty vehicle for Jack Lemmon as a son who discovers, upon his father's death in Ischia, a surprisingly long history of his father's adulteries.
The Front Page (1974) again brought together Lemmon and Matthau, for a typically broad and farcical re-make of a fine film.
In Fedora (1978), it was William Holden's turn to reverse roles from Sunset Boulevard as a failed film producer looking to a former film star (Marthe Keller) to restore his fortunes; but the theme seemed stale and the setting flat. Buddy Buddy (1981) was a re-make of a not very funny French film comedy, L'Emmerdeur.
Wilder married twice: first, in 1936, Judith Coppicus Iribe, with whom he had a daughter; the marriage was dissolved in 1947. In 1949 he married Audrey Young, a former singer with the Tommy Dorsey band, whom he met on the set of The Lost Weekend; she, and his daughter, survive him.
© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2002.
Just try to ask people, who lament about the violence on television and in movie theatres, when was the last time you left the theater because of that? You will be chased out of town before the last word of your sentence is uttered.
Who is responsible for the decay? In this country, it is always the president, the media, the foreigners, the minorities --- anyone but we ourselves. Poor Wilder, he did not know at the time...
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