Some Like It Wilder

...Wilder's characteristic theme is more along the lines of "It's an Indifferent World"—full of malicious, deceitful, self-seeking predators, or, worse, insufferably sanctimonious do-gooder ginks...

...You talk such big words...

...Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, some have hailed One, Two, Three for prescience in foreshadowing the seduction of the East by the consumerism of the West...

...Wilder's anxieties about shifting popular tastes begin to show up in his scripts of this period, often in the form of (mostly lame) gibes at rock-and-roll...

...Mouche (Anne Baxter) is a French chambermaid at the Hotel Imperial in flyblown Sidi Halfaya, abandoned by the British during the advance of Rommel's Afrika Korps...

...One can regret that Wilder, an immigrant success story if ever there was one, so seldom celebrated the freedom and opportunity available in his adopted land...

...As a writer-director in Paramount Pictures' stable, he made the first film noir, Double Indemnity, and Sunset Boulevard...

...But Billy Wilder's way to the pantheon was crooked...

...And this realism saved him...

...BY DANIEL WATTENBERG At age ninety-three, Billy Wilder is enjoying what the movies he directed almost never had: a long, triumphal fadeout at the end...

...Double Indemnity's Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), an insurance salesman who "crooks the house," is shot to death by his partner in crime, Barbara Stanwyck's irresistible Phyllis Dietrichson...

...He worked for a time as a dancer-gigolo, waltzing lonely old ladies around the dance floors of pricey hotels...

...This movie is a celebration of brake trouble—and German engineering, in the shape of Dietrich's Erika, "a black market number right up there with the big boys, she was Goebbels's girl or Goering's—one of 'em...

...Whatever the ending suggests, the gentlelady from Iowa is no match for Dietrich's "beast of Belsen," who describes her rival as "that funny little woman with a face like a scrubbed kitchen floor...

...The apparent intention of the line is to expose Erika's unprincipled frivolity...

...Every one of his pictures is available on video (except Ace in the Hole, the blackest of his black comedies...

...I ought to choke you a little," he says before one kiss...

...Mouche's brother has been captured by the Nazis, and she beds one of Rommel's aides in exchange for his promise of help...

...As a salaried studio writer, he and his partner, Charles Brackett, wrote Ninotchka and Midnight...

...Ed Sikov's definitive biography, On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder, has been reissued in paperback...

...Sometimes you skid quite a piece...

...And above all, the late Wilder movies are way too long...

...For the first time in his long and successful Hollywood career, Wilder began to suffer public neglect and critical hostility...

...Those looking for an uplifting saga of success American-style will find it in Wilder's life after his 1934 immigration to the United States...

...I knew that Bekessy was an unscrupulous scoundrel, but my principal worry was not to sit in judgment but to feed myself and have a roof over my head," Wilder later said...

...Somehow, the tale grows sweeter the uglier it gets (ugly enough to receive a "C-condemned" from the Legion of Decency and be widely boycotted...

...Frost is on a "fact-finding" mission to expose the "moral malaria" that has the American occupation forces "soaking their feet in Moselle...

...Wilder has often been criticized as a cold and impersonal director...

...Women pick out whatev-er's in fashion and change it like a spring hat...

...She played cynical, big city working gals shamed back into innocence by the example of the idealistic hayseeds she falls for...

...To win him, she must pry him away from Erika von Schluetow (Marlene Dietrich), an amoral cabaret singer who looks chic even in her first appearance, with a mouth foaming over with toothpaste...

...But remember that the same skeptical temperament that constrained him from creating moist-eyed panegyrics to his adopted land also constrained him from indulging himself in the equally sentimental beatification of the rebel...

...Sometimes, Wilder's heroes manage to fight destiny to a draw, but more often would-be shapers of destiny come to bad ends...

...Or The Apartment's famous running gag about the adverbial suffix "wise": "Premium-wise and billing-wise we are 18 percent ahead of last year, October-wise...

...Arthur, intimidated by Dietrich's self-confident glamour and sex appeal, became reclusive and even a little paranoid, accusing Dietrich of ordering Arthur's close-ups destroyed...

...And the ruins of Berlin are setup lines...

...As Shirley MacLaine explains in The Apartment, in this world there are "the takers" (like the corporate shark stringing her along) and those who "get took," like herself and Jack Lemmon's C.C...

...Loses something in the translation, French-wise...

...The East meets West comedy, the heel-clicking-Hun jokes, the cross-dressing gag—Wilder had done it all before, better, in Ninotchka, Stalag 17, and Some Like It Hot...

...If the standard of greatness is having all-around skills and sustaining them over many years, then Wilder is arguably the greatest director of the sound era...

...It's that he can't write one...

...Because of their production costs, however, movies in Wilder's day were required to be a commercial medium—which is to say, a narrative medium...

...Moral freelancers are staple Wilder characters...

...A Nazi, a Yank—"Oh, Johnny, what does it matter, a woman's politics...

...The conflict between Bramble's public morality and Mouche's private morality reaches its climax when Bramble—sounding pious and impersonally purple—lectures Mouche: "It's not just one brother that matters, it's a million brothers...

...Once the hotel is taken over by Rommel (memorably played by the eccentric silent director Erich von Stro-heim), Bramble assumes the identity of a dead bellhop—who had been spying for the Nazis—and tries to find Rommel's buried supply depots...

...But there is little evidence that poor Joe Gillis's poor talents entitle him to more...

...Unlike Preston Sturges, who tumbled swiftly from his peak, or Ernst Lubitsch, who died at fifty-four, Wilder kept making movies long after cultural tastes had begun to shift against him...

...It is the story of a small-town hack songwriter, Orville Spooner (Ray Walston), who serves up his (fake) wife (Kim Novak) to big-time crooner "Dino" (Dean Martin parodying himself and stealing the picture...

...In just a few years after his flight from Hitler, Wilder rose from being a penniless refugee to being one of the most successful men in Hollywood...

...From the time he left home at eighteen until he landed his first job as a Hollywood screenwriter at twenty-eight (without speaking English...

...As Sarris came to acknowledge, the French critics were ill-equipped to enjoy Wilder...

...Arthur was best known for her roles in Frank Capra's populist fairy tales of the 1930s...

...ly 1940s, Orson Welles and Preston Sturges...

...Destiny is not so plastic in Wilder's movies, although there are exceptions, like Sabrina (remade by Pollack himself...

...When one is scavenging, like Erika, for the daily necessities in a city that "looked like a great hunk of Gorgonzola cheese on which rats had been gnawing," maybe it is politics that represents frivolity...

...Wilder's hard-knocks heroes cannot afford the luxury of alienation and malaise...

...Who can, when the water is up to your neck and rising...

...Kiss Me, Stupid might have been great, in its dingy way, if only original star Peter Sellers had not driven everyone on the set nuts, then had a heart attack and left the picture...

...Unlike Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Ernst Lubitsch, and John Ford, Wilder was both a director and a screenwriter...

...At a castle in Heidelberg, he improvised a tale about a crazy Baron and a slut and was exposed— and dismissed—when Dwan overheard the prosaic truth from a nearby guide...

...When somebody turns to his neighbor and says, 'My, that was beautifully directed,' we have proof that it was not," he told another interviewer...

...Talk," Mouche scoffs...

...Later in Berlin, Wilder continued to live by his wits...

...Frost wins Johnny in the end, but it's hard to imagine who is fooled by the contrived, pro forma concession to ideological propriety...

...Certainly he delighted in hazing, to name just a few targets, the prurience and herding behavior of the American press (Ace In the Hole), the backscratching cronyism behind the meritocratic façade of corporate life (The Apartment), and the creepiness of American celebrity-worship (Kiss Me, Stupid...

...You have a million brothers...

...It's not just one prison gate they might sneak open for you, it's all their gates...

...Or the Wilder-Raymond Chandler script for Double Indemnity, in which a cup of coffee just needs a little rum to "get it up on its feet" and salesmen are guys "who ring doorbells and dish out a smooth line of monkey talk...

...Movies like The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause are today period artifacts...

...That's the way it crumbles, cookie-wise...

...After winning writer, director, and best picture Oscars for The Apartment (1960), Wilder made another nine movies, beginning with One, Two, Three...

...Most were outright failures—and maddeningly repetitive in their faults...

...Gillis's problem is not that he can't sell a good script...

...The hottest young romantic comedy director in Hollywood, Cameron Crowe (director of Say Anything . . . and Jerry Maguire) has just published the anecdotal coffee-table book Conversations with Wilder, modeled after François Truffaut's similar book on Hitchcock...

...And American Beauty, the most critically praised movie of last fall, flaunts its claim to spiritual kinship with the movies of Billy Wilder...

...Five Graves to Cairo is an espionage thriller set in North Africa...

...But there's little rags-to-riches optimism in his work...

...Brother, we're going to have some hoy toy toy...

...But Mouche never repudiates her earlier accommodation with the enemy...

...Even Cameron Crowe, in his devoted Conversations, can't help wishing Wilder had made just one personal movie...

...Some critics like to see Wilder as a subverter of America's official pieties...

...Wilder was a major creative influence on classic movies in three different professional modes...

...His satirical weaponry was not deployed in the service of any particular -ism, other than his own brand of moral realism (one conditioned, in part, by the hard, early experience of a Middle European Jew chased halfway around the world by a regime that gassed his mother in a concentration camp...

...In The Lost Weekend, Wilder's grim tale of a mean drunk and the meek maid who loves him, the alcoholic Don Bir-nam (Ray Milland) swears off the sauce at the end—but who believes him...

...His films are just too dependent on language—spicy, idiomatic American—for their pleasurable effects...

...Last year, four of his films (Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot, and The Apartment) made the AFI's list of the hundred best movies ever made...

...Faster—a hundred miles per hour, twenty-four hours a day, through burning towns and down smashed auto-bahns...

...I have only one, and I want him to live...

...Wilder seemed to be, in a phrase from Sunset Boulevard, "taking it out on the world" because he had "been given the go-by...

...The jokes have the crankily editorial feel of an old man yelling at his copy of the New York Times...

...Black marketeering, fraternizing with the frauleins—the occupying Americans have lost their "moral brakes," declares Frost, the high-minded congress-woman from the heartland...

...But Wilder continued making hit movies long after the post-World War II breakup of the studio system, while the careers of the undisciplined Welles and the demoralized Sturges spiraled downward...

...During the war he couldn't go fast enough for you," counters Pringle...

...Never having been outside of Berlin, Wilder memorized the Baedeker guide...

...But while Wilder was a man of lightly held liberal Democratic convictions (Brackett, in contrast, was a conservative Republican), his films are untainted by the spirit of partisanship...

...And there was no crueler time in which to find oneself passé in the American entertainment world than the fast-forwarding, gerontophobic 1960s...

...Restaurants that refused to buy ads or make payoffs were badly reviewed in its pages by, among others, young Billy Wilder...

...The one-sided sexual competition between the female leads even spilled onto the set...

...After all, it was in the postwar years that the cult of Rebel Worship first swept Hollywood, in a series of marble-mouthed and vaguely antiestablishment passion plays of youthful malaise, alienation, and rebellion starring the likes of Marlon Brando and James Dean...

...Wilder's America is not beautiful, but his characters are too smart to be shocked and wounded by the knowl-edge—unlike the protagonist in American Beauty, last year's self-proclaimed attempt to make a new film in the Wilder style...

...Bud" Baxter...

...And, perhaps in response, his movies grew meaner...

...In Wilder's hands, however, she is the provincial who falls for the cynic, Captain Johnny Pringle (John Lund...

...But despite breakneck pacing and a commanding James Cagney as a can-do Coca-Cola executive, the movie is warmed-over Wilder...

...They must go...

...While no shill for the status quo, Wilder never fell into the opposite trap of glorifying rebellion for its own sake...

...American Beauty's narrator is named Lester Burnham, a name inspired by The Lost Weekend's Don Birnam, and Burnham frames the story with opening and closing voice-over narration—a talking-corpse device appropriated from Sunset Boulevard, narrated by the defeated hack screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden...

...Well, everybody can't stop like that...

...There's the balcony where [Hitler] bet his Reich would last a thousand years," says a military guide to visiting congressmen...

...In Sikov's account, the young Wilder of Vienna and Berlin is a hustling, street-wise, quick-witted main-chancer with an elastic moral sensibility (at least at the low-stakes moral tables) and grit and chutzpah to burn...

...Lester is an alienated suburban bellyacher who is just too good for this world...

...His characters are usually the scuttling opportunists of the jungle floor: They calculate all the angles and seize every chance and refuse to let noble sentiments stand in the way of a good thing—but still the deck is stacked against them...

...Often too hard-bitten for the popular audiences that like movies to do their emotional work for them, he was also too straightforward for intellectual critics who don't like movies to do their interpretive work for them...

...That's the one that broke the bookies' hearts...

...And as a deal-making free agent after the demise of the studio system, he made the cross-dressing farce Some Like It Hot and the bittersweet The Apartment...

...Erika is a Nazi whore, and Johnny can't keep his hands off her...

...Originally intended as a propaganda comedy, the finished film scandalized censors with its meddlesome congressmen and hypocritical military brass...

...And Ace in the Hole's Charles Tatum (Kirk Douglas) gets a knife in the gut...

...It is hard to imagine the Production Code Administration permitting less than her death...

...asks Erika...

...Under the spell of Truffaut and the auteur school of French film theory, the prominent American critic Andrew Sarris, for example, found Wilder's slangy verbal crossfire and tight plotting too literary, insufficiently pictorial...

...I am small...

...Hollywood eats Gillis alive: The yes-men at Metro say no to him, and his agent is "in Bel Air making with the golf sticks" instead of "digging up a job for poor Joe Gillis...

...What could a non-English speaker like Truf-faut make of Ball of Fire...

...His movies, however, may be personal in a very precise way...

...A pair of Wilder's films, the 1943 Five Graves to Cairo and the 1948 A Foreign Affair, might stand as bookends to Wilder's vision...

...Mouche eventually closes ranks with Bramble and ends up a martyr to the Allied cause...

...She abandons it only after learning that her German lover had been lying about her brother's freedom...

...Wilder during the same period was making enduring dark comedies...

...A comic fable of crooks and lexicographers, it is a riot of period slang: "We'll be stubbin', me and the smooch, I mean the dish, I mean the mouse—you know, hit the jiggles for a little rum boogie...

...They are often leering, filled with busty blonde sluts and the gropey old goats who clutch at them...

...Real Wilder characters do not renounce the world for the sake of moral purity...

...Bramble (Franchot Tone) is the sole survivor of a British tank crew who makes his way to the seaside hotel...

...as mature classics, but that's an insult to maturity—and Wilder in his prime...

...Wilder adapted to a succession of alien environments by relying on the survivor's unsentimental cunning, just as many of his characters later would...

...Laziness and cronyism afflict the casting (for example, Wilder crony Cliff Osmond, an untalented nobody, turns up again and again in the late movies...

...Only Irma la Douce (1963) was a hit...

...But in Kiss Me, Stupid, Martin's self-deprecating shtick ("I sing better than all of [the Beatles] put together, and I'm younger—than all of 'em put together") gives poignant expression to Wilder's own fears of becoming a wisecracking dinosaur in an earnest, turned-on America...

...He has received the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award and the Thalberg Award...

...Some critics have tried to make a case for The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes and Avanti...

...It is the survivor's creed of many a Wilder protagonist...

...Many of his best gags would be lost on non-English speakers...

...The director Sydney Pollack once said that the characteristic theme of American movies is "The Hero Shapes Destiny...

...But it is Casablanca with a twist: Rick is a chick...

...In indicting the callousness and smarminess of the Hollywood power elite in Sunset Boulevard, a more partisan and less morally realistic filmmaker might well have made Joe Gillis a dreary martyr to Art in its conflict with Commerce...

...After all, the script Gillis pitches is about a rookie shortstop who once ran afoul of the law, "but he's tryin' to go straight"—and, guess what, now the mob wants him to throw the World Series...

...But a last name and a toe tag are about all that Lester Burnham shares with Billy Wilder's wised-up opportunists...

...And one day the war is over, and you expect him to stop like that...

...It's true that so were his fellow boy-wonders of the earDaniel Wattenberg is a contributing editor to George...

...Sometimes you go into a spin and smash into a wall or a tree and bash your fenders and scrape those fine, shiny ideals that you brought from home...

...And he got himself hired as visiting Hollywood director Allan Dwan's tour guide...

...The film ends with Bramble's stirringly patriotic graveside vow to the executed chambermaid, but it is impossible to ignore Wilder's sneaking sympathy for Mouche's earlier separate peace tactics...

...As a young tabloid reporter in Vienna, he participated in a shakedown scheme dreamed up by the paper's shady owner, Imre Bekessy...

...But still, Kiss Me, Stupid can't survive the inexplicably demented performance of Walston, Sellers's lastminute replacement, as Orville...

...Wilder's refusal to romanticize the anti-hero is all the more commendable in context...

...But in context, it is shaded with ambiguity...

...If Five Graves to Cairo's theme is the bending of individual wills to the discipline of war, then Foreign Affair's is the inevitable unbending after the war...

...The film is effective in its use of the ruins of postwar Berlin: "Considering the amount of taxpayers' money that was poured on it, I don't expect it to look like a lace Valentine," says the prim and officious Republican con-gresswoman Phoebe Frost (Jean Arthur...

...Like Casablanca, Five Graves to Cairo weighs disillusioned self-interest against the self-sacrificing morality of wartime idealism...

...If you try to be artistic or affected you miss everything...

...The best mise-en-scène is the one you don't notice," Wilder told Cahiers du Cinéma in 1962...