Two New York premieres back to back, on June 15 and June 16 of 1960, introduced two of the most memorable films of the decade and represented the pinnacles of their directors’ careers. In both cases, they also marked the end of their glory days. After their remarkable success, both directors would go from prolific working schedules to scattered and increasingly less successful releases. Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho would become the film that defined his title as the Master of Suspense, but after its runaway success (and notoriety) he would only make six more films and I’d say only two of them (The Birds and Frenzy) rank among his best.
Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, which premiered the night before, would turn out to be the artistic apex of his career, up there with Some Like It Hot and Sunset Boulevard as the movies most frequently associated with his name. The following spring it would win six Oscars, three of them for Wilder to add to his previous three wins, and would prove to be the highest meeting point of critical acclaim and audience favour that he would ever hit. It had to all be downhill from there.
Wilder came to Hollywood a writer and never stopped being one, and to this day is held up as a master craftsman of film structure. You can search his name on YouTube and find hundreds of fan-made videos that examine his elements of style, many of them quoting him on his famous rules. (“If you have a problem in the third act, your problem is in the first act.”) He believed in his audience and treated them like his revered masters. (“The audience is never wrong. An individual member of it may be an imbecile, but 1000 imbeciles together in the dark–that is critical genius.”) If the characters weren’t fully fleshed out, he said, the audience would turn on a film no matter how good the plot, although this doesn’t work when you look at the brilliant characters in Ace in the Hole aka The Big Carnival, which audiences unjustly turned on.
The man born Shmuel (or Samuel) Vilder on June 22, 1906, in a small town in Galicia (Austro-Hungarian empire at the time, now Poland) couldn’t have been less likely to end up as one of the giants of Hollywood’s golden age. His parents ran an elegant cake shop in Sucha Beskidzka (“Half an hour from Vienna…by telegraph”) that his father developed into a successful chain before dying when Wilder was 22. His mother took him and his brother Wilhelm to Vienna where the art world quickly found him: Wilder became a journalist and the “King of Jazz” Paul Whiteman liked him so much he invited him to join his band and write about them as they headed to what was then the capital of culture in late twenties Europe, Berlin. There, he worked his way up the entertainment ladder, making money as a taxi dancer while also writing for newspapers and embarking on scriptwriting and producing, scoring a major breakthrough with the popularity of Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer’s People on Sunday.
The Nazi threat of the 1930s prompted a move to Paris where Wilder made his directorial debut under his new name “Billy” (confusing given that his brother at the time went by “Willie,” later as “W. Lee Wilder”), co-directing Mauvaise Graine (Bad Seed) with Alexander Esway. Before it was even released, he was once again on the run from Adolf Hitler, heading to Hollywood where he would begin again as a writer and would not have a directorial credit again until 1942. His family were much less fortunate and he was plagued with survivor’s guilt for the rest of his life, as his mother, grandmother and stepfather all died in concentration camps. In his final years, he set about to adapt Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark as his final project and a tribute to his own connection to the Holocaust. He never did achieve this dream, but praised the eventual film version (retitled Schindler’s List) directed by Steven Spielberg.
Wilder became a naturalized American citizen in 1939, and that year saw the release of Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka, for which he received his first Oscar nomination. One of its co-writers was Charles Brackett, with whom he was first paired on Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, a collaboration that would last until Sunset Boulevard twelve years later (according to Brackett, “our lives were simpler” when you accepted that Wilder took credit for his own ideas). Wilder never fell victim to the blacklist but, surprisingly, also got away with challenging it, becoming one of the creators of the Committee for the First Amendment; inimitably witty as always, he supported the Hollywood ten but also pointed out that “Of the ten, two had talent, and the rest were just unfriendly.”
Over the course of his career, he won seven Academy Awards (the last being the Thalberg in 1987) and, until Woody Allen’s thirteenth screenplay nomination for Deconstructing Harry in 1998, held the record for the most writing nominations. His filmography includes films that are still regularly viewed and adored today: Sabrina, The Seven Year Itch and, probably most famous of all, Some Like It Hot are never hard to find on a big or small screen somewhere. After his run of classics in the fifties (which also included Stalag 17, Witness for the Prosecution and The Spirit of St. Louis) it didn’t seem like he could go any higher, but then came The Apartment.
Wilder had always had a curious attitude towards comedy and romance, his brilliant mind and his experiences surviving Europe’s hardest decades of the twentieth century gave him a cynical, wry perspective that always came through in his dialogue. Sabrina manages to criticize post-war capitalism while still indulging in Audrey Hepburn’s gorgeous wardrobe; Sunset Boulevard exposes the gothic horrors of an egotist who won’t let the past go but also allows you to feel a tender sympathy for her. Ace in the Hole‘s hard-bitten take on the cruelty of the mob was too dark for audiences and has only found critical favour recently, and The Apartment threatened to do the same. It’s a gorgeous love story, but it involves suicide and adultery, and its most frequently used setting is a modest bachelor pad being used for sexual dalliances with careless secretaries. It also encompasses all the best elements of Wilder’s work, from his honest but generous view of human connection to his incredible skill for building a script that has no flaws. Is it any wonder he could never recover from this success.
The changes of the sixties began in its first year, and not just in the arts. Fifteen African countries achieved independence from their colonial overseers and many others were on the road to their own victories. In Hamburg in August, a foursome called The Beatles began a 48-night residency at the Indra Club and a month later Americans tuned into the first televised presidential debate (between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy). The Hollywood Walk of fame was unveiled, and The Apartment‘s incredible coup with audiences and awards was swiftly followed by the changes in cinema that would prevent Wilder ever repeating its success. A number of future celebrated directors either made their debuts or had their breakthroughs this year: Godard (Breathless), Kubrick (Spartacus), Fellini (La Dolce Vita) and Antonioni (L’Avventura).
Hollywood’s dominance would give way to European arthouse classics, ironic given that Wilder had to escape Europe to even have a career, and his more modest and nuanced takes on American life would be replaced by More Is More epic productions shot in Italy and splashy comedies with Doris Day. Wilder had a few more hits, The Fortune Cookie and Irma La Douce did well, but he also had major setbacks like Kiss Me Stupid, which was roundly condemned by moral forces and didn’t connect with audiences. He only made four more movies in the sixties and another four the following decade, finding it harder and harder to convince studio heads to back his projects even while new generations of directors, who had studied him in school, were hailing him as a god of the artform, and continue to do so to this day. He is frequently cited in Oscar speeches, including Fernando Trueba, who accepted his 1994 Best Foreign Language Film award for Belle Epoque with the statement, “I would like to believe in God in order to thank him. But I just believe in Billy Wilder… so thank you, Mr. Wilder.”
After the uphill battle of getting Fedora made under compromised circumstances in 1978, Wilder announced his retirement from directing, coming back behind the camera one last time to direct his old friends Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon in the 1981 comedy Buddy Buddy. It was not a fitting end to such an illustrious career. Never one to rest on his laurels, however, he spent his remaining years on his art collection, amassing so impressive an array of works that art dealer Louis Stern arranged an exhibition in 1993 at his Beverly Hills Gallery. Living up to his own dictum, “Don’t be boring”, he remained a public figure and a beloved one until his death in 2002 at the age of 95. Le Monde announced the news with the headline “Billy Wilder is dead. Nobody is perfect.”
Reviews are by Bil Antoniou, except where noted. Many thanks to Colin Biggs and Matthew Simpson for their generous contributions.
MUST SEE
Midnight
Mitchell Leisen, 1939
There’s a reason why they call it the silver screen: the images here actually glisten as Claudette Colbert arrives in Paris in the middle of the night, finely dressed but lacking a dime to her name. She befriends a cab driver (Don Ameche) with whom she has an immediate attachment, but then gives him the slip and finds herself in the company of aristocrats to whom she presents herself as a baroness. John Barrymore plays an incredibly wealthy member of the leisure set who hires her to woo a rich playboy away from his own philandering wife (Mary Astor). Colbert sees it as a great opportunity to marry into a fortune, but her plans become complicated when Ameche shows up again pretending to be her “baron” husband. Lots of Depression-era politics about the moral superiority of the working class, but lots of laughs too in the dazzling screenplay co-written by Wilder. Leisen’s direction is perfectly effortless, moving seamlessly from situation to situation without breaking a bead of sweat, backed up by bubbly performances, beautiful sets and costumes and a palpable sexy chemistry between the leads. It’s one of the prime examples of 1930s’ filmmaking, and one of Colbert’s greatest performances.
Ninotchka
Ernst Lubitsch, 1939
The famous Lubitsch touch is partly the result of hiring Wilder as one of the writers of one of the most beloved comedies of the Golden Age. The headlines read that “Garbo Laughs!” when this charmer was released and broke through the Swedish star’s icy persona to reveal sincere charm in a role tailor made to lampoon her image. The fun begins when three Russians show up in Paris to handle the sale of priceless jewels that will help fund the socialist project back home, but they run into a snag when the deposed countess who once owned the baubles tries to prevent their sale. Even more of a problem is that the three emissaries have been seduced by the charms of the City of Lights thanks to the temptations put in their way by the countess’s lover (Melvyn Douglas). A humourless, ideologically firm agent (Greta Garbo) is sent to undo their mess but finds herself equally won over by capitalist indulgences, none more potent than Douglas himself, with whom she falls deeply in love. Wilder wrote the script with his regular collaborator Charles Brackett and Walter Reisch, and much of his sparkly humour shows through in elements of the script: the flimsy nature of intellectual ideals in the face of human emotions and the elevating of sensual pleasures to morally valuable pursuits are themes he would revisit in later classics. The film itself was popular enough to inspire a musical remake, Silk Stockings in 1957, but it couldn’t recapture the lightning energy between the stars. For all the awkwardenss of Lubitsch’s editing choices (there are times when different angles reveal Garbo to clearly be performing in a very different take), her sexy, earthy performance and Douglas’s debonair charm make for a delicious combination, and the view of East vs. West in the years before Cold War paranoia is so much more soothing than the sharper examinations of the subject that were to come.
Ball of Fire
Howard Hawks, 1941
Gary Cooper is a shy professor of linguistics who, along with seven other equally isolated gentlemen, is working on a brand-new, up-to-date dictionary thanks to a fund left behind by a late, wealthy benefactor. Upon researching an entry he intends to devote to “slang” language, Cooper comes across snazzy club singer Barbara Stanwyck and asks her for research help. She initially refuses, but when she finds she’s in a little trouble with the law thanks to some shady mobster connections, she immediately makes her way to the mansion where the gentlemen both live and work and moves in. These guys, having not set eyes upon a woman in decades, all go gaga over her, and before you can say “Buzzbomb,” she’s turned their world upside down. None more so than Cooper, who has developed doe eyes for the lady who kisses him in order to teach him the meaning of the slang term “yum yum.” This is an incredibly delightful comedy that features one of Stanwyck’s most energetic and appealing performances, the same year that she appeared in Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve, and which has Wilder credited on a screenplay that sparkles with witty dialogue. Later remade as a musical, less effectively, with Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo under the title A Song Is Born.
The Major and the Minor
Billy Wilder, 1942
Tired of working hard and getting nowhere in the big city, and even more sick and tired of the wolves with too many hands that are always trying to have their way with her, Susan Applegate (Ginger Rogers) reaches into her purse for the return fare she has been saving and asks for a ticket back home. Unfortunately, inflation has raised the price since she first arrived and she’s short of funds, so she pretends to be a thirteen year-old and buys a child’s ticket instead. It would be a harmless gag except it has its consequences: she needs to keep the charade up for the conductor who is punching her ticket, which leads to her hiding in the cabin of Major Philip Kirby (Ray Milland) and maintaining the characterization for him too. If you think this is the end of the line for her routine, think again, for Kirby insists on bringing her to the military college, where he is staying with his fiancée and future in-laws, before escorting her back to her mother, which means that Susan is now made to dance with teenage cadets despite the fact that she’s falling in love with Kirby and can’t tell him. Thankfully, she also befriends thirteen year-old Lucy Hill (Diana Lynn, the best character in the film) who is immediately on to her game but keeps her secret, offering this grown woman a break from having to play the bobby-soxer. This uproarious comedy, Wilder’s first in Hollywood as a director, is skilfully written and directed, one hilarious sequence follows another while riding the fine line between crafty and creepy that the main couple’s romantic trajectory flirts with (you can see Kirby trying not to find her attractive and it’s actually funny). Rogers is superb in one of her sharpest performances, a role that the star had plenty of knowledge about: she often pretended to be younger to score cheaper train tickets when travelling the vaudeville circuit with her mother, who appears in this film as Susan’s mother.
Double Indemnity
Billy Wilder, 1944
One of the greatest achievements in film noir is this fantastic murder mystery, Wilder’s first sterling classic and the movie that established his reputation as a filmmaker of note. An insurance investigator (Fred MacMurray) on a routine door-to-door sales route talks to a married woman (Barbara Stanwyck, who made herself the archetype of the femme fatale with this fantastic role) about renewing her husband’s life insurance. She decides to create her own policy, using her feminine wiles to get MacMurray to help her kill her husband, cash in on his generous policy and split the loot. Plans are made, carefully plotted out to the most careful degree, but given that the film uses a flashback framing device to tell its tale, it’s more than likely that someone in this formula isn’t going to stick to their side of the bargain. The gorgeous, moody black-and-white photography became the hallmark of the genre.
Death Mills
Hans Burger, Billy Wilder, 1945
Wilder wasn’t one of the directors covered in Mark Harris’ book (and subsequent documentary series) Five Came Back, but he did take time from his Hollywood career to contribute to the war effort with this groundbreaking documentary short, the first time that audiences would have seen footage of the Holocaust. American soldiers liberate the camps and find evidence of the horrors that had claimed, among its millions of victims, Wilder’s own mother, grandmother and stepfather. A short running time doesn’t diminish the impact of images that still burn through the mind so many decades later.
A Foreign Affair
Billy Wilder, 1948
Wilder moves towards the golden period of his own filmography with this postwar masterpiece featuring stunning cinematography and unforgettable performances. The chipper optimism that Jean Arthur always brought to Capra films is given a dark, authoritative edge in her masterful portrayal of an American congresswoman who is sent as the head of a delegation to determine the morale of soldiers stationed in a desperate and divided Berlin. She expects to find homesick men in need of their government’s support but instead is embroiled in black market shopping and observes some good times with the local German women who give out kisses for nylons and chocolate. Arthur’s tight hairdo and icy demeanour eventually soften when serviceman John Lund makes eyes at her to throw her off the trail of a German cabaret singer (a superb Marlene Dietrich) whose past Nazi ties have made her a suspect for war crimes. It’s a comedy with a great deal of laughs that never undermine the subject matter, balancing light and dark elements to perfection and including location footage of ruined Berlin between gorgeous sequences of Dietrich singing songs that would become signature tunes for her, “Illusions” and “Black Market.” It’s sexy and still feels so modern, but the shadowy photography also makes it a nostalgic indulgence of the highest order.
Sunset Boulevard
Billy Wilder, 1950
The release of Wilder’s biggest hit to date had some commentators announcing that Hollywood wouldn’t survive its success, an unveiling of the darker side of Tinseltown that is still for the many the very definition of behind the scenes melodrama. As it turned out, the movie business chugged on and so did Wilder, and more seamy tales of show biz came out in the fifties (A Star Is Born, Love Me or Leave Me) while the director enjoyed the most successful decade of his career (Sabrina, Witness for the Prosecution, The Apartment). William Holden is terrific as Joe Gillis, an impoverished screenwriter trying to save his car from the repo men who are pursuing him, who lucks into a hideout when his car breaks down and lands him in the driveway of a once-famous, now faded and forgotten queen of the silvers screen, Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson). She hires him to help her finish a hopeless comeback project, a film about Salome that she hopes will be directed by her old friend Cecil B. DeMille, but after the trinkets and fine suits she drops in his lap, it’s quite obvious that what this stud is really being paid for is to keep her ego afloat. Swanson gives one of the most memorable performances in film history with her own comeback, sinking her teeth into the pleasure of taking potshots at her own image both past and present. In reality, she’d walked away from the business on her own terms and revealed very little bitterness about it, but Norma Desmond can’t look at anyone without flashing lightning bolts out of her eyes about what could have been. Once an indomitable image that didn’t need words, she now lives in luxury. (Wilder wryly points out that she’s rich for plenty of reasons that actually have nothing to do with movie salaries.) However, her mansion is an ornate prison and she is an exotic animal within its walls. It’s still one of the most beautiful films of its era and one that, despite all its trappings, plays as incredibly modern thanks to the wisdom with which Wilder writes his characters: Norma might be out of her mind but she’s also endearing and genuinely pitiable, and Joe might be an unfortunate victim of circumstances but he’s also a selfish fool. The cast is rounded out with excellent support from master filmmaker and sometime character Erich von Stroheim as her faithful servant Max, and Nancy Olson as an ambitious writer who hopes to collaborate with Holden on a screenplay. Real life Hollywood figures such as DeMille, Hedda Hopper, and Buster Keaton make appearances as themselves.
Ace in the Hole
Billy Wilder, 1951
Colin Biggs: In terms of scathing social critique of media, Nightcrawler has to be up there, but Wilder beat that film to the punch by 63 years. The character work is top-notch with every person getting a zinger of a line, and Kirk Douglas gets to play one of the most unscrupulous monsters of his career (not an insignificant feat) in Chuck Tatum. Tatum gets a scoop about a treasure hunter trapped in a cave and milks it, article by article, all the way back to the big time. The problem is if the worker gets out, there goes the story… so Tatum convinces rescuers to take longer to save him for a few extra bucks. Wilder’s film is bleak, shatteringly so for its time, and still a hard watch today; Wilder doesn’t just rely on his keen screenplay to deliver the message, he uses the canvas of the screen to really drive it home. Take the literal carnival that develops around the oil drill site: while workers fret about one of their neighbors trapped in a cave, onlookers get off a train to join the festivities. Kids and smiling parents all hurrying to take part in the tragedy that Tatum has built into a nationwide sensation. You see, we’ve always been this dark. And it was much harder for Wilder to get that across in a film back then. That Ace in the Hole still pulls no punches is a testimony to its staying power.
Stalag 17
Billy Wilder, 1953
Matthew Simpson: Stalag 17 is a broad, zany comedy featuring the antics of a couple of class clown-type characters and a World War II wartime drama about men in captivity, and how a community can turn against one of its own when its members are tired and afraid. It shouldn’t work, but there is a reason Wilder is regarded as one of the greatest directors, as his film walks a knife edge between its two genres, delivering on both while compromising on neither. It’s quite the feat, and one that could only be accomplished by a master of the art. It helps that the film is anchored by the great William Holden (in an Oscar-winning performance) as Sefton, the notorious black marketeer of the titular POW camp. Sefton eventually comes under suspicion of being a mole for their Nazi captors, and he plays off the entire group expertly. In one scene, where the men turn on him, he switches gears effortlessly from denial to acceptance of the ostracizing he’s about to endure. The entire cast is good, but Holden stands above them all, even in the long stretches of the film, where he is quietly observing in the background. He and Wilder know where and when to place focus when to be quiet, and when to go big. It’s a great performance that stands out in his career of great performances. Stalag 17 is a classic, and one of the best films in the filmography of Wilder and Holden both.
Witness for the Prosecution
Billy Wilder, 1957
Matthew Simpson: There’s a reason why Agatha Christie’s stories have been told and retold and adapted and re-adapted so many times over the years: they’re all classics. Witness for the Prosecution is no exception. This 1957 film was nominated for six Oscars, including Best Director for Wilder, and it’s easy to see why: there are several all-time great performances and exactly no wasted frames. As the film opens, prestigious lawyer Sir Wilfred Robart (Charles Laughton) is recovering from a heart attack but agrees to defend Leonard Vole (Tyrone Power), who is accused of murdering a woman who has left him £80,000 (the equivalent of £2.4 million today). The case is entirely circumstantial and based on an alibi provided by his wife, Christine (Marlene Dietrich), who eventually appears as the titular witness against him. To say any more about the plot would be a disservice to anyone who hasn’t seen it, but the film never lets up when it comes to its pace or tone. Wilder is in complete command here, both in conjuring great performances from the actors and in making sure each scene is blocked, shot, and edited into a near-perfect flow, and then perfectly executing one of the better twists in cinema history. The twist was so good that the producers of the film put a voice over on the end credits asking people not to spoil it for others. Witness for the Prosecution is a delight to watch, whether you’re a fan of courtroom dramas, mysteries in general, or just good cinema. It turns out it’s an all-time classic for a reason.
Some Like It Hot
Billy Wilder, 1959
This hysterical comedy was recently ranked the greatest American comedy of the century by the American Film Institute and is likely Wilder’s best-known film. It’s a laugh-fest that begins when struggling musicians Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis witness the St. Valentine’s Day massacre in Prohibition-era Chicago and are spotted by the gangsters who did it. To hide out from their predators, the two of them dress up as women and join an all-girl band that is travelling to Florida. Now they have to maintain their image as women while keeping their hands off the band’s featured attraction, a ukulele player named Sugar (Marilyn Monroe). Hilarity further ensues when Curtis impersonates a Cary Grant-ish millionaire to impress Monroe and Lemmon catches the eye of a very rich man with many ex-wives (Joe E. Brown, who delivers the film’s classic closing line). Monroe sings some great songs from the period with which she has become eternally associated (“I Want To Be Loved By You,” “Running Wild”), and gives what is probably her sharpest and best-timed comedic performance (an odd accomplishment considering that during filming she needed to retake shots with simple lines up to thirty times; Wilder eventually had her dialogue written on cue cards and hidden strategically on the set).
The Apartment
Billy Wilder, 1960
Colin Biggs: Did anyone epitomize the charming and loquacious evil of the world for Wilder better than Fred MacMurray? He has the square jaw, the confidence, and a hole where a heart should be. As corporate honcho Sheldrake, MacMurray instills immorality into every worker beneath him on the bottomless ladder at Consolidated Life. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) has no hopes of establishing himself without letting the higher-ups use his apartment for their extramarital affairs. Then Sheldrake leaves one of his problems for Baxter to take care of the next morning. “The mirror… It’s broken.” “Yes, I know. I like it that way. Makes me look the way I feel.” A comedy with this premise shouldn’t be romantic. Yet it succeeds at realizing a cathartic love story that never feels saccharine. And it also scorches right through the screen when it needs to. Wilder juggles going for the throat with warmth and solidly thought-out gags that only pay off later. Wilder was a master of tone and screenplay mechanics, The Apartment might be the best example of just how good he was.
WORTHY
People on Sunday
Edgar G. Ulmer, Robert Siodmak; 1930
Careers that would be celebrated in Hollywood were kicked into high gear by a film whose reputation has only grown since its release, as have the arguments over its authorship. Siodmak and Ulmer were not yet thirty when they co-directed this experimental hybrid of drama and documentary, which presents scenes of Berlin life at the end of the work week before focusing on two urban couples enjoying a picnic in the countryside. The figures on the screen were non-professionals and the film was shot in an improvisational style surrounding a premise on which Wilder is co-credited, though in later years he would take credit for the lion’s share of the film’s creation and Siodmak would insist he worked no more than an hour on the whole thing. Wilder’s sole contribution, according to Siodmak, is the one that shows off his sense of humour to those familiar with his later work: the fifth friend who misses the day’s pleasure by sleeping in. The turbulence (to say the least) of European history in the 1930s would prompt the crew to move to America where they would increase their fame, Siodmak becoming a celebrated director of noirs, Ulmer of numerous B-level classics like The Black Cat and Detour, and cinematographer Eugen Shufftan an Oscar-winning director of photography (for The Hustler). The film itself is seen as a precursor to cinematic movements unknown at the time, notably Italian neorealism and the French Nouvelle Vague, but stands freshly on its own for comfortably blending the realism of the former with the spontaneous humour of the latter.
Mauvaise Graine
Billy Wilder, Alexandre Esway; 1934
Wilder made his directorial debut in France before escaping Nazi power and heading to Hollywood, and this is his only credit as director until 1942. He shows talent as a filmmaker early on in a charming story he co-helmed with Alexander Esway that also features an early appearance by a seventeen year-old Danielle Darrieux. She plays the sole female member of a gang of car thieves who get one more added to their number when a spoiled playboy takes back the car his father sold out from under him. Hoping to teach the young man some responsibility and announcing he will no longer support him, his father is naturally disappointed that, instead, his son ends up a part of a criminal enterprise who eventually get the police on their tail. Light-hearted and charismatic, the film shows off aspects of Wilder’s storytelling we would come to see in much more accomplished films later on, especially the richness of the characters and the clarity of the story that is never muddled by the primitive early 1930s’ technology.
Under Pressure
Raoul Walsh, 1935
“Sandhogs” are the focus of this exciting melodrama on which Wilder made uncredited writing contributions (to dialogue, according to IMDb), about the men who worked building the tunnels under New York’s rivers. Jumbo Smith (Ward Bond) and Shocker Dugan (Edmund Lowe) are guys on the Brooklyn side of a tunnel being built under the East River, engaged in a bet with the guys working the New York side (under Charles Bickford as “Nipper Moran”) as to who can make it to the middle first. Their work is dangerous, as is revealed by the constant reference to compressed air, and their plight is illuminated for the whole city to learn about when a journalist on her way to cover a horse race stumbles on their operation. Movies in the silent era may have been escapist indulgences aimed at immigrant audiences, but when we reach the Depression the cinema is speaking to the struggling American masses, and this film’s focus on celebrating the labour of the underclasses (including a scene where they get to give it to a few snobby toffs at a nightclub) certainly plays to this. When Paramount released No Time For Love in 1943, a film with no overt connection but whose plot (and tunnel set) is more or less the same, the emphasis in the era of screwball comedies is moved more towards romance and sexy chemistry. Watch the full film here.
Arise, My Love
Mitchell Leisen, 1940
An American pilot (Ray Milland) sits in a prison cell awaiting his execution by the newly-formed fascist government serving a victorious Franco at the end of the Spanish Civil War. He is told that his wife has pleaded his case and authorities have decided to release him and he, in the name of saving his neck, avoids telling his captors that he has never had a wife. She turns out to be an ambitious journalist (Claudette Colbert) whose idea was to spring him from jail and have an exclusive cover story to further her career, but the happy couple barely escape with their hides intact when the ruse is revealed just minutes after they get into a car and head to the airport. Arriving home, they give into a mutual attraction but she tells him that her career is too valuable for her to give it up and become a mere housewife, so he vows to give up his own ambitions in the cockpit so that they can simply be happily married (as if that’s a job). When Hitler invades Poland and gets a world war under way, however, they both find themselves behind enemy lines in Germany and their romantic plan is challenged. The events of December 7, 1941 made a lot of Americans forget the fierce debate over whether or not to get involved in Europe’s war that had been raging for two years, but movies like this one (and Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent) exist as reminders of Interventionist propaganda that lay the filmmakers’ purposes quite bare. What begins as a sexy romantic comedy, in which Colbert enjoys very hot chemistry with her usually unmotivated co-star, enjoys some lighthearted tones of adventure before risking becoming absolutely preachy in its last third. The combination of elements is strange, and the plot sags in places, but it’s a pleasant charmer that reveals Wilder’s ability to infuse humour in even the thorniest of places. Many of his films as director would have characters clinging to love and sex in times of political strife, and his humanism would show itself in his belief that human connection was a sacred principle to be cherished no matter what the greater situation.
Five Graves to Cairo
Billy Wilder, 1943
A British soldier (Franchot Tone, employing very little Britishness) arrives at a remote Egyptian hotel delirious from wandering the hot desert sun, and promptly passes out. When he is conscious and his mind clears, he discovers that the building has been taken over by “Desert Fox” Field Marshall Rommel (Erich von Stroheim) and his soldiers. Thinking quickly, Tone barely manages to avoid being detected before he gets into the uniform of a waiter who died in a bombing. He uses his position as an opportunity to discover the secret location of five cargo holds of supplies for the German army (the five graves of the title) while also dealing with a persistently paranoid hotel manager (Akim Tamiroff) and a beautiful chambermaid (Anne Baxter) who hates the British for what her brother suffered while serving in the French army. This was Wilder’s second film in Hollywood as director and he already shows a smooth command of performance, photography and dialogue; if for no other reason, the film is worth watching to see what a natural the man was at the job from the very beginning. The plotting is a bit too stagebound, it’s a spy film that barely goes beyond a few rooms for much of its running time, but the characters attach themselves to you easily and von Stroheim brings more than just the usual harsh accent and commanding manner that actors generally give to portrayals of Nazi menace. The ending is surprisingly moving (this was made, after all, before we knew we were going to win the war) and the whole thing looks exotic and beautiful.
The Lost Weekend
Billy Wilder, 1945
The success of Double Indemnity was followed by the critical and commercial success of this, at the time, hard-hitting look at the realities of alcoholism, which earned Wilder his first two of an eventual six Oscars (plus the Thalberg). Ray Milland plays a New York writer who has achieved sobriety and is planning a weekend getaway with his brother (Phillip Terry). Instead he concocts a plot to get his brother and girlfriend (Jane Wyman) out of his apartment so he can hit the bottle again, going on a journey that sees him descend to the madness of a hospital ward. Many aspects of it haven’t aged well–Milland clutching his throat every time he takes a sip is ridiculous now–but the actors surrounding him give hard-edged, sincere performances. It’s a movie that keeps its eye on entertaining the audience while opening our eyes to the issue it is concerned with.
Sabrina
Billy Wilder, 1954
In Samuel Taylor’s 1953 play Sabrina Fair, the daughter of a chauffeur to the wealthy Larrabee family comes back from Paris, where she worked as an assistant for a low-level European diplomat. She realizes that her childhood crush on David, the playboy son of the Larrabees, is no longer as strong as her pull to his more practical brother Linus. Having learned that her father has become rich from dabbling in the stock market, Sabrina Fairchild questions her place as someone caught between worlds. Her money is new, but so is her country’s attitude towards it after the industrial boom that follows the Second World War. Such considerations of class and the American ambivalence towards upward mobility were all washed away by Wilder’s highly unfaithful film adaptation, changes to which angered Taylor so much that he quit the project well before it was over. (He retained screen credit and ended up with an Oscar nomination all the same, and the rift between him and Wilder clearly didn’t hold long enough to prevent another adaptation of his work, Avanti, in 1972.) In the film version, Sabrina (Audrey Hepburn) leaves home to go to a Parisian cooking school and, when she comes back, gets embroiled in a romantic entanglement between the Larrabee brothers (William Holden, Humphrey Bogart) when the family gets nervous about one of their sons marrying the child of the help. No one plays the stock market, and while the play had her figuring out her sense of self, the film has her choosing between men. It’s easy to cast aspersions on the typical Hollywood dumbing down of a much headier theatrical piece, but it should be pointed out that Taylor’s questioning of the value of post-war prosperity would have read as Commie propaganda in a Hollywood terrified by McCarthy’s investigations, and having characters consider ideas rather than feelings works much better on stage than it does on film. What Wilder does instead is deliver one of Hepburn’s most memorable and beloved vehicles, in which she debuts her lifelong association with Hubert de Givenchy (who did not speak up when Edith Head claimed the costume design Oscar for herself alone) and convinces you that she’d be happy, at the age of 25, to settle for 55 year-old Humphrey Bogart, who subbed in after Cary Grant dropped out a week before shooting began (and who spent the entire shoot complaining of Hepburn’s lack of talent). There’s still a whiff of staginess that remains in the finished product–the film takes place in only a handful of locations and over a short period of time, but Wilder’s return to comedy after six years also shows off his trademark wit, from the intelligent dialogue (“Nobody poor was ever called democratic for marrying somebody rich”) to his crafty visual puns (like the way Holden unspools the tennis court net so that it seems like he’s dropping his pants).
The Seven Year Itch
Billy Wilder, 1955
Wilder’s hit comedy features what is likely the most famous image in his entire filmography: Marilyn Monroe standing above a subway grate while her dress billows with air rushing up from below. Tom Ewell (recreating his stage role) is hilarious as a happily married man who sends his wife (Evelyn Keyes) and son away to the Hamptons for the summer and remains behind to continue work in New York City. When a gorgeous blonde (Monroe) moves in upstairs, he discovers that he is suffering from the urge that hits all married men after seven years of marriage: the need to cheat! Monroe’s timing couldn’t be better, but censors reportedly took their scissors to a great deal of the original play and it’s likely why aspects of its writing play a little limp. This was the last project Monroe filmed before studying at the Actors Studio in New York City and one can see a distinction between her easy spontaneity here and the more self-conscious work in Bus Stop a year later. By the time Wilder would work with her again, on Some Like It Hot, her struggles had taken a strong hold of her personal and professional bearing and the director wouldn’t shy away from expressing his displeasure over the experience.
The Spirit of St. Louis
Billy Wilder, 1957
Growing up obsessed with airplanes, Charles Lindbergh (James Stewart) purchases a junk heap of a little flyer that he puts to use as a moneymaker, delivering air mail and giving flying lessons to the public. Having known for a long time of the Orteig Prize, a cash reward offered to anyone who can cross the Atlantic Ocean on a single flight, Lindbergh pursues his dream of winning the contest, believing he can fly his small propeller airplane from Roosevelt Island to Paris in one go. He raises funding from dubious but dedicated businessmen, assembles his personal crew and then, in an impressively intimate sequence of scenes, spends forty hours alone in a cockpit. Despite a weighty running time, this film has no unnecessary fat to it, focusing on its protagonist as he goes step by step through accomplishing his dream against a great many odds. Beautifully photographed, the scenes of him crossing the Atlantic really do feel like he is up in the air (with visual effects that hold up quite nicely), and, while Stewart didn’t need to prove his value as a movie star at this point, it’s wonderful to see how exceptional he is at commanding attention with so little opportunity for movement or interaction (his only companion for most of the film is a common house fly). Stewart had for years campaigned to make the film and play the man who, at this point, was in his early twenties, and Stewart’s being forty-nine cannot be hidden by some very good wig work, but he still maintains the straight-arrow morality and passionate intelligence that movie audiences always loved about him. Wilder directs with sincerity and little flourish, trusting the narrative to be enough but still including the odd moment of his trademark witty sparkle: in a film overloaded by scenes of men in suits arguing, the inclusion of a small but sharp scene in which a female admirer gifts Lindbergh the makeup mirror in her purse goes a long way.
The Fortune Cookie
Billy Wilder, 1966)
This was the first time that Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau were teamed up on screen, and from this casting a legendary cinematic pairing was born. Lemmon plays an unhappily married business man who is persuaded by his money-grubbing brother-in-law to play up a minor injury into a major lawsuit with which they could both strike it rich. The comedy these two produce between them far outweighs anything that director Wilder can come up with as either writer or director, but that isn’t necessarily a criticism. Think of it as a younger, less popular sibling to The Apartment. The film won Matthau a Best Supporting Actor Oscar.
The Front Page
Billy Wilder, 1974
Wilder reunites with his Fortune Cookie stars for a remake of Ben Hecht’s much-lauded play, closer to the Lewis Milestone version than the gender-bending remake by Howard Hawks. This time, it’s Walter Matthau as the conniving editor who knows that his ace reporter Jack Lemmon is about to get married (to Susan Sarandon) and take a job in the cushier world of advertising. Determined to keep him from quitting, Matthau first tries to manipulate the situation by telling Sarandon that Lemmon is wanted on a sex offender charge, but when that fails, he pulls out all the stops and goes for something he knows his friend can’t resist: the action is happening on the day of the planned execution of an accused, possibly innocent murderer (Austin Pendleton), who then escapes before being gassed and finds his way into the courthouse’s press room overlooking the gallows. What reporter can avoid such a good story when they know they’re the only one who can write it properly? The period details are rich and comforting and the dialogue just zings by in Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond’s expert adaptation of Hecht’s play, although adhering to the single-setting of its stage origins won’t work for all viewers and might come across a bit stifled (the film’s recent appearance in one of the funniest scenes in Dolemite Is My Name is wholly appropriate). Carol Burnett appears in a supporting role as a maligned sex worker who speaks out against the dishonesty of the journalists who have been so unkind to her. Following its release, she was very critical of her own performance, feeling she hadn’t given it enough preparation and she’s only halfway right. Burnett is too talented to be bad in anything, but there is a sense that she’s not sure if she’s playing a real person or taking part in a farcical caricature (which is actually Wilder’s problem, not hers). The film is more generous to her, though, than it is to Sarandon, who is completely dampened by her role as the ingénue and barely makes an impression. Matthau and Lemmon show off the crackling chemistry that would serve them so well in their ten movies together, and their fans will have a great time watching this one.
FOR THE CURIOUS
Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife
Ernst Lubitsch, 1938
A penniless aristocrat learns upon marrying a wealthy American financier that she is actually his seventh wife, deciding to put him through his paces and provoke the terms of their prenuptial agreement in order to reverse their power dynamic. Like most screwball comedies of the time, this one puts so much effort into avoiding the topic of sex that it’s all you can think about throughout the whole thing, which is helped by the sexy chemistry between Gary Cooper and Claudette Colbert. This first script collaboration between Wilder and Charles Brackett isn’t up to the standard of the stars and works a bit too hard at proving its sly cleverness, but it has its charms.
Hold Back the Dawn
Mitchell Leisen, 1941
Charles Boyer plays a Romanian national (with a French accent) who is hanging out in a Mexican border town waiting for the documents that will let him enter the United States. After border officials inform him that he will be waiting years before he can become a resident, he takes his frustration out on a schoolteacher (Olivia de Havilland) as she is driving by with a car full of students she has brought on a day trip, which causes her to get into an accident. When his girlfriend (Paulette Goddard) suggests that he marry an American to speed up his immigration, he sabotages de Havilland’s car repairs so that she is forced to stay the night and give him the opportunity to seduce her with his continental charms. The plot works and she falls head over heels, marrying him the next day before going home to wait out the weeks until he can join her in California, but as they spend more time together and he realizes what a good, sincere person she is, his guilt begins to work against his coldly calculated, Wings of the Dove-esque scheme. In execution it’s a horribly dated film, but it does deal with a subject that is still making today’s headlines, its cynicism over the pursuit of American citizenship courtesy of the sophistication of co-scenarist Wilder (who had not yet turned to directing). In his manipulation of this innocent woman, Boyer is forced to wonder if what he is going after is really worth the effort or if he is sees America as the solution for something he cannot escape. It’s insinuated that Boyer’s character has a past as a gigolo, likely informed by Wilder’s own time as a paid dancer in his leaner years in Berlin, which is not used against him either. There’s an emphasis on sympathizing with his plight that is separate from how we view the way he treats someone as sincere and amiable as de Havilland’s character. De Havilland gives a gorgeous, understated performance, near the beginning of her run of roles that proved her to be far more than just Errol Flynn’s arm candy, but she naturally radiates the kind of wisdom she had in Gone with the Wind. It makes watching her play someone this gullible quite tiresome. The film pays off in the end, when her sensitivity kicks in and the actress really gives the film its powerful, emotional punch, but Boyer’s shameless behaviour and her falling so easily for it results in a movie that spends far too much of its time being predictably trite.
Love in the Afternoon
Billy Wilder, 1957
For some odd reason, filmmakers were under the distinct impression that Audrey Hepburn liked to get it on with old men: Humphrey Bogart (Sabrina), Fred Astaire (Funny Face) and Rex Harrison (My Fair Lady) were all long in the tooth when they got to have a crack at the (very) young lady. (We let Cary Grant in Charade slide because, even in cardigans, he still looked like he could keep pace with her in the sack.) In the very worst example of them all, Hepburn plays opposite a fifty-six year-old Gary Cooper, who looks much the worse for wear as the man who captures her fancy. She’s the daughter of a private investigator who has been hired to investigate an American entrepreneur’s shady love life, not realizing that his own daughter has become enamoured of him. It’s a minor Wilder classic, but beautifully shot and a great opportunity to view the young star being directed by one of her best directors.
One, Two, Three
Billy Wilder, 1961
James Cagney gives a terrific performance as an executive for Coca-Cola in West Berlin who gets nervous about his job when the American boss (Howard St. John) comes over for a visit. Things get pretty heated when the boss’s rather unsophisticated daughter falls in love and eventually elopes with a vehemently dedicated Communist (Horst Buchholz) from the East side, where Coca-Cola has yet to find its market as a popular drink. Now Cagney has to spruce up the boss’s new son-in-law and make him presentable for his new capitalist family. Arlene Francis is superb as Cagney’s age-wisened wife, while Buchholz gives a hilariously impassioned performance as the young offender. The film isn’t the best in Wilder’s oeuvre, and its message, that every spirited Communist is just a capitalist in denial, would have been helped by a little more irony.
Irma la Douce
Billy Wilder, 1963
The idea here was to reunite the cast and director of The Apartment and create another successful masterpiece that would please both critics and audiences. The result, based on the 1956 stage musical by Marguerite Monnot and Alexandre Breffort, was beloved by audiences at the time, but doesn’t look nearly as good as their previous effort many years later. Wilder, removing all the songs from the show and relegating them to (Oscar-winning) background music, casts Jack Lemmon as a French policeman who is assigned to the red-light district of Paris. He gets his career off to a bad start when he arrests a whole slew of sex workers and throws them in jail, violating the understanding that the cops in the area have had for so long with the union of pimps that run the place. Things get further muddled when he meets one very fun working girl (Shirley MacLaine) who charms him so much that he comes up with a scheme to prevent her from seeing other men: he impersonates a wealthy suitor and finds ways to pay her huge sums of money that prevent her from needing to ever see anyone else. The flimsy story gets boring fast and doesn’t sparkle with the kind of wit that one expects from a Wilder film, and Lemmon is hammy in the lead, but MacLaine is marvelous.
Kiss Me, Stupid
Billy Wilder, 1964
Wilder called this film the beginning of the end for him. Its failure at the box office and condemnation by religious authorities narrowed down his freedom to get future projects off the ground. As with most films that caused moral outrage before the summer of love, it’s hilariously tame today. It’s a silly tale based on an Italian theatrical sex face called L’Ora Della Fantasia (The Dazzling Hour) by Anna Bonacci, previously made as a 1952 film called Wife for a Night with Gina Lollobrigida. Dean Martin plays a caricatured version of himself (“Dino!”) who stops for a gas in a dusty Arizona town and is immediately recognized by the station attendant Barney (Cliff Osmond), who is moonlighting as a songwriter with music teacher Orville (Ray Walston). Orville is married to Zelda (Felicia Farr) and jealous of her every move, which becomes a problem when he and Barney convince Dino to stick around town (by messing with his car) in order to convince him to buy their songs. Fearful of Dino’s reputation with the ladies, Orville provokes a fight with Zelda in order to get her to leave town and hires a waitress from the local saloon named “Polly the Pistol” (Kim Novak) to pose as his wife while Dino is staying in his guest room. Naturally, the complications are many and the bedroom doors slam excessively. The project was delayed by Marilyn Monroe’s death, for whom the role of Polly was intended, and Peter Sellers’ heart attack prevented him from playing Orville. (“You need a heart to have a heart attack!” Wilder said when he heard.) By the time cameras were ready to roll, the likes of Jack Lemmon and Danny Kaye were no longer interested, leaving Wilder with a cast he didn’t really want and they all perform as if they know it. It’s a charming idea for a farce but it plays things broadly and moves far too slowly, everyone in it is talented but there’s a spark that’s missing. It doesn’t help that Wilder is so honest about what’s really happening (we are left in no doubt as to what Polly’s being a “waitress” means) that it saps a great deal of humour that this kind of comedy relies on (censorship, after all, was what gave birth to screwball comedy, and no one has ever laughed at a Single Entendre). After this release, which was marked as “Condemned” by the Catholic Legion of Decency and publicly denounced by no less a former collaborator than Barbara Stanwyck, Wilder’s output would be far less prolific than it had been. Even when films were successful, they would be made with difficulty, the following year’s The Fortune Cookie one of his few hits before the end of his career.
Avanti!
Billy Wilder, 1972
Jack Lemmon shows up in Ischia, Italy feeling exasperated and upset, having arrived to collect the remains of his father who died in an automobile accident. In trying to arrange for the body to be shipped home in time for the funeral, he encounters a country with three hour lunches and endless swirls of bureaucracy that make his task very difficult to accomplish. Even more upsetting is the presence of a delightful Juliet Mills, who informs him that her mother died in the same car accident because she was his father’s mistress. Stuck in paradise and forced to listen to this woman endlessly prattle on, Lemmon eventually learns to soak up the surroundings, realizing that what he thought was his ambitious can-do American attitude is actually workaholic misery that is missing the most that life has to offer. Mills’ character has a ridiculous ongoing obsession with her weight that is meant to be her lesson to not sweat the small stuff, but even when factoring in Mills gaining twenty pounds to play the character (and the fact that these things are usually a personal hangup not based on any objective weight assessment), it’s absolutely impossible to believe that she would feel in the least bit self-conscious about being so luscious. All seems to be forgiven with author Samuel Taylor fenough to give the director a chance at adapting him again following Sabrina, but Taylor’s focus on American corporate mentality confusing or, in this case, poisoning the enjoyment of life, while toned down in Wilder’s version of Sabrina, is not exactly given centre stage here either. Wilder is far more interested in comedy antics and romantic indulgence, mixing in some touches of Italian sex comedy (including gratuitous breasts and truly unnecessary glimpses of Lemmon naked) that fall flat thanks to a ridiculously generous running time. It’s a ninety minute movie spread out over one hundred and forty minutes. The complete lack of chemistry between the stars makes sitting through it a genuine challenge.
Fedora
Billy Wilder, 1978
Wilder’s penultimate film as director seeks to recreate the atmosphere of Sunset Boulevard with a similar tale of imagined Hollywood lore. William Holden gives a reliable performance as a struggling film producer who flies to Corfu to find a reclusive movie star named Fedora (Marthe Keller) and convince her to star in his modernized update of Anna Karenina. He has a hard time breaking the protective circle around the actress until he is granted an interview with an elderly countess at the actress’s villa, who tells him that Fedora no longer works in films and will not be available. Holden suspects that the woman is being held against her will by those who would exploit her until a later turn of events prompts the actress’s entourage to tell him the complete tale, in flashback, of a tragedy involving babies out of wedlock, desperate plastic surgery and a conspiracy to shut out the public and the press. Wilder couldn’t raise interest from Hollywood studios to make this film, which given his status as an architect of Hollywood’s golden age is a crime regardless of how this particular project turned out. His being forced to make the film with much less European money and a lower-tier production team results in compromised values: it doesn’t look great (a rare Wilder film with ugly cinematography) and the foreign actors are all badly dubbed, but ultimately it is the weak script by Wilder and Diamond (adapted from a story by Tom Tryon, star of Preminger’s The Cardinal) that undoes the entire thing. It’s a trashy TV movie that has a Kenneth Anger Hollywood Babylon-style story but is not played with the kind of juicy, gossipy tone that would excuse its being so ineffective as a drama about either a dysfunctional family or the inner workings of the most glamorous business in the world. Henry Fonda and Michael York appear in cameos as themselves.
Buddy Buddy
Billy Wilder, 1981
Wilder had decided to retire after the difficulties of Fedora but decided to get back behind the camera when his frequent collaborators Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon agreed to star in this adaptation of Édouard Molinaro’s 1973 film L’Emmerdeur (written by Dinner Game scribe Francis Veber, adapted from his play Le Contrat). The result is an enjoyable comedy, nothing near the stellar quality of Wilder’s best but an improvement on his efforts the previous decade. It was also his final directorial effort, while Matthau and Lemmon would continue to work together, appearing together in eleven films by the time of their deaths. Matthau is somewhat miscast but still fun as Trabucco, a hit man for the mob who is famous for his ability to pull off a kill without the slightest hitch, sneaking poison into a milk bottle or a bomb into a mailbox and getting away with no one the wiser. He has successfully killed two witnesses who were set to testify against his bosses, but a third has evaded him and is on his way to appear in court. Setting up in a hotel room opposite the courthouse and trying to get a rifle in place to kill the man upon arrival, Trabucco is interrupted by the ruckus coming from the next hotel room, where depressed divorcee Victor Clooney (Jack Lemmon) has just tried, and spectacularly failed, to kill himself. Being drawn away from his job and into his new friend’s insanity causes a series of hijinks that eventually involve Klaus Kinski as the head of a sex institute and Paula Prentiss as the woman who got away. There’s an effortless spontaneity to Veber’s comedies that never translates exactly right in his American adaptations, but this experience is too good-natured and unassuming for one to be too picky about the fact that it doesn’t exactly shine.
SKIP IT
Rhythm on the River
Victor Schertzinger, 1940
Wilder is credited with co-writing the story of this silly fluff. Its premise is twisty enough to bear the mark of his ironic humour. A wealthy impresario played by Basil Rathbone (who always wears silk robes at home over his shirt and tie) has run out of inspiration but needs to keep the lights on, so he pays a composer (Bing Crosby) to write his hit tunes for him and keep quiet about it. Rathbone also pays a lyricist separately but he passes away, so he hires a gorgeous young singer (Mary Martin, during her few years of attempting a film career) to take over, keeping her and Crosby away from each other until they find themselves at the same country retreat and fall in love. Deciding to strike out on their own without Rathbone’s exploitative patronage, they find it difficult to sell their songs without having an established name behind them, but keep soldiering on thanks to their belief in the magical power of love. What matters here is not the dramatic content, which is dreadful, but the endless parade of musical numbers staged, as always with finesse, by Schertzinger as a sort of visual Hit Parade program. Crosby and Martin both sound great and the glinty cinematography makes you forget that you’re basically watching a commercial for the accompanying singles.
The Emperor Waltz
Billy Wilder, 1948
Corny nonsense that marks a rare misfire for Wilder and screenwriter Charles Brackett. Bing Crosby is ludicrously out of place as a phonograph salesman who arrives in turn of the century Vienna with his dog Buttons, hoping to gain audience with the emperor in order to get an endorsement for his product. The monarch is busy in a private meeting with an impoverished aristocrat and his daughter (Joan Fontaine), whose dog Scheherazade has been selected as the ideal mate for the emperor’s pet, from whom he hopes to spawn a host of pure-bred puppies. For Fontaine and her father, this is a great opportunity for them in their dire circumstances, but their chances are ruined when Crosby’s pup gets into a vicious fight with theirs, traumatizing Scheherazade so much that Fontaine is forced to find out where this low man is staying in order to repair her dog’s mental equilibrium. Naturally, this also means that this beautiful woman will spend plenty of time in the company of this romantic crooner, the very emblem of World War II American music somehow existing in Europe’s Belle Epoque, and they embark on a romance that threatens the dictates of class partnerships in her world. The story is, for the most part, drivel, the canine stars far more enchanting and displaying much better chemistry than their dull human counterparts (Fontaine is particularly wooden). The only moments of charm come from the framing narrative, in which the love story is related to the archduchess (Julia Dean) attending the Emperor’s waltz, who finds the story inspiring despite the fact that it is being related with complete disapproval by her companions. (Did anyone ever do a funnier job of sounding disapproving than the great Lucile Watson?) There’s enough songs to qualify it as a musical film, though don’t bring too big an expectation on that front, either.
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
Billy Wilder, 1970
Robert Stephens and Colin Blakely are terrific as the ever-famous Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, character creations of Arthur Conan Doyle who have been intoxicating readers with their sleuthing for more than a century. In this adventure, Holmes is enveloped into the mystery of a missing man after his wife (Geneviève Page) is nearly killed. The trail leads to such strange places as a Scottish castle and the appearance of the Loch Ness monster. It should be boatloads of fun, but the pace is sluggish and the film takes forever to get going, employing an overdone widescreen style that is better suited to a bloated Hollywood musical than a zippy murder mystery. Wilder originally intended the film to be an epic adventure with multiple plots, and the eventual debacle that occurred in the editing room is likely the reason why the result is such a mess.
