Some Like It Wilder Read online

  Because he was an aficionado of jazz, Wilder was particularly interested in interviewing American bandleader Paul Whiteman, the King of Jazz, in the summer of 1926, when he came to Vienna for a concert. Whiteman’s lead vocalist was Bing Crosby, who would star in Wilder’s musical The Emperor Waltz two decades later. Whiteman was pleased with Wilder’s write-up of his Vienna concert, so he asked him to come to Berlin and cover his concert there. Wilder cagily notified his parents that he was going to stay in Berlin for a few days after the concert, when he had actually decided to stay there for good.

  When Wilder arrived in Berlin at age twenty-one, it was a heady center of the arts that drew ambitious young people from all over Europe. He soon earned a reputation as a freelance crime reporter for Berlin tabloids like Tempo. Wilder was already cynical by nature; hence the exposés of greed, lust, and political corruption that he reported for the scandal sheets in Vienna and Berlin served to deepen his cynical attitude toward human nature—an attitude that was later to surface in his films.

  Wilder’s earnings as a freelance journalist were meager, since he got paid only for the pieces that were accepted. Indeed, he was sometimes reduced to sleeping in the waiting room of a railway station. To make a fast buck in the autumn of 1926, he conceived the idea of writing a series of articles on gigolos, so he posed as a dancing partner for elderly ladies at the Hotel Eden. It was the hotel’s custom to hold a thé dansant every afternoon, when young men steered lonely matrons around the dance floor. According to protocol, a lady would ask the waiter for an Eintanzer (dancer): “Waiter, I’d like to order one extra-dry dancing partner.” The dancer then went through the ritual of asking her to dance with him. “One had to say enchanting things while dancing divinely with those dreadful creatures,” Wilder commented. His outré series of articles, “Waiter, Bring Me a Dancer: The Life of a Gigolo,” was published in January 1927 in four installments. The series caused quite a furor. Wilder coyly implied that some of the boys provided services for the ladies beyond ballroom dancing, but he always contended that he was not one of them. “I was a newspaper man, gathering evidence for a story”; he maintained that he was not inclined to bed down with any of these “corpulent old ladies,” even for a considerable hunk of cash.8

  Wilder liked to hang out at the Romanisches Café, a Bohemian tavern frequented by people in the film industry as well as newspapermen. He began moving around the edges of the German film industry by making contacts at the café. It was there that he encountered Joe Pasternak and Paul Kohner, managers of the Berlin office of Universal Pictures in Hollywood. He also met a rising young actress named Marlene Dietrich, who would star in two of his films years later.

  The Film Apprentice in Berlin

  Berlin in the 1920s was the film capital of Europe; indeed, this period became known as the golden age of German cinema, when directors like Ernst Lubitsch (Madame Du Barry), F. W. Murnau (Nosferatu), and Fritz Lang (Metropolis) produced major silent films in Germany that were seen around the world. So Wilder, while still working as a newspaperman, began writing film scenarios on the side, with a view to pursuing a career in the movies. He could not sell any script under his own name, since he had no standing in the film industry. So he became a ghostwriter: he would collaborate on a script with an established screenwriter but would not receive an official screen credit for his efforts as coauthor of the script.

  In all, Wilder worked on close to fifty scripts for silent pictures from 1927 to 1929, receiving twenty-five to fifty dollars per script. The number of screenplays is somewhat misleading, since scripts for silent movies were usually about thirty pages long—there was no dialogue, only action.

  In 1928 Max Wilder came to Berlin to visit his son, only to be stricken with severe stomach pains while there. Max expired of an abdominal rupture on November 10, 1928. Wilder buried his father at the Jewish cemetery on Schönhauser Allee in Berlin, since he could not afford to ship the corpse back to Vienna. He was eking out an existence in Berlin. Sometimes he was compelled to borrow money from a man named Nietz, leaving his typewriter as collateral. Wilder would use this incident in The Lost Weekend (1945), when a failed writer decides to hock his typewriter.

  Wilder was making enough money from ghostwriting to rent a modest accommodation in a slightly disreputable rooming house. It was there that he sold his first solo script. “I was living in a rooming house where there was also living Lulu, the daughter of the housekeeper. Lulu was engaged, but she was also playing around a little on the side. One night, when she was at it again,” Heinz, her muscle-bound fiancé, “stormed up the stairs and pounded on the door.” Suddenly Wilder saw a frightened man on the ledge outside his window, carrying his clothes in a bundle under his arm. He hauled the man into his room. Wilder recognized him as Herr Galitzenstein, the president of Maxim Films. Wilder seized a script that had been turned down all over town and informed the producer that the price of his hiding out in Wilder’s room was that he purchase the screenplay. “Send it along to my office,” the producer said. Wilder replied, “Tomorrow you’ll forget you ever met me,” and demanded payment on the spot. Galitzenstein gave Wilder five hundred marks and beat a hasty retreat down the back stairs.9

  Der Teufelsreporter (1929)

  Carl Laemmle, studio chief at Universal Pictures in Hollywood, sent word to Pasternak and Kohner that he wanted them to produce a low-budget silent picture starring Eddie Polo, a has-been Hollywood Western hero who was trying to revive his sagging career in Germany. Pasternak and Kohner immediately commissioned Wilder to concoct a script for Polo.

  Writing the script, Wilder was able to draw on his own experiences as a journalist. Polo had been an action star at Universal in his heyday, so Wilder had him playing an intrepid reporter who captures a mob of kidnappers singlehandedly. Wilder endeavored to enliven the proceedings with a climactic car chase in which Polo gallantly pursues the kidnappers. He even has Polo gamely holding the gang at gunpoint while phoning in his story to his editor—before calling the police! Alas, it was too late to salvage Polo’s stalled career, given his advanced age; he was no longer credible as an action hero. Der Teufelsreporter (The daredevil reporter) opened on June 19, 1929, in Hamburg and was quickly forgotten. Wilder nursed a grudge against Polo, who had seduced Wilder’s current girlfriend, so he wanted to forget Polo and the picture—except for the fact that the film represented his first official screen credit as a scriptwriter, and a solo credit at that.

  Wilder developed the habit of writing on the title page of each script “Cum Deo,” Latin for “With God.” He did so because he was convinced that whatever talent he possessed came from above. He picked up the practice, he said, from another writer whom he worked with in Germany. Then, perhaps a little embarrassed by expressing some religious sentiment, he added, “It can’t hurt; it’s the cheapest way I know of to bribe that being up there in the clouds.”

  Wilder’s contacts at the Romanisches Café were beginning to pay off, not only in terms of his relationship with Pasternak and Kohner but also in the case of Robert Siodmak, an aspiring filmmaker. Robert’s brother Curt suggested that Robert assemble an independent film unit to make a low-budget semidocumentary, shot entirely on location in and around Berlin. The story was about a group of young Berliners sharing a Sunday afternoon outing on their day off at Lake Wannsee on the outskirts of Berlin. Wilder’s scenario was based on Curt’s concept. Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday) was the projected title.

  Menschen am Sonntag (1929)

  The picture was to be shot on a shoestring; Siodmak drew up a budget of five thousand marks (roughly five hundred American dollars at the time). He then set about cobbling together the financing. He borrowed a goodly sum from a relative. In addition, Edgar Ulmer, a friend of Siodmak’s and the assistant director on the film, cofinanced the picture with money that he had earned as a production assistant on Lang’s Metropolis and other movies.

  The balance of the crew included cinematographer Eugene Schüfftan and assistant cine
matographer Fred Zinnemann. Schüfftan, who had served as one of the cinematographers on Metropolis, was the only pro in the film unit. “Four nonprofessionals were selected to play themselves,” remembered Zinnemann, “because we couldn’t afford professional actors.” They could shoot only on Sundays because all of the actors had regular jobs during the week.10 The cast included Edwin Splettstösser, a taxi driver; Wolfgang von Walterschausen, a wine salesman; Christl Ehlers, a movie extra; and Brigette Borchert, a salesgirl in a record shop. Each weekend Wilder would meet with Siodmak and Ulmer at the Romanisches Café to flesh out the scenes in Wilder’s scenario to be shot that Sunday. Wilder would scribble the additional material “on pieces of scratch paper,” the backs of envelopes, and even the café menus.11

  No one on the team owned a car, so they had to travel by bus to the location sites. During the week, Wilder and Siodmak would take the footage shot on the previous Sunday to the laboratory to be developed. One day they got into a heated argument about a brainstorm that Siodmak had, which departed significantly from the script. To Wilder, the script was always “scripture.” They both stormed angrily off the bus, “leaving the film negative behind them—a whole day’s work, which was never seen again and had to be reshot.”12

  During production Wilder wrote an article for Tempo in which he explained that the film aimed to render a portrait of daily life in Berlin, focusing on a cross-section of typical Berliners. He and his fellow filmmakers wanted to bypass the conventional methods of traditional German cinema. So the movie avoided the “clearly contrived situations” characteristic of the schmaltzy pictures being turned out by the big studios.13 Since the actors could shoot only one day a week, the filmmakers worked at a fevered tempo each Sunday, to get as much accomplished as possible before having to shut down until the next weekend. When filming finally wrapped, the four principals in the cast retired permanently from the screen. But work on the film continued.

  Siodmak and Schüfftan edited the footage into a one-hour film and finished postproduction on December 11, 1929. Wilder and his partners beat the bushes for a distributor, until finally Hanns Brodnitz, who was in charge of distribution at Ufa, the enormous studio at Babelsberg outside Berlin, bought the exhibition rights. (Ufa was the acronym for Universum Film-Aktiengesellschaft, the Universal Film-Production Company). Menschen am Sonntag was given a limited release on the art house circuit in Germany in December 1929. It opened in Berlin on February 4, 1930.

  Critics noted enthusiastically that the ordinariness of the characters was captured with unvarnished realism. Edwin and Christl loll languidly about on the beach together, while Wolf and Brigette go off into the woods, where he seduces her. The camera coyly pans up to the treetops and descends to the lovers. Brigette then removes a pinecone from under her back; it has been poking her and making her uncomfortable all the time that Wolf was on top of her. She feared that if she mentioned it during their lovemaking, it would ruin the moment. Both Brigette and Wolf laugh nervously as they stare at the cone. At the film’s end the four individuals go their separate ways, realizing that they never got to know each other at all. They part nonchalantly, with no plans to see one another on the following Sunday. A printed epilogue declares, “The actors went back into the nameless crowd from which they came.”

  Menschen am Sonntag is a movie of honesty and simplicity. Wilder’s script brings “zest, humor, and enthusiasm to what could have been dull material,” noted Sight and Sound when the film was released on DVD.14 “The film did make quite a splash at the time it was released,” Wilder remembered. “People talked about it. It was a semidocumentary type film, which was very novel for its time. We had a fresh approach to our material because we made the film on our own, and we were therefore not caught up in the quagmire of banality of some of the big studio films. We were chiefly concerned with learning our craft and trying from the beginning of our careers to avoid the clichés of the average commercial pictures.”

  Wilder and his colleagues were fortunate that their picture was a big success, despite that it was released when silent movies were going out of favor. “Klangfilm, that is, sound movies, were introduced in America with Alan Crosland’s The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson,” on October 6, 1927, Zinnemann said. The film had a musical score and four musical numbers, but only one dialogue sequence. “It was followed in July 1928 by Brian Foy’s The Lights of New York, a gangster movie that was the first all-talking picture,” he continued. “The coming of the sound era took Berlin by storm,” and there was a frantic rush to convert studios to sound in Berlin.15 Movies have not shut up since. Melody of the Heart, a musical released in Germany in late 1929, formally inaugurated the era of talking pictures in Germany. Wilder welcomed the advent of sound because it allowed for spoken dialogue and thus for more character development. Individual characters could now reveal themselves more effectively through the nuances of speech.

  Wilder, Zinnemann, Siodmak, and Ulmer would all become Hollywood directors, but at the time he scripted Menschen am Sonntag, Wilder pointed out, he was still making the rounds of the studios. He remembered sounding off at the Romanisches Café about how the studios should be more willing to hire young talent. Robert Liebmann, head of the story department at Ufa, went over to Wilder’s table and announced, “If you are as talented at screenwriting as you are at shooting your mouth off, I might give you some work.” With that, Wilder began to obtain writing assignments, mostly at Ufa, which was presided over by Erich Pommer, a canny impresario who had helped to make it the top German film corporation.

  Between 1930 and 1933, the year that Wilder left Germany, he received official screen credits on at least a dozen films. He said he also made uncredited contributions to some other screenplays, for example, Ein Burschenlied aus Heidelberg (The student song from Heidelberg, 1930). One of the most noteworthy films for which Wilder was granted a screen credit was Emil und die Detektive (Emil and the Detectives, 1931), a fresh, vigorous movie about a lad who secures the help of a gang of street urchins to help him catch a thief. The film was derived from the 1928 novel of the same title by Erich Kästner, which had become an instant children’s classic.

  Film historian Kevin Brownlow thinks very highly of Emil und die Detektive. It “is brilliantly written and directed; it keeps up a tremendous pace. . . . Gerhardt Lamprecht, the director, has a marvelous light touch; the children are appealing and very well directed.” The documentary-style use of locations, Brownlow continues, makes the film of special interest. “The freshness and vitality of the street scenes must have been astonishing to audiences accustomed to all of the studio-bound talkies.” He concludes, “This is one of my top favorite German films.”16 The movie was a big hit in Germany when it premiered on December 2, 1931, and it went on to be booked on the art house circuit in the United States.

  The last German movie Wilder collaborated on was Was Frauen träumen (What Women Dream, 1933), which stars Peter Lorre, one of Wilder’s pals from the Romanisches Café, as a police detective on the trail of a female jewel thief.

  When Hitler officially became chancellor in January 1933, Wilder realized his days in Berlin were numbered. The Nazis were tightening their grip on every aspect of German society, including the film industry. Wilder was very much aware that, as a Jew, he had no future in Germany.

  Exile in Paris

  Wilder opted to emigrate to France, since he was fairly fluent in French, which he had studied at school. Twenty-four hours after the Reichstag fire, Wilder took the midnight train to Paris. All the money he could scrape together was hidden in his hatband. He was wise to leave Germany when he did; a few days after his departure, the front office at Ufa carried out an official “purge” of the Jewish employees at the studio.

  The twenty-six-year-old Wilder arrived in Paris on the morning of March 1, 1933. He holed up at the Ansonia, a shabby boardinghouse near the Arc de Triomphe, where several Jewish expatriates whom he had known at Ufa had taken lodgings: Lorre; composers Frederick Hollander and Franz Waxma
n; and screenwriters Max Kolpe, Hans Lustig, Walter Reisch, and Robert Liebmann. Wilder would work again with Hollander, Reisch, and Waxman in Hollywood. Right now he got together with Kolpe and Lustig and hashed out a screenplay for a low-budget caper film about a gang of delinquents who specialize in stealing cars. Waxman committed himself to scoring the picture once they got the project off and running. The screenplay was titled Mauvaise graine (Bad Seed), using a term for a youngster who is incorrigible and usually becomes a delinquent—thus the auto thieves in the script.

  Mauvaise graine (1933)

  Wilder and his team had difficulty obtaining financial backing for the movie, since none had established themselves in the French film industry. One producer offered to fund the picture, provided that his girlfriend could play the female lead. Wilder sarcastically noted that the young lady could not act her way out of one of her cashmere sweaters and turned her down, thereby alienating the producer.

  To save money, Wilder’s partners persuaded him to direct the movie. He in turn recruited a Hungarian immigrant, filmmaker Alexander Esway, to codirect the picture with him. Wilder had no experience in directing, but Esway had already codirected two French movies, including Le jugement de minuit (The judgment of the moment, 1932). It was Esway who in turn secured producer Edouard Corniglion-Molinier to finance the picture for one hundred thousand American dollars—a small budget by today’s standards, but a king’s ransom for an independent film in 1933.