Some Like It Wilder Read online

  At least the industry censor passed the final version of the movie without any further cuts. Sherlock Holmes was the first Wilder film to receive a classification from the new CARA. It was classified as PG, “parental guidance suggested.” That the movie flirted with the subject of homosexuality was not a problem for the present censor, Eugene Dougherty, who replaced Geoffrey Shurlock in 1968, when the new rating system began. Homosexuality was no longer a taboo subject for a Hollywood movie.

  During the opening credit sequence, Dr. Watson reads a letter addressed to his heirs in voice-over on the sound track. The voice-over was incorporated into the credit sequence from the eliminated prologue. Watson explains that he intends to recount some of Holmes’s cases that involve “matters of a delicate and sometimes scandalous nature.” One delicate issue that is raised in the film is the question of Holmes’s attitude toward the opposite sex. Holmes discusses this subject with Watson early in the movie. Essentially, Holmes explains, “I don’t dislike women; I merely mistrust them” because they are unreliable. “The most affectionate female I ever knew was a murderess.” She led him down the garden path “until she could steal some cyanide from my laboratory to sprinkle on her husband’s steak-and-kidney pie.” Holmes fears that an emotional entanglement with a female could warp his judgment and cloud his powers of deduction. Holmes’s remarks about women introduce the central episode in the film, “The Case of the Missing Husband.” “The time has come to reveal the most intimate aspect of Holmes’s life,” Watson says in his voice-over narration. “His one and only involvement with a woman.”

  Gabrielle Valladon comes to Holmes’s Baker Street flat, seeking the private detective’s assistance. She has come to London from Belgium, searching for her husband, Emile, an engineer and inventor who is missing. An item in a newspaper gives a clue to Emile’s possible presence in Scotland, so Holmes, Watson, and Gabrielle take the Highland Express to Inverness. As Holmes declares, “The game’s afoot!” They manage to trace Emile Valladon to a village cemetery, where his corpse has been interred. Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock’s brother, who is associated with British intelligence, knows of Sherlock’s presence in Scotland and invites him to a secret meeting at a Scottish castle. Mycroft informs his brother that the government has been conducting secret experiments with a type of primitive submarine. Emile Valladon was involved in the experiments and died accidentally when one of the trial runs of the submarine went awry. Mycroft then reveals that the woman his brother knows as Gabrielle Valladon is an impostor; she is actually Ilse von Hoffmanstahl, a notorious German spy. Ilse ingratiated herself with Holmes to dupe him into helping her track down Emile Valladon and uncover the secret plans for the submarine. “In helping Ilse,” Mycroft concludes, “you have been in the service of the Kaiser.”

  It is a severe blow to Holmes’s pride to acknowledge that he has allowed himself to be outwitted by the feminine wiles of a charming foreign spy. Ilse endeavors to soften the blow by saying that she volunteered for this assignment because she “couldn’t resist the challenge of coming up against the best.” Steinbrunner and Michaels note that, although Ilse has admitted to Holmes that she is a foreign spy, “there is an unspoken tenderness in their parting.”44 Holmes and Ilse have developed in the course of their journey together a reticent but nonetheless genuine affection for each other. Dick calls their farewell “two intelligent people saying goodbye to one another.”45

  As Ilse proceeds up the path in a carriage on her way to be exchanged by the Germans for a British prisoner, she signals to Holmes in Morse code by opening and closing her umbrella. Holmes reads her departing message: “Auf Wiedersehen” (Until we meet again). But they will not. In the movie’s epilogue, Holmes learns of Ilse’s execution as a foreign agent while she is on a secret mission in Japan, spying on the Yokohama Harbor naval installations. He retreats to his bedroom with the container of cocaine that is hidden in a file case to assuage his grief over the death of Ilse, with whom he shared a platonic relationship. As Holmes observes at the end of The Sign of the Four, “For me there still remains the cocaine bottle.”46 The scene is accompanied by Rozsa’s bittersweet theme.

  Jonathan Rigby writes that Holmes’s emotions have been stirred by Gabrielle, a woman whose pluck and acumen he admires, so he is shattered when he learns of her execution. Stephens’s “mournful Holmes is a triumph. It’s by no means the standard issue Sherlock of the popular imagination, but remains much the most human and affecting interpretation on film.”47

  The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, at a running time of 125 minutes, had its American premiere at Radio City Music Hall in New York City on October 19, 1970. It opened to a batch of mixed reviews. Vincent Canby in the New York Times found the movie amusing. Focusing on the film’s treatment of the ambiguous nature of Holmes and Watson’s friendship, Canby stated that the material was “rather daring” for a Sherlock Holmes picture. Nevertheless, “there is simply no reason to cavil with Billy Wilder’s mostly comic, charming movie,” which is fundamentally “a fond and entertaining film.”48 Pauline Kael, as usual, filed a negative report in the New Yorker. She thought the movie ranged from mildly diverting to downright dull: “Wilder has made a detective picture that fails to whet our curiosity,” she opined. “So one must content oneself with the occasional wit,” along with Trauner’s magnificent Victorian production design and Challis’s handsome color cinematography.49

  The movie had been booked at the music hall in late October as its Thanksgiving attraction, but it was withdrawn before Thanksgiving in the wake of the lukewarm public reception. The film likewise proved to be a box office disappointment when it went into general release across the country. Its total domestic gross was a paltry $1.5 million.

  “When the picture was released,” Walter explained, “people were disappointed because they expected a thriller like The Hound of the Baskervilles with Basil Rathbone. But this was a more tongue-in-cheek picture, and a more personal story.”50 Moreover, writes Allen Eyles, “the downbeat epilogue was not calculated to please the masses.”51 Though the movie failed in the United States, Wilder emphasized, “in England it was popular.”52 Tom Milne’s notice in the Observer in London was typical of the British response to the picture. Milne, who placed the movie on his “ten best list” for 1970, proclaimed that, Wilder’s “acid wit” notwithstanding, the film was really “an affectionate homage” to Holmes.53

  Although the film was not a notable success when it was released, it has steadily built a strong reputation among film scholars as one of the best Sherlock Holmes films. As Michael Pointer observes, it is “the only Holmes film to be made by a major director.” In the course of the movie, “we are able to savor many of the delights of Wilder’s unique piece, which revealed Holmes as human and fallible in a most moving way.”54

  Nowadays the film is seen as an archetype for the detective movie, with its crackling dialogue, elegant visuals, rousing score, and dark-hearted characters. It is “a masterpiece of the highest order,” in George Morris’s words.55 Eyles writes in his survey of the Holmes movies, “It is the screen’s most intelligent, coherent, and convincing representation of the detective and his world.”56

  When a fully restored version of Sherlock Holmes was scheduled for release on DVD by MGM Home Entertainment in 2003, there was renewed interest in the sequences that had been excised from the movie, for inclusion in the Special Features section of the DVD. Wilder had often said over the years, “If it takes my permission to help restore Sherlock Holmes, I’m delighted; if they can get ahold” of the missing material, “they can show it.”57 The restoration team found the sound track for “The Upside-Down Room” but no film footage to go with it, so they filled in the missing visuals with still photos of the episode. For “The Naked Honeymooners,” the technical team uncovered all of the footage, but no sound track, so they employed subtitles for the dialogue. For both “The Adventure of the Dumbfounded Detective” and the prologue at Barclays Bank, the restoration crew utilized script ex
cerpts, with visuals supplied by still photos. Wilder heard before his death in 2002 of the plans to recover the lost footage, but he did not live to see it in the DVD. When the DVD finally arrived in 2003, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes met with fresh acclaim. It has at last come to occupy a prominent place in the canon of Wilder’s work.

  17

  The Perfect Blendship

  The Front Page And Avanti!

  I was curious to see how a bunch of empty-headed nitwits would conduct themselves.

  —William Powell in the title role

  of the film My Man Godfrey

  Friendship, friendship!

  What a perfect blendship!

  When other friendships have been forgot

  Ours will still be hot.

  —Cole Porter, “Friendship”

  In 1928 Billy Wilder was a reporter on a tabloid in Berlin that specialized in crime stories and sensational feature pieces, such as his first-person account of life as a gigolo. That same year, on August 14, playwrights Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur premiered their cynical farce about the newspaper racket, The Front Page, on Broadway.

  The play later reminded Wilder of his years as a young reporter; he would get around to filming it some four decades later. “I loved the 1920s,” he recalled. “A reporter back then was a mixture of a private eye and a dramatist. If you were any good, you could improve on the story” by adding some spicy details. “Then there was the round-the-clock dedication—no family life for the lone wolf—and the camaraderie of the newsroom.”1

  Like Wilder, Hecht always remembered fondly his years as a young reporter, in his case for the Chicago Daily News. He was only sixteen when he got his first job as a cub reporter, he recalled in a brief essay about The Front Page in his private papers. “I quit after sixteen years of chasing fires, killers, swindles, and scandals.”2 Hecht based many characters in The Front Page on real Chicago journalists. His street-smart reporter Hildy Johnson, for example, was modeled on Hilding Johnson, a reporter for the Chicago Herald-Examiner who was not above picking locks and clambering through transoms in pursuit of a news story. As Sherman Duffy, one of Hecht’s fellow reporters, put it, “Socially, a journalist fits somewhere between a whore and a bartender.”3 Walter Burns, the domineering managing editor in Hecht and MacArthur’s play, was inspired by Walter Howey, the managing editor of the Herald-Examiner. Hecht described Howey this way: “He smiled like a wide-eyed sightseer from the sticks. But he could plot like Cesare Borgia and strike like Gengis Khan.”4

  Howard Hughes produced the first film version of the play in 1931. It was directed by Lewis Milestone (All Quiet on the Western Front). Pat O’Brien played Hildy, and Adolphe Menjou was Walter Burns. Wilder felt that Milestone’s version was “handicapped by the crude conditions of making early sound pictures.” In addition, it could not totally disguise its stage-bound origins.5

  The second movie adaptation of The Front Page was titled His Girl Friday (1940). It was directed by Howard Hawks, with a screenplay by Charles Lederer, who had collaborated on the script of the 1931 movie. Hawks said that one day, after Cary Grant was set to play Walter Burns, “I had a secretary read through one of the scenes of The Front Page with me. I realized that Hildy Johnson’s lines were better when they were read by a woman. I called Hecht and he agreed, so the part of the reporter was rewritten for Rosalind Russell.”6 Wilder, who had coscripted Ball of Fire for Hawks, much admired him. But he did not agree with Hawks’s changing Hildy’s gender. In his opinion, it placed too much emphasis on Walter’s winning back his ex-wife, rather than his ace reporter. Hawks had also moved his film up to 1940. Hence his film was not The Front Page of Hecht and MacArthur, according to Wilder.7

  When Jennings Lang, a vice president at Universal, by sheer coincidence inquired whether Wilder would like to direct a remake of The Front Page, Wilder accepted enthusiastically. (For the record, this was the same Jennings Lang whose affair with Joan Bennett some years earlier was one of the inspirations for The Apartment.) Wilder was drawn to the project in part because male friendship plays an important role in The Front Page, just as it does in The Fortune Cookie and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Furthermore, Wilder’s own experience as a journalist would be reflected in the movie. “I hope to show that I have a feeling for newspaper guys,” he told Lang. “I understand their problems and their hang-ups.”8

  The Front Page (1974)

  In September 1973, Wilder and Diamond set up shop at Universal, reworking one of the classic American comedies into a screenplay. Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau were cast as Hildy Johnson and Walter Burns before Wilder started on the script. Hence Wilder and his partner could write the screenplay with these two actors in mind. Wilder pointed out that Matthau was closer to the original conception of the gruff, surly Walter Burns in the play than the dapper Adolphe Menjou in Milestone’s version or the suave Cary Grant in Hawks’s film.

  Wilder moved the setting of his film back to its original time frame. Wilder’s version of the play takes place in Chicago in 1929—in the same town, the same year, and the same zany world as Some Like It Hot. As a matter of fact, there is an implicit reference to Some Like It Hot in The Front Page: one of the reporters boasts that he scooped his fellow journalists in covering the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. There is also an allusion to The Spirit of St. Louis: Hildy recalls the hack reporters sitting around the press room, waiting for Lindbergh to land in Paris. What’s more, Wilder lifted a line spoken by Chuck Tatum in Ace in the Hole for Hildy to repeat in the present film. Tatum says that a reporter is proud of his front page story today, and the next day somebody wraps the front page around a dead fish. Even Ben Hecht is mentioned as having made Walter Burns furious by forsaking the newspaper game to go to Hollywood to write scripts. Hecht had to be smuggled out of Chicago to escape the wrath of Walter Burns. In addition, Hildy does an impersonation of James Cagney as a tough guy—which is a bit premature, since this film is set in 1929, and Cagney went to Hollywood in 1930.

  Wilder and Diamond rewrote about 60 percent of the play’s dialogue, much to the dismay of Helen Hayes, the widow of Charles MacArthur and one of the great actresses of the theater. Nevertheless, Wilder said that he regarded the screenplay as a faithful opening out of the play for the screen, and he said so to Hayes. He conceded, however, “We did much more opening out of the story than we did on Stalag 17, for instance. . . . Certain plays call for being opened out more than others. Indeed, the playwright himself might have opened up the play more had he not been straitjacketed by the format of the stage.”

  Whereas the play was set entirely in the press room, “the film ranges more naturally over Chicago,” including a new scene in the Balaban and Katz State Theatre (actually the State-Lake), where Peggy Grant, Hildy’s fiancée, plays the organ during intermission.9 Barney Balaban, who was president of Paramount during Wilder’s tenure there, co-owned a chain of Chicago movie theaters before going to Hollywood. (The feature announced on the State’s marquee is The Phantom of the Opera, a 1925 silent picture with Lon Chaney—a curious choice, since The Front Page is set well after the advent of sound pictures.)

  Walter, carrying out one of his crafty ruses to sabotage the marriage of Hildy and Peggy, visits Peggy backstage and presents himself as Hildy’s probation officer. He solemnly informs Peggy that Hildy is a convicted flasher. But Hildy gets wind of what Walter is up to and exposes his nefarious plot to Peggy over the phone. The description of Walter in the screenplay is one of those satirical asides that make a Wilder screenplay almost as entertaining to read as to see performed. As the scene with Peggy shows, Walter “operates in the great tradition of Machiavelli, Rasputin, and Count Dracula: No ethics, no scruples, and no private life—a fanatic, oblivious of ulcers and lack of sleep, in his constant pursuit of tomorrow’s headlines.”10

  Wilder added two characters to the scenario who do not appear in the play. One of them, Dr. Eggelhofer (Martin Gabel), is a balmy Freudian psychiatrist from Vienna. Eggelhofer, wh
o is only referred to in the play, is to provide a second opinion about the sanity of Earl Williams (Austin Pendleton), a befuddled anarchist who claims that he shot a policeman quite by accident. When Eggelhofer interprets a gun as a phallic symbol, Earl complains to the sheriff, “If he’s going to talk dirty . . .” Eggelhofer asks Earl to reenact how he shot the cop, and the sheriff obligingly lends Earl his revolver for the demonstration. Earl uses the gun to escape and, in the ensuing scuffle, accidentally shoots Eggelhofer in the groin. Eggelhofer is carted off to the hospital, hollering, “Fruitcake!”—his assessment of Earl’s sanity.

  The other character that Wilder introduced into the picture is Rudy Keppler (Jon Korkes), a callow cub reporter who becomes the object of the affections of journalist Roy Bensinger (David Wayne). With the Bensinger character, Wilder picks up on the topic of homosexuality he had broached in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Roy is high-strung and effeminate in the play, but Wilder presents him clearly as a mincing homosexual. Gerd Gemünden calls Bensinger “Wilder’s most stereotypical portrait” of a homosexual.11 Some of the reporters derisively term Rudy “a snot-nosed kid” because he gets so excited about Earl’s escape that he wets his pants. Roy defends Rudy, insisting that the other reporters are “beastly” to him. Rudy seems to be regressing to childhood, with Roy as his father figure. Hildy warns Rudy, “Never get caught in the can with Bensinger!” Later on Roy caresses Rudy’s shoulder like a lover. We subsequently see Roy and Rudy exiting the men’s room together; Rudy has disregarded Hildy’s advice. In fact, Wilder obviously intended the relationship of Roy and Rudy as a contrast to the male bonding of Hildy and Walter, which does not have sexual intent.