Some Like It Wilder Read online

  The critics by and large found Buddy Buddy to be a rather off-center, laborious farce. The dialogue lacked sparkle, the plotting was sluggish at times, and the story never jelled. Wilder’s use of verbal wit in a morally disturbing environment did not work this time around. Buddy Buddy emerged as a box office failure. It grossed a lackluster $6 million—it did not break even.

  “Buddy Buddy was dead on the vine—Hollywood and Vine,” Wilder confessed in retrospect; “it was a misfire.”66 Fred MacMurray said he wondered how an experienced director like Billy Wilder and the other talents involved in the movie could all go so wrong about the same picture.67 Asked this question, Wilder replied, “Nobody in Hollywood is foolproof; nobody hits a homer every time.” He continued, “When you make a particular movie, you know damned well” after two or three weeks that it is going to “fall flat like a lead pancake. You, the director, are the pilot in the cockpit; you designed the plane and you thought it was going to soar. But that goddamned plane that you’ve constructed is not going to fly; it is going to crash.”68

  When a Broadway play fails during the tryout on the road, it quietly closes out of town and is forgotten, Wilder said. Some of the plays of Hecht and MacArthur, for example, never made it to Broadway. “But when you make a bad picture, it pursues you the rest of your life. It comes back to haunt you.” MGM sold the ancillary rights for Buddy Buddy to TV and home video. “It hurts to strike out on your last picture,” Wilder said. If he could have chosen a movie to end his career with, it would not have been Buddy Buddy. “I didn’t know that was going to be my swan song; if I’d known, I would have bet on a different swan.”69

  Epilogue

  A Touch of Class

  The American public was tired of the cinematic chocolate éclairs that had been stuffed down their throats. They had a great desire for knowledge of life as it is lived. I tried to give it to them in my own way.

  —Erich von Stroheim

  Hollywood is a factory town for mass production, out of which something good comes now and then.

  —Billy Wilder

  The export of European film artists to Hollywood in the 1930s, write Gerald Mast and Bruce Kawin, bled the European film industry “as steadily as a Dracula’s kiss.” But this exodus “would inject its powerful juices into the American film” for decades to come.1 Billy Wilder certainly did his part to enrich American cinema. He learned during his long career in Hollywood that a director had to work hard not just to achieve artistic independence but also to keep it. Wilder went his own way in Hollywood and made films that suited his own talent, taste, and temperament. He challenged the fundamentally conformist cinema of Hollywood, bringing to his films a sophisticated middle European wit and mature view of human nature.

  Still, Wilder often had difficulty in securing studio backing for a project he had developed on his own. He had to negotiate with movie executives who were wary of providing capital for a property that departed in varying degrees from the safe, commercial subject matter they tended to favor. Yet it was precisely the risky, offbeat project that often captured a large audience; movies like The Apartment bear out this contention. Such a film is not a gigantic spectacle concerned with sinking ocean liners or torching office towers. In the age of cookie-cutter fare at the multiplex, this type of film relies more on the director’s creativity than on fancy technology.

  “You have to be flexible,” Wilder said. “When wide-screen came in, I considered making the love story of two dachshunds. You see, I try to make pictures that are not for cinema gourmets. I don’t do cinema; I make movies—for amusement. I’m making a picture for a middle-class audience, for the people that you see on the subway; and I can only hope they’ll like it.”2 It has often been said that some films age; some films date. A substantial number of the films made by Wilder belong to the first category; they demonstrate his respect for the creative freedom that he worked so hard to win.

  Wilder was philosophical about the ups and downs of filmmaking. “If I were to sum up my career, I would say that I am a competent journeyman who has gotten lucky once in a while.” He explained,

  Sometimes a film comes off and sometimes it doesn’t and you can’t always predict the outcome, which I think is clear from some of the films I’ve made. Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t say that for this failure I have this excuse and for that failure I have that excuse, but for this big hit I take all the credit! I have had good luck, too, and sometimes I have muffed it when it came my way. But look at the total canon of a supreme dramatist like George Bernard Shaw. He wrote dozens of plays of which you remember six or seven, which are still being played in the repertory. The rest are never performed.

  Wilder was instrumental in bringing a mature treatment of sex to Hollywood films, particularly in his comedies. Writing of the films Wilder coauthored with I. A. L. Diamond, Joanne Yeck notes, “Witty dialogue and sophisticated situations marked their stories. They openly challenged the long-standing assumption that all Hollywood products should be family oriented, and provided moviegoers with tasteful, adult entertainment.”3

  Wilder was not aware that Buddy Buddy would be his last picture. He said at the time, “I have absolutely no intention of retiring.” Using yet another baseball metaphor, he added, “This here ball game is going into extra innings.”4 But film directing had become “a young man’s sport,” and Wilder was a septuagenarian. Furthermore, in the wake of the debacle of Buddy Buddy, with the studio gossip spreading that Wilder was over the hill, no studio would grant him the right of final cut. His demand for final cut—a prerogative that he had enjoyed throughout his career—forced him into retirement.

  “I was retired, and I didn’t know it,” he said later. Then, one day, while he and Diamond were discussing a possible feature idea, Diamond suddenly said, “I’d better tell you, I guess.” He revealed that he was suffering from incurable cancer. “He only told me six weeks before he died,” Wilder remembered.5 On April 21, 1988, Iz Diamond passed away. Friends said that Wilder was “flattened” by Diamond’s death. Now even Wilder acknowledged that his career was over; he had no writing partner. He missed having a collaborator who could serve as a sounding board, someone whose taste and ideas he respected. “If God would send me another Brackett or Diamond . . .” he mused; but that was not in the cards.6

  When a film director hits seventy, he is expected to bequeath his screenplays to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and to appear at awards shows. Wilder kept his scripts, but he did accept awards. In addition to the many Academy Awards he received as a director, writer, and producer, he received recognition from various other quarters. “The awards keep arriving,” Wilder commented. “I get offered all these prizes, . . . but no offers to make a picture.”7 His awards include a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Film Society of Lincoln Center in 1982; the prestigious Career Achievement Award presented by the Directors Guild of America in 1985; a Life Achievement Award from AFI in 1986; the coveted Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, which he received on April 11 at the 1988 Academy Awards ceremony in recognition for his contribution to the cinema; and an award for distinguished achievement presented to him by President George H. W. Bush at a televised gala at the Kennedy Center in 1990. In addition, Wilder received the Preston Sturges Award, presented jointly by the Writers Guild and the Directors Guild of America in 1991, and the National Medal of the Arts, presented by President Bill Clinton at the White House in 1993.

  Moreover, the Library of Congress claimed the films of this native Austrian as part of the American film heritage when it bestowed a singular honor on Billy Wilder in 1995. The Apartment, Double Indemnity, Some Like It Hot, and Sunset Boulevard were selected as four of the American motion pictures to be preserved in the permanent collection of the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress as culturally, historically, and aesthetically important.

  In 1997 Wilder accepted the Golden Laurel Award from the Producers Guild of America. He said at the testimonial dinner that he had run
out of acceptance speeches, so he decided to tell an anecdote inspired by his having turned ninety: An elderly man went to see a doctor and complained, “I can’t pee.” The doctor asked him, “How old are you?” He said, “I’m ninety.” The doctor’s diagnosis: “You’ve peed enough.” It was Wilder’s way of acknowledging, writes Richard Corliss, “that his big carnival ride was over.”8

  Wilder received yet another singular honor when a building at Paramount Studios, where he had made several films, was dedicated to him on the studio’s seventy-fifth anniversary in 1989. It stands as an enduring monument to his incalculable contribution to American cinema.

  But not all such recognition has come from the United States; Wilder received laurels from other sectors of the film world. In 1995 he was given a Lifetime Fellowship by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. During their deliberations on Wilder’s candidacy, one of the members said, “I would vote for Billy Wilder, but he’s dead.” When the remark got back to Wilder, he replied, “Mistake! Thank God I am not dead. You see, I am the lion tamer who did not get eaten by the lions.”9

  A special Golden Bear was bestowed on Wilder at the 1993 Berlin International Film Festival. He dryly told a reporter, “I’m getting it because Lubitsch is dead.” On a lighter note, he confessed that he would rather have a Volkswagen. In his acceptance speech, he quoted Norma Desmond, thanking “all those wonderful people out there in the dark.” Moreover, in the spring of 1994, his native country conferred on its illustrious exile the Grand Prize of the Republic of Austria. It was presented to Wilder by the chancellor of Austria, Franz Vranitzky, on Wilder’s first visit to his homeland in three decades.10 In addition, Volker Schlöndorff, then head of production at Ufa, where Wilder began his film career as a screenwriter, arranged to have a city square near the studio on the outskirts of Berlin named Billy Wilder Plaza.

  During the early months of 2002, Wilder’s health began to fail significantly; he was in and out of the hospital. It became evident that this was his last illness. Billy Wilder died peacefully at eleven o’clock in the evening on Wednesday, March 27, 2002, in his apartment; his wife Audrey was by his side. Wilder had always been refreshingly unpretentious, living in a twelfth-story apartment on Wilshire Boulevard. Unlike Norma Desmond, he never felt the need to have a house with a swimming pool as a Hollywood status symbol.

  In his obituary in Time, Richard Corliss observed how the sterner critics labeled Wilder, Hollywood’s cleverest writer-director, as a cynic. “Yet, if cynic he was,” he had a “shameless love for all the scoundrels who schemed to get rich, shin up the corporate ladder, and bamboozle an insurance company. . . . What knaves these mortals be!”11 Wilder always disavowed being a cynic. He did not invent sinners, he pointed out; he just paid attention to how they operated. Diamond claimed that many of Wilder’s films were decidedly not cynical; they were “whipped cream that’s gotten slightly curdled.” Moreover, notes Michiko Kakutani, “in some Wilder movies, the cream isn’t even sour.” Sabrina and Love in the Afternoon, for example, are really “fairy tales, in which a toadlike cynic is transformed by Audrey Hepburn.”12 Wilder always maintained that he was an optimist. “I carry a little hope of being immortal,” he said, because his best films would endure.13

  A scant five months after Wilder’s death, in August 2002, he was chosen as one of the ten greatest film directors of all time in an international poll of 108 filmmakers and 145 film critics conducted by the British Film Institute.14 Wilder was indeed a world-class director. But he invariably identified himself as a writer who happened to direct his own screenplays, and not as a writer-director. He admired Preston Sturges because he was the first writer to become a director; “he always had a respect for words.” Asked what he would like printed on his tombstone, Wilder answered without hesitation, “Here lies a writer.” He added, “It is what I am.”15

  Wilder would have been particularly pleased by a poll conducted by the Writers Guild of America in 2005, in which members chose the twenty-five best screenplays of all time. Three of them were cowritten by Wilder.16 All three—Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot, and The Apartment—were original screenplays. As Raymond Chandler once said, good original screenplays “were almost as rare in Hollywood as virgins.”17

  Perhaps one of the most touching compliments Wilder received came from British director Stephen Frears (The Grifters): “I identify with Billy Wilder, of course. He was a man who went to Hollywood and made a very, very elaborate range of films; yet he kept his own voice.”18 Indeed he did.

  Filmography

  Mauvaise graine (1933)

  Production Company: Compagnie Nouvelle Cinématographique

  Producer: Edouard Corniglion-Molinier

  Directors: Alexander Esway and Billy Wilder

  Script: Max Kolpe, H. G. Lustig, and Billy Wilder, based on an original story by Billy Wilder

  Directors of Photography: Paul Coteret and Maurice Delattre

  Production Designer: Robert Gys

  Music: Walter Gray and Franz Waxman

  Cast: Danielle Darrieux (Jeanette), Pierre Mingand (Henri Pasquier), Raymond Galle (Jean-la-Cravate), Paul Escoffier (Dr. Pasquier), Michel Duran (the boss), Jean Wall (Zebra), Marcel Maupi (man in Panama hat), Paul Velsa (man with peanuts), Georges Malkine (secretary), Georges Cahuzac (Sir), Gaby Héritier (Gaby)

  Released: France, 1933 (premiere), 1934 (general release)

  Running Time: 80 min.

  The Major and the Minor (1942)

  Production Company: Paramount

  Producer: Arthur Hornblow Jr.

  Director: Billy Wilder

  Assistant Director: C. C. Coleman Jr.

  Script: Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, suggested by the play Connie Goes Home by Edward Childs Carpenter and the story “Sunny Goes Home” by Fannie Kilbourne

  Director of Photography: Leo Tover

  Editor: Doane Harrison

  Production Designers: Roland Anderson and Hans Dreier

  Music: Robert Emmett Dolan

  Costumes: Edith Head

  Sound: Don Johnson and Harold Lewis

  Cast: Ginger Rogers (Susan Applegate), Ray Milland (Major Philip Kirby), Rita Johnson (Pamela Hill), Robert Benchley (Mr. Osborne), Diana Lynn (Lucy Hill), Edward Fielding (Colonel Hill), Frankie Thomas (Cadet Osborne), Raymond Roe (Cadet Wigton), Charles Smith (Cadet Korner), Larry Nunn (Cadet Babcock), Billy Dawson (Cadet Miller), Lela E. Rogers (Mrs. Applegate), Aldrich Bowker (Reverend Doyle), Boyd Irwin (Major Griscom), Byron Shores (Captain Durand), Richard Fiske (Will Duffy), Norma Varden (Mrs. Osborne), Gretl Dupont (Miss Shackleford), Roland Kibbee (station agent), Ken Lundy (elevator boy)

  Released: September 1942

  Running Time: 100 min.

  Five Graves to Cairo (1943)

  Production Company: Paramount

  Producer: Charles Brackett

  Director: Billy Wilder

  Assistant Director: C. C. Coleman Jr.

  Script: Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, based on the play Hotel Imperial by Lajos Biró

  Director of Photography: John F. Seitz

  Editor: Doane Harrison

  Production Designers: Hans Dreier and Ernst Fegte

  Set Decorator: Bertram Granger

  Music: Miklos Rozsa

  Costumes: Edith Head

  Sound: Ferol Redd and Philip Wisdom

  Cast: Franchot Tone (Corporal John J. Bramble), Anne Baxter (Mouche), Erich von Stroheim (Field Marshal Erwin Rommel), Akim Tamiroff (Farid), Fortunio Bonanova (General Sebastiano), Peter van Eyck (Lieutenant Schwegler), Konstantin Shayne (Major von Buelow), Fred Nurney (Major Lamprecht), Miles Mander (Colonel Fitzhume), Ian Keith (Captain St. Bride)

  Released: May 1943

  Running Time: 96 min.

  Double Indemnity (1944)

  Production Company: Paramount

  Associate Producer: Joseph Sistrom

  Director: Billy Wilder

  Assistant Director: C. C. Coleman Jr.

  Script: Raymon
d Chandler and Billy Wilder, based on the novella by James M. Cain

  Director of Photography: John F. Seitz

  Editor: Doane Harrison

  Production Designers: Hans Dreier and Hal Pereira

  Set Decorator: Bertram Granger

  Music: Miklos Rozsa

  Sound: Stanley Cooley

  Cast: Fred MacMurray (Walter Neff), Barbara Stanwyck (Phyllis Dietrichson), Edward G. Robinson (Barton Keyes), Porter Hall (Mr. Jackson), Jean Heather (Lola Dietrichson), Tom Powers (Mr. Dietrichson), Byron Barr (Nino Zachetti), Richard Gaines (Edward S. Norton), Fortunio Bonanova (Sam Garlopis), John Philliber (Joe Peters), Bess Flowers (Norton’s secretary), Betty Farrington (Nettie, the maid), Sam McDaniel (Charlie)

  Released: September 1944

  Running Time: 107 min.

  The Lost Weekend (1945)

  Production Company: Paramount

  Producer: Charles Brackett

  Director: Billy Wilder

  Assistant Director: C. C. Coleman Jr.