First and foremost a writer, Billy Wilder, by his own admission, became a director to protect his scripts, having frequently bounced onto a set to express his fury at their misinterpretation in other hands. Sometimes criticized for tempering the harshness of his vision in deference to the box office, he operated with assurance across genre boundaries, compiling an impressive body of work featuring language over character, its wit and astringent bite setting his oeuvre refreshingly apart from mainstream Hollywood fare. With the help of co-writer Raymond Chandler, he produced a masterpiece of film noir, "Double Indemnity" (1944), which he followed with "The Lost Weekend" (1945), a social problem play that despite its unconvincing, upbeat ending delivers a brutally uncompromising look at an alcoholic. Wilder, who created a variation on the comedy of manners and seduction of his mentor Ernst Lubitsch in films such as "Sabrina" (1954) and "Love in the Afternoon" (1957), mixed black comedy with farce for "Some Like It Hot" (1959), his most purely entertaining movie, and alienated Hollywood with arguably the greatest Tinseltown insider's tale, the cruel and haunting "Sunset Boulevard" (1950).
Wilder's initial foray to film was extremely fortuitous. Co-writing the screenplay for "Menschen am Sonntag/People on Sunday" (1929) brought him into collaboration with future Hollywood players Robert and Curt Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer and Fred Zinnemann, all of whom joined him at the huge German studio UFA on the strength of its overwhelming success. At UFA he wrote scores of scripts for silents and talkies, including two notable 1931 films. Gerhard Lamprecht's "Emil und die Detektive" and "Der Mann, der Seinen Morder Sucht", which reteamed him with director Robert Siodmak. Hitler's ascent to power, however, convinced him that Germany was no place for a Jew (his mother, stepfather and grandmother would all perish at Auschwitz). Wasting no time, he sold his possessions and slipped out of Berlin on the night train to Paris, where he shared directing duties with Alexander Esway on "Mauvaise graine/Bad Blood" (1933), a fast-paced movie about young auto thieves. His sale of a story to Columbia Pictures gave him his first American credit ("Adorable" 1933) and financed his trip to California, but his unfamiliarity with English made it tough to eke out a living as a writer, despite a brain burgeoning with script ideas.
Success finally came Wilder's way when Paramount producer Arthur Hornblower matched him with veteran screenwriter Charles Brackett on Ernst Lubitsch's "Bluebeard's Eighth Wife" (1938), inaugurating a storied partnership that would produce 14 screenplays and earn the pair two shared Oscars ("The Lost Weekend" and "Sunset Boulevard"). Running his innumerable ideas past Brackett who sifted the grain from the chaff, Wilder enjoyed an incredibly volatile relationship with his co-author behind closed doors, but the two joined forces to terrorize Paramount's front office and make life miserable for actors and directors who took liberties with their scripts. Their second screenplay for Lubitsch, "Ninotchka" (1939), provided Greta Garbo with the wonderfully comic role of an icy Russian agent who melts for playboy Melvyn Douglas and earned them their first Academy Award nomination. They also wrote for Howard Hawks ("Ball of Fire", 1941) and Mitchell Leisen ("Midnight" 1939, "Arise, My Love" 1940, "Hold Back the Dawn" 1941), a director Wilder deemed incompetent, before the studio, expecting him to fail, gave him his first directing assignment, "The Major and the Minor" (1942).
To Paramount's surprise, Wilder triumphed with the sparkling, sexy farce about a working girl (Ginger Rogers, 30 at the time) who pretends to be a 12-year-old to save train fare. When Army major Ray Milland finds himself smitten by the supposed pre-teen, he doesn't quite know what to do (after all, he's no pedophile), but the censors did, turning a blind eye toward the potentially risque situations as everything was in good fun. His second picture, the war-time thriller "Five Graves to Cairo" (1943, with Erich von Stroheim as German Field Marshal Rommel), was a box office success as well, and the two films that followed firmly established his directing star with their scrutiny of human weakness. The lust-driven insurance agent (Fred MacMurray) and calculating married woman (Barbara Stanwyck) of "Double Indemnity" plus the hopeless alcoholic (Ray Milland) of "The Lost Weekend" (which earned him a Best Director Academy Award) are at the front of a long line of Wilder characters whose squalid motives enhance the cynicism of his films. Though he had begun writing comedies and would always be the master of the wisecrack, the Austrian-born director had looked closely at his adopted country and found a black spot at the center of the American dream.
Wilder, who had returned to Germany (as a civilian with the rank of colonel) to serve in the Psychological Warfare Division and, working under CBS president William Paley, written a 400-page manual to help reconstruct the German film industry, brilliantly captured the bewildering moral climate of the late 40s with the underrated political satire "A Foreign Affair" (1948). Despite a star-reviving turn by Marlene Dietrich as a torch singer with Nazis in her past and an equally good job by straight-arrow Jean Arthur investigating black marketeering in post-war Berlin, this extremely acerbic study of the clash between American and European values was too much too soon with the war and its wounds still fresh in mind, prompting critics to attack its "tastelessness." "Sunset Boulevard", his last project with Brackett, restored his box office clout and gave us Gloria Swanson as the half-mad silent star stuck in a time-warp, spouting the unforgettable "I AM big! It's the pictures that got small!" and "All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up" as she descends the staircase, a frightening specter of dementia in the film's closing moment.
Sans Brackett, Wilder was responsible for one of the darkest pictures ever to come from a commercial studio, "Ace in the Hole/The Big Carnival" (1951), starring Kirk Douglas as an embittered reporter who stumbles on the story of a man trapped in a cave-in and ruthlessly exploits the "human interest" angle to his own ends by postponing a rescue for six days. Vast crowds arrive to enjoy the potential tragedy, a carnival moves in to exploit the crowds, the man dies, and Wilder offers not one scrap of compassion, not a morsel of hope for the human race in a film that flopped in its day but seems curiously contemporary now. He then embarked on a succession of successful adaptations of plays, beginning with "Stalag 17" (1953), the exuberant prison-camp comedy that revealed the charisma of its Oscar-winning Best Actor William Holden and set the stage for everything from "The Great Escape" (1965) to "Hogan's Heroes" (CBS, 1965-71). After the romantic satire "Sabrina" and "The Seven Year Itch" (1955), in which the dreamy humor is sometimes overwhelmed by the prodigious presence of Marilyn Monroe, he slipped in the Lindbergh biopic "The Spirit of St Louis" before returning to the theater as the source of "Witness for the Prosecution" (both 1957).
Wilder began his second great writing partnership with I.A.L. Diamond on the elegant romantic comedy "Love in the Afternoon" (1957), an emphatic tribute to Lubitsch that paired Gary Cooper and Audrey Hepburn. Coop was too long in the tooth for the gamine Hepburn, but the director shot him in the shadows to keep him a mysterious figure (and mitigate the extremeness of their particular May-December match), resulting in a first-class film practically stolen by Maurice Chevalier as Hepburn's private-eye father. Their second project together was the delightful, gender-bending "Some Like It Hot" (1959), presenting Monroe at her luscious best ("Jell-O on springs"), Tony Curtis (when not in drag) doing Cary Grant, and Jack Lemmon at the beginning of his long association with Wilder. There are those who consider it his best film. Certainly, it is a screwball masterpiece right to the end when Lemmon, taking off his wig and declaring himself a man to his intended, Joe E. Brown, prompts the famous last line from the amorous millionaire: "Well, nobody's perfect." As Brown would say, "Zowee!"
Although Wilder and Diamond would co-write all the director's subsequent work, they reached their zenith (award-wise) on "The Apartment" (1960), a quiet, sad, often bitter comedy about the perennial conflict between love and money, earning Wilder three Academy Awards for producing, directing and writing (with Diamond). art director Alexander Trauner, a collaborator on five other Wilder efforts, contributed handsomely, picking up an Oscar for designing the dehumanizing interior of the vast insurance office with its geometric rows of desks and clicking business machines. Again on display was the moral frailty of the cheating boss (MacMurray) and the spineless, insurance clerk (Lemmon) who lends out his apartment to his superiors for their extra-marital affairs, obtaining a promotion and the coveted key to the executive washroom. However, love wins out in the end for Lemmon, who gets his girl, the pert, pixieish Shirley MacLaine, showing for the first time the depth of her talent as MacMurray's discarded mistress. MacMurray received so much negative mail as the perfect heel that he never again took a role where his character could be questioned.
Wilder's hot streak continued with the machine-gun paced comedy "One, Two, Three" (1961), starring James Cagney as a West Berlin-based Coca-Cola executive, and "Irma La Douce" (1963), the overly-long (but still successful) music-less film based on a French musical about an inept cop (Lemmon) who falls for a prostitute (MacLaine). "Kiss Me, Stupid" (1964), condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency for allowing adultery to go unpunished, began his commercial slide, and the improbably positive ending of the otherwise savage satire that followed, "The Fortune Cookie" (1966), represented, according to some critics (who were obviously forgetting "The Lost Weekend"), a failure of his nerve. His time had passed. Though blessed with the talents of Lemmon and Walter Matthau ("The Front Page" 1974, "Buddy, Buddy" 1981) and Holden ("Fedora" 1978), he never again had a hit, though his atypical, but extremely personal "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes" (1970) and sadly underrated "Avanti!" (1972) gain in stature with each passing year.
The string of box-office failures forced Wilder reluctantly into retirement, but he remained a vibrant link to Old Hollywood, always ready to oblige with a trademark quip, especially when accepting the many lifetime achievement awards that came his way. A marvelous director of actors, he coaxed career performances out of Milland, Swanson, Holden, Curtis, Lemmon, Monroe and Rogers, to name only a few, and who can't love a guy that at one time or another infuriated almost every segment of the movie-going population. He brought to the screen an outsider's sharp satirical eye for American absurdity and cruelty, and a master scenarist's skill at rendering those absurdities within a dozen variations. Some were bitter, some sweet, but all were marked by intelligence, clarity and even affection, with just a touch of innocence. Whether you prefer the earlier darker version ("Double Indemnity", "Sunset Boulevard") or the more free-wheeling later one ("Some Like It Hot", "The Apartment"), there can be no denying Wilder was a master storyteller with a great ear for a memorable line.