Billy Wilder: Hollywood Comedy’s Caustic Social Chronicler

Compound Adjective Practice

Billy Wilder, who died on 27^th March 2002 at his Beverly Hills home at the age of 95, was the most pungent and literate creator of movie comedy in mid-20^th century Hollywood. As a writer and director, he helped shape an evolution in style and taste from the pre-war innocence blended with verbal sophistication of screenplays like Midnight and Ninotchka, via the satirical tragicomedy mixed with resonant one-liners (“I’m ready for my close-up, Mr DeMille”) of Sunset Boulevard (1950), to the hectic, irreverent slapstick of his best-known comedy Some Like It Hot (1956).

That the same man directed the hardboiled thriller Double Indemnity, a classic of film noir, the archetypal Hollywood drama about alcoholism The Lost Weekend and the Oscar-winning sweet-sour romantic comedy The Apartment made Wilder a caustic social chronicler almost without peer in western cinema in the last century.

A European refugee who fled Germany in 1933, he showed a fondness for fish-out-of-the-water tales. In Ninotchka, stern Bolshevik Greta Garbo falls for pleasure-loving American Melvyn Douglas. In Ball of Fire mild-mannered linguistics professor Gary Cooper tangles with goodtime girl Barbara Stanwyck. Both these movies were scripted, for other directors, by Wilder and his then regular collaborator Charles Brackett. When Wilder himself began directing, in 1942 with The Major and the Minor, the same misfit themes recurred in films as diverse as Ace in the Hole, his hard-hitting satire on newspaper reporting; the prisoner-of-war drama Stalag 17; the wistful Audrey Hepburn romantic comedy Sabrina; and the strident but fiercely idiosyncratic comedies he made from the mid-1950s with new screenplay collaborator I.A.L. Diamond.

Wilder’s cinema reflected, albeit in a comical distorting mirror, the life of a man tossed about from country to country since his teens. Born in Vienna in 1906, Wilder first flirted with law studies and journalism in Austria. He soon migrated to Berlin, working variously as a reporter, as a so-called taxi dancer and finally as a script collaborator in half a dozen German films.

As one of a legion of refugees from Nazism in Hollywood, Wilder soon became the most American of immigrant film-makers. His brash, wisecracking style set a pace few natives could equal. He used favourite actors over and over —Fred MacMurray, Shirley MacLaine, Walter Matthau, above all Jack Lemmon— to help shape his world of abrasive dialogue, astringent romance, hapless physical comedy and defiant optimism. The final line of Some Like It Hot became the most famous in screen comedy history —when millionaire Joe E. Brown’s “fiancée” Lemmon (in drag) confesses that he is a man, Brown shrugs, smiles and says “Nobody’s perfect”.

After The Apartment won Oscars for Best Film, Best Director and Best Screenplay, Wilder’s work declined in vitality and inventiveness. The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes, Avanti! and Fedora were ambitious but thinly scripted whimsies. The Front Page and Buddy Buddy tried to re-ignite the spark of the Lemmon-Matthau partnership Wilder himself created in the 1966 Meet Whiplash Willie (aka The Fortune Cookie), which won Matthau an Oscar.

In the 1980s and 1990s Wilder toyed with projects that never saw the light, including directing Shindler’s List. He also gave his time to befriending younger directors, one of whom, Cameron Crowe (of Jerry Maguire) published in 1999 a definitive book-length interview with him, Conversations with Billy Wilder.

As a movie artist, Wilder left no one indifferent. Detractors included Pauline Kael, the New Yorker critic, and David Thomson, who in his Biographical Dictionary of Film called Wilder “a heartless exploiter of public taste who manipulates situations in the name of satire. He prefers dialogue to character, sniping to structure”. For others, Wilder combined a classical command of craft with iconoclastic courage in confronting taboo subjects. 

© NIGEL ANDREWS, Financial Times, 2002

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