In half a century of writing and moviemaking, Billy Wilder took torn-from-the-headline subjects and born-in-the-boudoir jokes and created an amazing closed universe of wit. To see his movies is to enter an environment in which all the cracks are wise -- and no simple feeling can emerge unscathed.
As a writer or director or both, he gave us some of the smartest entertainments in Hollywood history, from Midnight and Ninotchka in 1939 to Some Like It Hot in 1959. And movies like Double Indemnity (1944) and The Lost Weekend (1945) brought a new, cynical realism to the screen.
In his metier, Wilder was incomparable. Sophisticated audiences went to his landmark movies hoping for the kind of acrid observations that could set you back on your feet like a stiff, bitter drink.
Throughout June and July, Baltimore audiences can once again see vintage Wilder on the big screen. Johns Hopkins' summer film series kicked off last week with Wilder's trifling debut film, The Major and the Minor, but hits its stride this Wednesday with Double Indemnity. Four more films -- The Lost Weekend, Some Like It Hot, Irma La Douce and Kiss Me, Stupid -- follow before the series winds up on July 24.
In addition, after having showcased Wilder's Ace in the Hole earlier this month, the Charles Theatre's Saturday revival series will unspool his creepiest, most original film, Sunset Boulevard, on June 29. (See related story for information about both series.)
Wilder hadn't made a movie in more than two decades when he died of pneumonia on March 27 at the age of 95. But throughout his later years the adulation of his fans and his propensity for quips of genius kept him in the public eye. Wilder would be immortal if only for his barbed, offhand wisdom, such as his famous remark about Louis B. Mayer's crowded funeral: "It shows that if you give the public what they want, they will come out for it!"
Nonetheless, Wilder's own hottest one-liners are no competition for his most Wilder-esque movies. It may be fun to re-hear real-life gags, like Wilder telling his prospective wife, "I'd worship the ground you walk on if only you lived in a better neighborhood." But it's no substitute for Jan Sterling in Ace in the Hole complaining that she doesn't like church because "kneeling bags my nylons" or for Cecil B. De Mille in Sunset Boulevard intoning, "Twelve press agents working overtime can do terrible things to the human spirit."
In classic Wilder scripts, good lines become great -- they encapsulate themes, put spin on the action, and sum up entire Zeitgeists. Wilder could make plain speaking or verbal curlicues come off as popular music. Nobody has topped Fred MacMurray's and Barbara Stanwyck's first double-entendre duet in Wilder's Double Indemnity, the one that ends with her saying, "I wonder if I know what you mean," and him responding, "I wonder if you wonder."
Wilder's dialogue simultaneously pricks up the ear and provokes nostalgia -- it's boulevard badinage that's been streamlined and toned-up, from an era when wit was part of street smarts. He's the comic laureate of the Big City, the place where the action is, or at least where it once was. He depicted Paris as a glamorous playground in Midnight and Ninotchka, New York as a hive of aspiration in The Lost Weekend and The Apartment. In Sunset Boulevard and Double Indemnity, L.A. is a sun-kissed, movie-haunted limbo where sex, lucre and homicide tumble together in emotional landslides. In the underrated postwar comedy A Foreign Affair (1948) and the overrated Cold War comedy One, Two, Three (1961), Berlin is a hustler's paradise.
Even Wilder movies that aren't set in cities get taken over by hard-boiled metropolitans -- like Chicago gangsters converging on a Florida resort in Some Like It Hot, or the exiled New York reporter (Kirk Douglas) in Ace in the Hole controlling a rescue operation in the Southwest so he can scoop his way back to Gotham in style.
Douglas mocks a righteous Albuquerque editor for wearing "belts and suspenders." Dwight Macdonald, who as Esquire's film critic was pretty hard on Wilder, once used the same phrase when advising a protege to avoid "doubled adjectives [a belt and a suspender]."
Wilder and Macdonald are disparate characters, but they shared an urban tradition of spirited banter and joshing. They mixed cheerfulness and aggression instead of merely unleashing aggression, which is more the fashion now.
Ups and downs
Despite his lionization in Hollywood, Wilder's national critical reputation went through some killer roller-coaster turns. In the 1970s and 1980s, it was at its lowest dip. Only in the decade before his death did it surge up again. There are two simple explanations.
First, unlike John Huston, who ended his career with the back-to-back triumphs of Prizzi's Honor and The Dead, Wilder endured a decade of disappointments before he made his last movie, a tired farce called Buddy, Buddy (1981). Part of what made Wilder's final efforts negligible was their disconnectedness. They were out of touch with contemporary realities and fantasies -- and Wilder had habitually made movies that epitomized both.
Second, Wilder established his obvious strengths so immediately that critics couldn't resist prodding him to stretch. James Agee spent much of the 1940s demarcating the limitations of Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend and A Foreign Affair; but at the end of an appreciation of 1950's Sunset Boulevard, he noted that Wilder and his then-partner, Charles Brackett, "are beautifully equipped to do the cold, exact, adroit, sardonic job they have done; and artists who, consciously or unconsciously, learn to be true to their limitations as well as their gifts, deserve a kind of gratitude and respect they much too seldom get."
"Cold, exact, adroit, sardonic": Those adjectives bedeviled Wilder after he went in other directions, as in the rambunctious combination of slob comedy and POW melodrama in the World War II tour de force Stalag 17 (1954). When he made the sweet-and-sour The Apartment in 1960, he won Oscars and mainstream acclaim, but lost his remaining highbrow support. The Apartment is a mixed bag, but it's a tantalizing attempt to do a dirty Capra movie -- and, as with some of Capra's movies, you're amazed at how well it works though you can't suspend disbelief.
Wilder's movies viewed in toto raise scads of questions small and large. What did a man named "Sheldrake" ever do to Billy Wilder? One Sheldrake is a glib producer in Sunset Boulevard, another is the smoothly malevolent personnel boss in The Apartment, yet another is a giggly dentist in Kiss Me, Stupid. And why did Wilder have a thing for lilacs? In The Lost Weekend, Ray Milland compares Jane Wyman's aroma to "all the lilacs in Ohio"; in One, Two, Three, James Cagney says his secretary smells like "all the lilacs in lower Bavaria."
Bigger areas, too, cry out for exploration. For more than a half-century, Wilder has been known as a writer-director who put his emphasis on writing, but his films have the visual power to enter your dream life. In the worst nightmare I ever had, I lay in bed and watched my father change a light bulb in the ceiling lamp while a ratlike creature emerged from the wall behind him, sprouted batwings and swooped down on me. All the elements of that dream came from The Lost Weekend.
Instinct for theatrics
Wilder became a prime example of the director as star. But unlike many director-stars of our day, he became a celebrated ringmaster of star performers.
Just as his verbal signature was his delicious curdled urbanity, his instinct for theatrics shows in his least remarked capacity -- bringing out the best and most characteristic performances of his actors. "A movie is a star vehicle," Wilder once said. "What good is it to have a magnificent concept for which you must have Laurence Olivier and Audrey Hepburn if they're not available?"
Wilder's achievement as a nurturer of actors is overdue for consideration. Even in his screenwriting career, Wilder did terrific custom-tailoring jobs for big-screen immortals. The French-born, American-bred Claudette Colbert never looked more fetching than as Eve Peabody, the chorine from Kokomo in the Mitchell Leisen-directed Midnight, from Wilder and Charles Brackett's lighthearted yet ardent script.
She arrives in Paris with small hopes of becoming a cafe singer. She immediately falls in love with an emigre Hungarian cabdriver, Tibor Czerny (Don Ameche), and later falls in like with a high-society circle that accepts her imitation of a Hungarian baroness. From afar, Colbert looks like part of the Art Deco decor, with cheekbones so high they make her face look upside-down triangular, those swirls of cloth that 1930s women wore for hats, the dresses that set off her classic figure, yet have puffed shoulders that register like epaulets. Close-up, her big warm eyes take over.
You know why every man in the movie melts for her, thanks partly to Brackett and Wilder's screenplay. They establish her as an American Cinderella -- that is, a self-made Cinderella to whom money is certainly nice but true love needs no bank account. The midnight when the coach-and-four is supposed to turn into a pumpkin never comes; the only pumpkin is Czerny's cab, and if Ameche as Czerny isn't exactly princely, he is unexpectedly charming.
Ninotchka became a classic primarily because of the double-decker styling that Wilder, his co-writers (Brackett, Walter Reisch) and the director, Ernst Lubitsch, gave it. On the first deck are three Soviet stooges sent to Paris to obtain revenue from the sale of Russian jewels. They represent the Russia of "borscht, beef stroganoff, and blini and sour cream." On the second deck is Ninotchka, the "envoy extraordinaire" ordered to oversee this unholy trio. She stands for the Russia of Tolstoy.
Greta Garbo, both soulful and effervescent, balances the farce, and Lubitsch captures her lightest and most intimate shades of feeling. In the final shots, the Russian gloom fades from Ninotchka's face, and, with her first knowing smile, she seeks the only asylum she craves -- the tender embrace of her Parisian playboy lover (Melvyn Douglas). Lubitsch doesn't underline her longing; he relied on Garbo's romantic spirit to transform a topical satire into a comic love letter.
And Wilder learned from his master, Lubitsch, when Wilder and Raymond Chandler wrote their chilling 1943 adaptation of James M. Cain's Double Indemnity. They excised some extravagant rhetoric and stuck to the plot of a femme fatale (Stanwyck) and a lust-struck insurance agent (MacMurray) murdering her husband and trying to outsmart the agent's best pal, a Javert-like claims investigator played by Edward G. Robinson.
They knew that Stanwyck didn't need Cain's line, "I think of myself as Death sometimes." One look at her and you get that she's a sensual death- dealer: There's something uncanny and eternal about how she snares MacMurray's eager- to-please agent. Her voice is both harsh and seductive, a steel purr, and her movements walk the tightrope between lewdness and propriety. Stanwyck was the perfect Wilder actress and a Tinseltown rarity: a thoroughly unsentimental big star.
Before The Lost Weekend had its premiere in 1945, the entire career of Ray Milland rhymed with bland. But as Don Birnam, the alcoholic would-be writer in Wilder's version of Charles Jackson's novel (co-
written with Charles Brackett, who produced), he sharpened the skills he'd mastered as a romantic comedian in movies like Wilder's The Major and the Minor, and put them to lacerating use.
Birnam's all-too-easy charm allows him to coast between drinks. Even when he's alert, his matinee-idol twinkle can't camouflage his peripheral pursuit of the next shot or bottle. The action is unsparing. Wilder filled the movie with on-location coups, such as Birnam's futile search up and down Third Avenue for a pawnshop open on Yom Kippur, and with tersely written, shrewdly cast supporting parts -- especially Frank Faylen as a malicious nurse and Doris Dowling as the sympathetic B-girl who drops ending syllables (as in "Don't be ridic!"). But Milland's mold-
breaking performance is what galvanizes the movie -- under Wilder's direction, he drinks to the bottom of the glass.
The charisma of Holden
A murdered screenwriter. An idealistic young female reader working her way up in a studio. A producer who might consider pushing a baseball project if he could turn it into a musical for a female star. Hollywood luminaries playing themselves. That's not the roll call for The Player, it's a partial cast of characters for Sunset Boulevard. With the second wave of international attention that greeted the movie on the heels of Andrew Lloyd Webber's stage musical variation on it, Wilder was justly lauded for his deployment of horror and black comedy to expose cushy, crawling corruption.
The key to its success, though, is William Holden's antihero, Joe Gillis, the debt-ridden screenwriter who becomes the kept man of silent- era movie legend Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson). Desmond and her butler, Max (Erich Von Stroheim), are Old Hollywood in all its crazy grandeur. The director and his co-writers (Brackett, who again produced, and D.M. Marshman Jr.) bask in Desmond's baroqueness, giving her lines as pungent as Margo Channing's in All About Eve and an exit as potent in its own glittery way as that of Blanche DuBois. The studio reader (Nancy Olson) is Young Hollywood; she wants Gillis to write something "true and moving."
But Gillis, who narrates the picture in amusing tough-guy lingo, represents the Hollywood norm. Compromise has become a habit with him, and Holden expresses the ravaging self-loathing that goes with it. No one has put across better the Hollywood experience of feeling lousy when dressed to the nines. Holden is brilliant in Sunset Boulevard, blending sensitivity and skepticism.
In his POW movie, Stalag 17, Wilder went on to tap Holden's never-before-exploited charisma. The longtime leading man brought matter-of-fact fierceness to the role of a loner named Sefton, a scrounger who antagonizes barracks-mates with his ingenious moneymaking ventures (such as a literal rat race), his bartering with Nazi guards, and his willingness to bet on whether potential escapees will make it out alive. Holden exudes orneriness, and his street-fighting reflexes come into play when the rest of the POWs suspect him of leaking secrets to the Nazis. Stalag 17-is a claustrophobic war film with the charge of high adventure. Its blend of suspense and black comedy influenced every POW movie or TV show to come, from The Bridge on the River Kwai and The Great Escape to Hogan's Heroes.
Wilder's comedies failed when he pushed his stars into broadness (as in the Tom Ewell-Marilyn Monroe film, The Seven Year Itch) or mismatched them curiously, as in his two Audrey Hepburn vehicles, Sabrina and Love in the Afternoon. Holden's string of great work for Wilder ran out with Sabrina; he's graceful but nothing more in the role of the lightweight playboy whom the chauffeur's daughter (Hepburn) is infatuated with (while Humphrey Bogart is downright uncomfortable as Holden's all-business older brother).
Love in the Afternoon is even worse, with Gary Cooper looking like Hepburn's great-grandfather and failing to pull off the kind of farcical romance he did so well for Brackett and Wilder and director Ernst Lubitsch in the wildly erratic Bluebeard's Eighth Wife nearly 20 years before.
But when Wilder's comedies clicked, whole groups of stars could settle into unexpectedly risible constellations -- as they did in his most purely entertaining movie, the gangbusters Roaring Twenties farce, Some Like It Hot.
Monroe over the top
Wilder had worked with Monroe before, but in Some Like It Hot, he took her dumb-blonde persona and ran with it. When Monroe's Sugar Kane, a ukulele- strumming singer in an all-girl band, isn't cooing or tippling, she's falling for male tenor-sax players. The way Wilder and his co-writer, I.A.L. Diamond, shape Sugar's character, she's savvy enough to know better, but not strong enough to resist.
And the way Monroe embodies her, Sugar is a bouncy sweetheart -- God's gift to saxophonists, especially the one played by Tony Curtis, who along with bass-player Jack Lemmon is on the transvestite lam for inadvertently witnessing the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.
As a woman, Curtis is haughty and super-refined; that's how Lemmon starts out, too, but soon he throws caution to the wind section and becomes a good-time gal. The exuberance of Curtis and Lemmon, one of the funniest drag duos of all time, buoys the whole picture. Their parodies of femininity curb Monroe's tendency toward self-parody. Curtis desires her, and Lemmon, improbably but hilariously, wants to emulate her when he gets engaged to a millionaire (the miraculously game, 67-year-old Joe E. Brown).
In a film where almost everything is theatrically stylized, from bootlegging and murder to the row of plutocrats rocking on the porch of a beachside hotel, Monroe is intrinsically exaggerated. She's described as "Jell-O on springs" -- a phrase that fits even her singing voice.
As Joe E. Brown would say, "Zowee!"
Wilder on screen
Throughout June and July, Baltimore audiences can once again see vintage Billy Wilder films on the big screen at the Johns Hopkins medical campus and the Charles Theatre.
The continuing Hopkins summer film series offers five films on Wednesday evenings. The full schedule:
* June 19: Double Indemnity (Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, 1944)
* June 26: The Lost Weekend (Ray Milland, Jane Wyman, 1945)
* July 10: Some Like It Hot (Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, Marilyn Monroe, 1959)
* July 17: Irma La Douce (Shirley MacLaine, Jack Lemmon, 1963)
* July 24: Kiss Me, Stupid (Dean Martin, Kim Novak, 1964)
All films begin at 7:15 p.m. at the Johns Hopkins Hospital Preclinical Teaching Building at Wolfe and East Monument streets. Admission is free.
The Charles Theatre's Saturday revival series, meanwhile, will unspool Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (William Holden, Gloria Swanson, 1950) on Saturday, June 29, at noon. The Charles is at 1711 N. Charles St. Admission is $5.