 Goodbye...
by Andrew Sarris
The first Billy Wilder movie I saw and enjoyed, The Major and the Minor (1942), came out at a time long before I knew who Billy Wilder was and what he did. Even today in the post auteurist world it is not clear to many people what directors actually do. When I interviewed Wilder a few years ago, he told me that he became a director "to protect his scripts" from the compromises cooked up by directors like Mitchell Leisen and actors like Charles Boyer in a movie called Hold Back the Dawn (1941) over a scene in which Boyer played a refugee character in a seedy Mexican hotel room talking philosophically to a cockroach crawling up the wall. Boyer complained he was too serious an actor to waste his time talking to a cockroach, and the scene was cut.
Fortunately, Wilder had more success persuading a skeptical Ginger Rogers to masquerade for almost the whole length of a movie as a little girl in The Major and the Minor, a skeptical Fred MacMurray — a light comedy type — to play a cold-blooded, sex-driven murderer in Double Indemnity (1944), and another light comedy leading man, Ray Milland, to play a desperate alcoholic in The Lost Weekend (1945) and win an Oscar in the process.
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DGA President Gilbert Cates and actor Jack Lemmon present Billy Wilder with the D.W. Griffith Award (now called the DGA Lifetime Achievement Award) in 1985.
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Hence, I was a 14-year-old high school student when I was romantically thrilled by The Major and the Minor, and I was a movie buffish college graduate in 1950 when I saw Sunset Boulevard at the Radio City Music Hall 32 times. Wilder could do no wrong. Yet, little more than a decade later I had soured on Wilder in my directorial roundup entitled The American Cinema. What happened in the meantime were the French critics and filmmakers of Cahiers du Cinema and La Nouvelle Vague, particularly Francois Truffaut (1932–1984) in a persuasive anti-Wilder essay that brooked no contradiction. Like Governor Romney in Vietnam many years ago, I was brainwashed. After all, who was I to question the men who had devised La Politique des Auteurs, which enabled me to introduce the word "auteur" into the English language?
Then in the early '70s, a close friend and Freudian auteurist named Stephen Gottlieb reminded me that Billy Wilder was the only Hollywood director who had lost his whole family in the Holocaust. Suddenly, the seeming incongruities in Wilder's narratives clicked into place. No longer could the suicide attempts in Sabrina and The Apartment be attributed to Wilder's alleged cynicism and bad taste. Nor was there anything any longer unsettling about the long procession of guilt-ridden heroes who find a sort of redemption despite their often ignoble behavior. Hello, Billy. Goodbye, Francois.
I apologized in print several times for my having grievously underrated Wilder in The American Cinema, and I was happy to read Wilder interviews in which he made jokes about my critical reversal in his favor. After all, I had wanted him to know how badly I felt for letting the French critics talk me out of my earlier enthusiasm for Wilder, particularly when many of them did not speak English well enough to appreciate the verbal felicities of his scripts, and his amazing command of idiomatic English. Don't get me wrong. The French were right so much of the time that I will never cease to be grateful to them for having awakened me to so much that had been overlooked in American movies before them.
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DGA Von Stoheim, Swanson and Wilder behind the scenes on Sunset Blvd.
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Anyway, I have given courses on Wilder in the Film Division of the School of the Arts at Columbia University and have been gratified to witness a new generation of students discovering and appreciating the glories of the Wilder oeuvre. Even more than Preston Sturges, illustrious in his own right, Wilder can claim to be the heir of Ernst Lubitsch with a dash of vinegar supplied by Erich von Stroheim. Indeed, looking at Wilder's best films again, one is astonished to see how marvelously well they stand the test of time and repeated viewings. Many people say this film or that film is the greatest film of all-time, but I always wonder how many times these people are prepared to look at their choice without gagging. Wilder, like Hitchcock, seems infinitely and eternally watchable.
I am not suggesting that Wilder did not have his share of setbacks and failures, but some of his commercial flops like Ace in the Hole (1951), Love in the Afternoon (1957), Kiss Me Stupid (1964) and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) have stood the test of time better than such commercial hits as The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Witness for the Prosecution (1958). A special niche has to be set aside for A Foreign Affair (1948), a film that I liked despite the fact that critics complained that Wilder — of all people — was too soft and farcical about the Nazis too soon after the Holocaust had been uncovered. My own problem was that I could never forgive Wilder for making Jean Arthur look so ridiculous next to Marlene Dietrich, who, after all, was playing a Nazi, contrary to her real-life role during the War as an anti-Nazi.
Though Wilder never confronted the Holocaust head-on as in The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) and Schindler's List (1993), he was often on the edge of the conflict as in Five Graves to Cairo (1943), Stalag 17 (1953), One, Two, Three (1961) and A Foreign Affair, but with a comic tendency, insistent on making jokes about Hitler rather than delivering speeches against him or whimpering about all his victims.
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Billy Wilder receives his 1953 DGA Award nomination plaque for Stalag 17 from DGA President George Sidney and director George Seaton.
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Through most of his career, Wilder was "married" to two screenwriters, Charles Brackett (1892–1969) and I.A.L. Diamond (1920–1988). The first industry gossip I ever heard about the Brackett-Wilder collaboration implied that Brackett was a civilizing influence on the more cynical, more movie-wise Wilder. Their joint careers reached their ultimate fruition in Sunset Boulevard (1950). It is interesting, though, that when Wilder went very dark with Double Indemnity, Brackett opted out of the project and was replaced by Raymond Chandler, who, Wilder complained to me, was more interested in thinking up outlandish camera angles than writing dialogue. And after Wilder broke up formally with Brackett, his next film, Ace in the Hole, was his darkest yet.
Wilder's writing partnership with Brackett lasted 12 years, from 1938 to 1950, and besides Wilder's own directed gems, produced such comedy classics as Mitchell Leisen's Midnight (1939), Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka (also in 1939) and Howard Hawks' Ball of Fire (1941). Actually, come to think of it, the very first Brackett and Wilder effort I witnessed was Mitchell Leisen's Arise My Love, a romantic comedy set in pre–World War II Europe with Milland playing the nervy part of an anti-Franco volunteer saved from execution by Claudette Colbert's intrepid reporter posing as his wife. So even in an escapist entertainment, Wilder was dabbling with anti-fascist melodrama. Thus, at his best, Leisen (1898–1972) did not deserve Wilder's opprobrium, but I didn't say that to Wilder's face. I am too polite — or cowardly, if you prefer — to make a fuss by speaking my mind.
In any event, the tensions were reportedly exacerbated by age (Brackett was 14 years older) and pedigree (Brackett was a Harvard Law School graduate, a novelist, a drama critic for The New Yorker, and later a staff writer for Paramount in the early thirties). Wilder, on the other hand, was a scrounging arriviste from Vienna with a collection of vague screenwriting credits and Berlin press clippings from the time he worked there as a reporter, interviewing, among other luminaries, Sigmund Freud.
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Wilder and Lemmon on the set of The Apartment.
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Billy Wilder was born Samuel Wilder in Vienna, but the story goes that his Americanophile mother changed his name to "Billy" in honor of Buffalo Bill. The gossipy French critics gleefully circulated the story that Wilder sent books back home credited to Thornton Wilder with the explanation that his publisher had changed Wilder's first name to make it sound more impressive. In many ways, Wilder became the sum of all the stories told about him — authentic, imagined, embellished and totally invented as they might have been. Still, it isn't as if Wilder and his characteristic heroes were excessively self-righteous.
But what does it matter when we remember all the great moments he has given us on the screen, beginning with "Dream Lover," the haunting melody to which Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland waltzed in The Major and the Minor, and their subsequently magical reunion at the train station with references to the fall of France as comic counterpoint to a burst of patriotism just before Pearl Harbor when it was made, and just after when this high school student saw it.
But a farewell train scene perhaps emotionally topping all farewell train scenes unites Audrey Hepburn with Gary Cooper's international playboy of her dreams in Love in the Afternoon. Then there are spectacular William Holden moral turnabouts, too late in Sunset Boulevard and just in the nick of time in Stalag 17. On the sunnier side of the street is the virtuosity of Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot and The Apartment rising from the ashes of embarrassment and humiliation. And what about Wilder and Diamond and Robert Stephens and Colin Blakely breathing new life into an overworked property in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, which begins with a cheeky gay joke and ends with a morphine-laced lyrical lament for a lost love.
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Wilder and actor Ron Rich on the set of The Fortune Cookie.
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Wilder paid his stylistic debt to Erich von Stroheim directly in Five Graves to Cairo and Sunset Boulevard by casting him as Rommel in the former and as the butler of Gloria Swanson's Norma Desmond in the latter. And what of Swanson herself revived as the great silent star she was.
Goodbye, Billy. I'm still sorry I underrated you for even a little while, and thank you for helping me grow up and stay grown-up with your parables of mercy and forgiveness and redemption for even the less noble and less proper and less courageous among us. As for your setbacks, most often you were simply ahead of your time.
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