The only rule in movie is there are no rules.
-Billy Wilder
Director Billy Wilder prided himself more being an artist of the word than an artist of the lens. Yet he was responsible for some of the most memorable visuals in the cinema.
Among his trove of images are Marilyn Monroe's skirt billowing over a subway grate in "The Seven Year Itch," Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in dresses running from mobsters in "Some Like It Hot" and William Holden lying face down in a pool in "Sunset Boulevard."
Not surprisingly, though, Wilder, who died last Wednesday at the age of 95, started his film career as a screenwriter. For movie buffs Wilder will be remembered for his razor sharp dialogue and for pushing the envelope, as much as for the actual pictures or stars he put on the screen.
Wilder's oeuvre of scripts reads like a greatest hits volume of the best lines ever recited in Hollywood. It was in the director's universe that Gloria Swanson, playing a washed up silent film star in 1950's "Sunset Boulevard," uttered "I am big. It's the pictures that got small." In 1945's "The Lost Weekend," Ray Milland as a troubled alcoholic declared, "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation, I can't take quiet desperation." And in 1960's Academy Award Best Picture winner, "The Apartment," Shirley MacLaine, a disenchanted mistress, said about a cracked mirror, "I like it that way. It makes me look the way I feel."
Though not necessarily a has-been, Wilder had receded enough from the limelight to inspire the "whatever happened to him" type of questions. The last movie he made was in 1982 and he spent most of the rest of his life trying to break back into the industry. In spite of his falterings, though, he remained a living legend.
Born Samuel Wilder, the Austrian moviemaker got his start working for the top German studio, UFA, in the 1920s (His mother reportedly nicknamed him Billy after seeing Buffalo Bill's wild west show). He fled to Paris in 1933 fearing the artistic repression that would prevail under Hitler's regime.
He barely knew a word of English, but he had a knack for storytelling and came to America after an old producer friend, Joe May, got him a gig at Columbia Pictures.
Wilder liked to dance close to the edge and tease the censors during the peak of his career in the 1950s. "The Seven Year Itch" made in 1955, stands as a classic of innuendo. Even today it still raises eyebrows. In it Tom Ewell, a husband left alone for the summer, toys with the idea of a dalliance with his upstairs neighbor, played by Marilyn Monroe. The original Broadway show actually implied an affair, but the film censors forced Wilder to stop at mere temptation.
Moral dilemmas were characteristic of many of the director's protagonists, and as a result, scared off many potential stars. According to the New York Times, half a dozen actors rejected the lead role in "Double Indemnity" (about an insurance salesman who helps Barbara Stanwyck murder her husband) before Fred MacMurray took it.
Though many of Wilder's films dealt with serious subjects, a comic edge was apparent. "Stalag17" a sort of precursor to "Hogan's Heroes" told the story of American GIs in German POW camps. The movie treats its characters with respect and avoids making caricatures out of the Germans, but it also features the men longing for Betty Grable and playing pranks on one another.
Some critics derided Wilder for sugar-coating his material, but he was intelligent enough to keep the laughs from drowning out the internal complications of his characters and situations. The humor was just a way of emphasizing the flaws without succumbing to foolish sentimentality.
Wilder was a much honored filmmaker, winning five Oscars for his work, and having his "Some Like it Hot" named Best American Comedy by the American Film Institute. He also had as much wit in real life as in his movies and once cleverly explained what made his films so likable.
"Some pictures play wonderfully to a room of eight people," he said. "I don't go for that. I go for the masses. I go for the end effect."
Write to Robert at rclopez@bsu.edu
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