I’ve seen a few Billy Wilder movies in my time — Double Indemnity (1944), Sunset Boulevard (1950), Some Like It Hot (1959), one or two others — but not nearly enough. Now Mark Steyn has written an article commemorating the 100th anniversary of Wilder’s birth. A few excerpts:
In Vienna, he was a journalist who turned to screenwriting in the flourishing German film industry. Arriving in America, he wrote, with Charles Brackett, for Lubitsch (Ninotchka) and then began directing after tiring of their scripts getting screwed by studio hacks. He was always a writer first, an ideas man who came up with the premise for The Apartment after seeing Brief Encounter and finding himself wondering about the fellow who lends his flat to Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard. “The interesting character is the friend,” he said, “who returns to his home and finds the bed still warm; he who has no mistress.” . . .
For a script man, Wilder was also very shrewd about actors. To take just one example, compare Jack Lemmon in a Wilder movie with Jack Lemmon in just about anything else. Billy Wilder managed to play off that endearingly goofy earnestness of Lemmon in a way no other director could: without him, it decayed into pretentiousness and portentousness — and, Hollywood being Hollywood, with the wretched Save The Tiger, they gave him an Oscar for it. . . .
Their best picture together was The Apartment (1960), which scraped into the American Film Institute’s all-time Hot 100 at Number 93, but is, to my mind, vastly superior to Wilder’s more celebrated Some Like It Hot and Sunset Boulevard. It’s a sad but true urban Christmas fable: there’s no snow, just flu all month long; the office-party booze makes everyone mean and sour; the only sighting of le Père Noel is an aggressive off-duty department-store Santa chugging it down at a midtown bar; and the Christmas Eve climax is an attempted suicide. I hasten to add I’m not one of those seasonal cynics like so many of my cheerless colleagues in the British media: “Ho, ho, bloody ho,” as the Daily Telegraph rock critic began his Xmas round-up a couple of years ago. But that’s what I love about The Apartment: its Wilderian cynicism is redeemed by one of the sweetest Christmas Day scenes in any movie. In his review of Rodgers and Hart’s amoral Pal Joey, Brooks Atkinson wrote: “How can you draw sweet water from a foul well?” Well, The Apartment pulls it off, wonderfully. . . .
I once asked Jack Lemmon whether even the best comedies today compared with Wilder. He was circumspect because he didn’t want to sound like Mister Squaresville, but he made a good point. “There are fewer of what I’d call ‘book comedies’ now – with a first, second and third act through which the characters grow. Yes, there’s often a story today, but you could interchange the scenes. They’re like sketches: they’ve each got their own punch, then ka-boom, on to the next.” What he liked about Wilder was his ability to combine comedy and drama. “It’s hard enough to write a good drama,” mused Lemmon of his old friend, “it’s much harder to write a good comedy, and it’s hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.”
To my shame, The Apartment is one of the Wilder films I have never seen. I recently started watching certain old musicals based on Steyn’s write-ups; looks like I’ll have to give this a look, too.
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