Billy Wilder

Billy Wilder (born June 22, 1906, Sucha, Austria [now in Poland]—died March 27, 2002, Beverly Hills, California, U.S.) was an Austrian-born American motion-picture scenarist, director, and producer known for films that humorously treat subjects of controversy and offer biting indictments of hypocrisy in American life. His work often focused on subjects that had previously been considered unacceptable screen material, including alcoholism (The Lost Weekend, 1945), prisoner-of-war camps (Stalag 17, 1953), and prostitution (Irma La Douce, 1963). A number of his films, such as Sunset Boulevard (1950) and The Apartment (1960), weighed the emptiness of modern life.

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Early life and work

Wilder (who was named Samuel but called Billy because of his mother’s affinity for William [“Buffalo Bill”] Cody) was raised in Vienna and attended the University of Vienna as a prelaw student. After a year he dropped out to work as a sports reporter for a Vienna newspaper. A major paper in Berlin hired him away in 1926 to cover the crime beat, experience that would serve him well in his subsequent career. Wilder earned his first screenwriting credit working on Edgar Ulmer and Robert Siodmak’s Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday; 1930).

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More scripts for a variety of German and French films followed over the next four years, but when the Nazis took power in 1933, Wilder, like so many other Jews in the arts, fled. In Paris he codirected Mauvaise Graine (1934) with Alexander Esway before continuing on to the United States, after a brief period in Mexico.

During Wilder’s first years in Hollywood, when he spoke little English, he roomed with expatriate German actor Peter Lorre and accumulated credits on modest scripts such as Music in the Air (1934) and The Lottery Lover (1935) by collaborating with writers who could translate his contributions. In 1937 Paramount assigned him to work with former New Yorker theatre critic Charles Brackett. After first collaborating on Ernst Lubitsch’s Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938), they wrote such romantic-comedy gems as Mitchell Leisen’s Midnight (1939), Lubitsch’s Ninotchka (1939), and Howard Hawks’s Ball of Fire (1941). Arguably Wilder’s most personal work during this period was Leisen’s Hold Back the Dawn (1941), a compelling drama about a suave European refugee (played by Charles Boyer) stranded in Mexico who uses his wiles to entice an American schoolteacher (Olivia de Havilland) into marriage so that he can gain entry into the United States.

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Films of the 1940s

In 1942 Wilder and Brackett entered a new arrangement: Wilder directed, Brackett produced, and both wrote their subsequent projects, beginning with The Major and the Minor (1942), a clever farce in which a woman (Ginger Rogers) who masquerades as a 12-year-old to avoid paying full fare on a train becomes involved with an army officer (Ray Milland) who cannot quite figure why he is so attracted to a young girl.

Wilder and Brackett’s next project, Five Graves to Cairo (1943), was a suspenseful tale of wartime espionage. It was followed by Double Indemnity (1944), one of the most searing of the early films noir and, in the eyes of many historians, the apotheosis of the genre. James M. Cain’s 1936 novella, on which the film is based, had been deemed too controversial for Hollywood’s Production Code at the time of its publication, but by 1944 standards had relaxed enough to allow depictions of the decidedly adult scenario it offered, and the adaptation by Wilder and novelist Raymond Chandler was masterful. The genial Fred MacMurray, cast against type, played a jaded insurance salesman who conspires with the sexy wife of a prospective client (Barbara Stanwyck) to insure her husband, kill him, collect the money, and spend it together. The film—told in flashback with a voiceover—was nominated for an Academy Award, and Stanwyck received a nomination for best actress for her portrayal of the film’s icy, calculating femme fatale. Moreover, Wilder garnered the first of his seven Academy Award nominations for best director and another nomination for his and Chandler’s screenplay.

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Wilder had arrived. He managed to equal the success of Double Indemnity with The Lost Weekend (1945), a stark, harrowing portrait of one man’s battle with alcoholism. Milland gave a career-defining performance as an aspiring writer whose weekend drinking binge nearly costs him his life. Both critics and audiences embraced this powerful cautionary tale, which won the Academy Award as best picture, while Milland won for best actor, Wilder won as best director, and Wilder and Brackett won for their screenplay.

Although Wilder was arguably the hottest director in Hollywood, he put his film career on hiatus for three years to join the army, serving as a colonel in the Psychological Warfare Division in occupied Berlin. His first movie after his military service was The Emperor Waltz (1948), a slight musical set in Austria that starred Bing Crosby and Joan Fontaine. Much more substantial was A Foreign Affair (1948), a cynical romantic comedy set in occupied Berlin that illuminated the workings of the post-World War II U.S. armed services with a candour that was unique for its day. Jean Arthur starred as a prim congresswoman on a fact-finding mission, and John Lund was the calculating army captain who tries to protect his well-paid mistress (Marlene Dietrich, in one of her last significant screen roles).