One of cinema’s most versatile artists, Billy Wilder had both one of the longest, and the most honored, careers of any filmmaker working in Hollywood.
During his time at the top of the industry, he created some of the best-loved and respected films of the period: Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Sunset Blvd., Stalag 17, Sabrina, The Seven Year Itch, Some Like it Hot, The Apartment, and One, Two, Three.
Wilder’s career dated all the way back to the 1920s, when he began working in Germany.
A disciple of Ernst Lubitsch, over the course of the 30s and into the 40s, he established himself as one of Hollywood’s great screenwriters. And in 1942, made his Hollywood directorial debut with The Major and the Minor. In a career that would last virtually another 40 years, Wilder would take on a variety of genres and filmic styles, with varying degrees of success. But regardless of the success of individual films, his body of work remains interesting for its diversity. Through the early 1960s, Wilder would remain in the forefront of Hollywood, often working with a cynical and satirical eye to American culture, society, and attitudes.
Less often explored, however, is the end of Wilder’s career. The last 20 years of his directing career were a bit more checkered, but remain worthy of attention for the gems they occasionally yield.
Following the disastrous reception of his 1964 sex comedy, Kiss Me Stupid, Wilder turned his attention to a black comedy that would introduce the first pairing of Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau.
Called The Fortune Cookie, the premise dealt with a TV news cameraman working for CBS, who is filming a football game when he is suddenly knocked unconscious by one of the players. Matthau is Lemmon’s attorney, known in the business as “Whiplash Willie”. He concocts a scheme for Lemmon to fake an injury and bilk the insurance company for all he can get. Along the way, Lemmon’s conscience gets the better of him, and before long the scheme starts to come apart at the seams. Filmed in black and white (which was already unusual – especially for a comedy – in 1966), the film had a seedy, unpleasant tone to most of it. It wasn’t terribly popular, though Lemmon and Matthau would go on to be teamed together in a number of comedies over the next thirty years, including two more films with Wilder.
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes was an unusual effort for Wilder, but ranks as one of his strongest films of the late period of his career.
Consisting of a couple Holmes stories, Robert Stephens and Colin Blakely were Holmes and Dr. Watson, giving two fine performances. The problem with the film is that it sometimes verges between the level of the epic roadshow productions so popular during this period, while also wanting to be a more intimate “study” of the Holmes character. The story of the film’s recutting, however, makes Wilder’s “original” cut one of the most sought-after missing films. Edited down significantly, the cut footage has been lost. Clearly a sumptuous production, the film suffered from this tampering, and remains a case of “what could have been”.
Avanti!, released in 1972, is Wilder’s last masterpiece.
Its direction shows the assured hand of a master artist working in total control of the film’s themes, characters and narrative. The film is aided greatly by the location photography, and sumptuous production design by Ferdinando Scarfiotti. After a quick but funny opening sequence, the film’s credits are presented over shots of sunlight poking out above the clouds, in a series of beautiful images taken from the window of an airplane.
The premise finds Jack Lemmon making an unexpected trip to Italy to claim the body of his father who has just passed away. While there, he finds that his father was having an affair with another woman, who died in the car crash along with him. Lemmon, a high-strung, tightly-wound business type, is horrified at this discovery. He meets the daughter of the woman who his father was having an affair with, and before long, finds himself loosening up and learning to enjoy life – and even falling in love along the way.
Avanti! was really the first of Wilder’s films to take advantage of the relaxed censorship of the period. It’s an “adult” film in many ways, but never tasteless or crude. It’s interesting to see how Wilder handles the subject matter, since he was – perhaps more than any other filmmaker – really responsible for breaking the taboos of what was acceptable on the screen in films like Some Like it Hot and The Apartment.
Avanti! is a beautiful film, and never suffers for taking advantage of its R rating.
After a relatively uninteresting adaptation of The Front Page, this time starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau and released in 1974, Wilder returned to a subject that he had first explored so intriguingly in Sunset Blvd.
The film, Fedora, is an extremely bold and ambitious effort, and if it falls flat at times, it is only because Wilder had dissected Hollywood so mercilessly 28 years earlier. The film stars William Holden as a Hollywood producer who is trying to track down a faded star to bring back to the screen. As he attempts to locate her whereabouts, he uncovers a surprising secret. Where the film is most successful is in Wilder’s feelings toward late-70s Hollywood, conveyed in Holden’s dialog. It’s interesting to see how his own feelings on the industry had changed by that point, especially since Hollywood was in the process of re-grouping into a sort of corporate conglomeration that resembled the worst aspects of the old studio system, with little of the creativity or risk-taking.
Ironically, Wilder’s final film, Buddy Buddy, went out on a sour note.
A raunchy, tasteless comedy about a businessman who gets tangled up with a mob hit man, Lemmon and Matthau were again the leads, but this time the comedy was forced, mean-spirited and crude. It represented Wilder’s worst tendencies as both screenwriter and director, recalling the kind of humor he’d indulged in with Kiss Me Stupid. The film feels tired, as if Wilder was sort of just trying to see how many crude jokes he could cram in and get away with. It lacks the wit, polish and sparkle of his best work, and even his lesser efforts, for that matter. It’s also a bit of a downer for a comedy, with its repeated references to suicide and murder. Lemmon and Matthau are far from their best here.
As a “team”, they would be absent from the screen for another 12 years before being reunited in Grumpy Old Men, a vehicle far more worthy of their talents, and would continue appearing in several more films together until 1998.
Even though his last film was generally a disappointment, Wilder remains one of Hollywood’s real legends, a talented craftsman and a unique artist, whose best work retains its power and feels as fresh as the day it was released.
