Film · Hollywood

Billy Wilder

1906–2002 · Austrian-American

Classical Hollywood; film noir and sophisticated comedy

Billy Wilder began as a Berlin journalist and screenwriter, fled the Nazis in 1933, and became the most quotable writer-director in Hollywood. He moved between corrosive noir and bruising comedy without much changing register, and won six Academy Awards. He always wrote with a partner — Charles Brackett, then I. A. L. Diamond — and kept in his office the question 'How would Lubitsch do it?'

How to spot them

▸Cynicism with a wisecrack: a hustler narrating his own downfall in flashback, sometimes already dead
▸A writer-director who always shared the screenplay credit with one collaborator
▸Last lines that land like a punch, and a taste for the shabby hotel room and the office pool
▸A European exile's eye on American appetite — money, fame, sex and self-deception
▸Stars used against type: Fred MacMurray as a killer, James Cagney at machine-gun speed, Jack Lemmon as everyman

Key films

An insurance salesman and a housewife with an anklet plot a fall from a moving train (1944)

Double Indemnity — co-written with Raymond Chandler, who loathed working with him.

Four days of a novelist's drinking binge in New York, and a typewriter he cannot pawn on Yom Kippur (1945)

The Lost Weekend — Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay.

A silent-film star waits in a decaying mansion for a comeback, narrated by the man floating face down in her pool (1950)

Sunset Boulevard — Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond, with Erich von Stroheim as her butler.

A reporter keeps a man trapped underground to spin out his own exclusive (1951)

Ace in the Hole — a commercial disaster on release, now regarded as his fiercest film.

Prisoners of war hunt a stool pigeon in a German camp barracks (1953)

Stalag 17 — William Holden won Best Actor.

A subway grating, a white pleated dress, and a husband left alone in the city for the summer (1955)

The Seven Year Itch — the Marilyn Monroe image that outgrew the film.

Two Chicago musicians hide from the mob in an all-woman band, and a millionaire shrugs off the final revelation (1959)

Some Like It Hot — Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe; the last line is 'Nobody's perfect'.

A junior clerk lends his flat to executives for their affairs, and strains spaghetti with a tennis racket (1960)

The Apartment — he took Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay in one night.

Quick-fire facts

•Born on 22 June 1906 in Sucha, then Austria-Hungary and now Poland; he left Berlin for Paris after the Reichstag fire in 1933 and reached Hollywood in 1934
•His mother, grandmother and stepfather were murdered in the Holocaust; after the war he supervised film-making in the American zone of occupied Germany
•He won six Academy Awards, and was the first person to take producer, director and writer Oscars for the same film
•The Apartment was the last black-and-white film to win Best Picture until Schindler's List in 1993
•He co-wrote Ninotchka (1939) for Ernst Lubitsch, whose 'touch' he spent his career trying to reproduce
•Charles Brackett was his writing partner from 1938 to 1950; I. A. L. Diamond from 1957 to the end
•Some Like It Hot was refused a Production Code seal and released without one; it later topped the AFI list of the hundred funniest American films
•He received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1986 and the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 1988
•A serious art collector, he sold part of his collection at auction for some $32 million in 1989
•He died on 27 March 2002, aged 95; his gravestone reads 'I'm a writer but then nobody's perfect'

Drill it — 10 cards

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Sources

Senses of Cinema — Great Directors: Billy Wilder
Cameron Crowe — Conversations with Wilder