Billy Wilder Films | Billy Wilder Filmography | Billy Wilder Biography | Billy Wilder Career | Billy Wilder Awards

During the course of his directorial career, Billy Wilder succeeded in offending just about everybody. He offended the public, who shunned several of his movies as decisively as they flocked to others; he offended the press with Ace in the Hole, the U.S. Congress with A Foreign Affair, the Hollywood establishment with Sunset Boulevard ('This Wilder should be horsewhipped!" fumed Louis B. Mayer), and religious leaders with Kiss Me, Stupid; he offended the critics, both those who found him too cynical and those who found him not cynical enough. And he himself, in the end, seems to have taken offence at the lukewarm reception of his last two films, and retired into morose silence.

Still, if Wilder gave offence, it was never less than intentional. ?Bad taste,? the tweaking or flouting of social taboos, is a key tactic throughout his work. His first film as director, The Major and the Minor, hints slyly at pedophilia, and several other Wilder movies toy with offbeat sexual permutations: transvestism in Some Like It Hot, spouse-swapping in Kiss Me, Stupid, an ageing woman buying herself a young man in Sunset Boulevard, the reverse in Love in the Afternoon. Even when depicting straightforward romantic love, as in The Emperor Waltz, Wilder cannot resist counterpointing it with the eager ruttings of a pair of dogs.

He also relishes emphasising the more squalid of human motives. Stalag 1 7mocks prison-camp mythology by making a mercenary fixer the only hero on offer, and Double Indemnity replays The Postman Always Rings Twice with greed replacing honest lust. In The Apartment Jack Lemmon avidly demeans himself to achieve professional advancement (symbolised by the key to a lavatory door), and virtually everybody in Ace in the Hole, perhaps the most acerbic film ever made in Hollywood, furthers personal ends at the expense of a poor dupe dying trapped in an underground crevice. Wilder presents a disillusioned world, one (as Joan Didion put it) "seen at dawn through a hangover, a world of cheap double entendres and stale smoke... the true country of despair."

Themes of impersonation and deception, especially emotional deception, pervade Wilder's work. People disguise themselves as others, or feign passions they do not feel, to gain some ulterior end. Frequently, though?all too frequently, perhaps?the counterfeit turns genuine, masquerade love conveniently developing into the real thing. For all his much-flaunted cynicism, Wilder often seems to lose the courage of his own disenchantment, resorting to unconvincing changes of heart to bring about a slick last-reel resolution. Some critics have seen this as blatant opportunism. ?Billy Wilder,? Andrew Sarris remarked, ?is too cynical to believe even his own cynicism.? Others have detected a sentimental undertow, one which surfaces in the unexpectedly mellow, almost benign late films like Avanti! 'and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.

But although, by comparison with a true moral subversive like Bu?uel, Wilder can seem shallow and even facile, the best of his work retains a wit and astringent bite that sets it refreshingly off from the pieties of the Hollywood mainstream. When it comes to black comedy, he ranks at least the equal of his mentor, Lubitsch, whose audacity in wringing laughs out of concentration camps (To Be or Not To Be) is matched by Wilder's in pivoting Some Like It Hot around the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.

The consistency of Wilder's sardonic vision allows him to operate with assurance across genre boundaries. Sunset Boulevard ?"full of exactness, cleverness, mastery and pleasure, a gnawing, haunting and ruthless film with a dank smell of corrosive delusion hanging over it," wrote Axel Madsen?has yet to be surpassed among Hollywood-on-Hollywood movies. In its cold fatality, Double Indemnity qualifies as archetypal noir, yet the same sense of characters trapped helplessly in the rat-runs of their own nature underlies both the erotic farce of The Seven Year Itch and the autumnal melancholy of Sherlock Holmes. Acclamation, though, falls beyond Wilder's scope: his Lindbergh film, The Spirit of St. Louis, is respectful, impersonal, and dull.

By his own admission, Wilder became a director only to protect his scripts, and his shooting style is essentially functional. But though short on intricate camerawork and stunning compositions, his films are by no means visually drab. Several of them contain scenes that lodge indelibly in the mind: Swanson as the deranged Norma Desmond, regally descending her final

staircase; Jack Lemmon dwarfed by the monstrous perspectives of a vast open-plan office; Ray Milland (The Lost Weekend) trudging the parched length of Third Avenue in search of an open pawn-shop; Lemmon again, tangoing deliriously with Joe E. Brown, in full drag with a rose between his teeth. No filmmaker capable of creating images as potent?and as cinematic?as these can readily be written off.?PHILIP KEMP