Like all survivors, Billy Wilder never forgot where he came from or what he had left behind. He was born at the start of the 20th century in Austria-Hungary and died at the start of the 21st in California, the inscription on his gravestone a nod to his most famous line: “I’m a writer but then nobody’s perfect.” Wilder, though, had a habit of of making flawless films throughout his career, a point proved by Almost Perfect, a comprehensive retrospective of his work, running at the BFI Southbank from 19 October until the end of the year. Wilder was an inveterate self-mythologiser, a film-maker with a brand long before there were opportunities for promotion through Instagram accounts and chicken shop dates.
He told a story of living in Berlin during his fledgling years in show business and being kept awake all night by “a toilet that was on the blink”. This is the man who made Double Indemnity, the archetypal film noir and the genre’s zenith, a film often imitated but never equalled. He was responsible for Some Like It Hot, a movie routinely voted the greatest comedy ever made, while his Sunset Boulevard is generally acknowledged as the best film about show business.
The Apartment, arguably his magnum opus, is rightly considered one of the greatest films in the history of the medium. Like Stanley Kubrick, Wilder mastered a variety of genres and displayed a range rarely seen in the profession. Ace in the Hole was a scathing satire of the newspaper industry, Witness for the Prosecution a hugely influential courtroom drama and The Lost Weekend dealt with alcoholism in a way that was unprecedented in the 1940s.
Even a lesser work like The Seven Year Itch contains one of the century’s defining images: that of Marilyn Monroe standing on a subway grate as her dress is blown upwards. Wilder was undeniably an egotist but he had much to be egotistical about. He was born Samuel Wilder in 1906 to a Jewish family but the name change in this case was not an attempt at assimilation.
His mother nicknamed the young Wilder “Billie”, having been inspired by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows, an entertainment she experienced during a brief spell living in New York. Wilder worked as journalist and taxi dancer early in his career, jobs that seem to foreshadow an almost pathological desire to observe people in all their complexity, as well as a love of the limelight. His screenwriting career began in Berlin during the silent era, most notably collaborating with Robert Siodmak and Edgar G Ulmer for People on Sunday.
All three men would end up in Hollywood having fled their home countries due to the rise of nazism and are among the most significant players in shaping the film noir movement, the fatalism of the genre surely a byproduct of the fates of their families. When Adolf Hitler came to power, Wilder fled to France. With some understatement, he said: “It seemed like the wise thing for a Jew to do.” He made his directorial debut there in 1934 with Mauvaise Graine although nothing about that film suggested what was to come once he arrived in Hollywood later in the same year.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
