Oscar Profile #165: Billy Wilder

Born June 22, 1906 in Sucha, Galicia, Austria-Hungary, now Sucha Beskidzka, Malopolskie, Poland, to a Jewish family that operated a popular cake shop at the local train station, Samuel (Billy) Wilder was expected to join the family business but chose instead to become a lawyer. However, instead of attending the University of Vienna, he became a reporter for a Viennese newspaper. He parlayed that experience into a job in Berlin’s largest newspaper. He became a screenwriter in Berlin in 1930, but moved to Paris with the rise of the Nazis. After directing his first film, Mauvaise Graine, released in 1934, he moved to Hollywood in 1933. He got work as a screenwriter through his roommate, actor Peter Lorre, a friend from his Berlin days.

Married to first wife Judith in 1936, the couple had two children, twins Victoria and Vincent in 1939, but Vincent died soon after birth. The couple would divorce in 1946.

Wilder’s rise in Hollywood was swift. Both 1938’s Blueberd’s Eighth Wife, directed by Ernst Lubitsch, and 1939’s Midnight, directed by Mitchell Leisen, were huge hits. His screenplay for 1939’s Ninotchka, directed by Lubitsch, brought him the first of his twenty-one Oscar nominations.

Oscar nominations for two 1941 films, Leisen’s Hold Back the Dawn and Howard Hawks’ Ball of Fire, led to his first Hollywood film as both writer and director, 1942’s The Major and the Minor. Further success followed with 1943’s Five Graves to Cairo and 1944’s Double Indemnity for which he received his third Oscar nod for writing and his first for directing. 1945’s The Lost Weekend brought him Oscars in both categories, the first two of six he would win.

1948’s A Foreign Affair featuring Marlene Dietrich, another friend from his Berlin days, brought him his sixth Oscar nomination for writing. He married actress/singer Audrey Long, whom he met on the set of The Lost Weekend, in 1949. They remained married until his death.

Wilder received some of the best notices of his career, as well as the enmity of some of Hollywood’s biggest names including Louis B. Mayer who accused him of biting the hand that fed him for his cynical view of Hollywood in 1950’s Sunset Boulevard, for which he earned additional Oscar nods for both writing and directing. He was nominated again for his writing of 1951’s even more cynical Ace in the Hole, a prescient film about the mercenary reporters.

Back-to-back Oscar nominations for directing followed for 1953’s Stalag 17 and 1954’s Sabrina. The latter brought him another writing nomination as well.

He had his busiest and most versatile year in 1957, directing the Charles A. Lindbergh biography, The Spirit of St. Louis; the romantic comedy, Love in the Afternoon and the best film ever made from an Agatha Christie source, the intoxicating murder mystery, Witness for the Prosecution, receiving his fifteenth Oscar nod for the latter.

The period from 1959-1961 was perhaps the most rewarding of his career during which he made three of the best loved comedies of all time, Some Like It Hot, for which he earned his sixteenth and seventeenth Oscars nods; The Apartment for which he earned his eighteenth to twentieth nods and fourth to sixth wins and One, Two, Three for which he returned to Berlin.

Wilder received his twenty-first and final Oscar nomination for his screenplay for 1965’s The Fortune Cookie. Subsequent films were not successful, although some such as 1972’s Avanti! and 1978’s Fedroa have become cult classics.

Wilder received the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award in 1986 and the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award at the 1987 Academy Awards. He died in 2002 at the age of 95. His wife Audrey passed away in 2012 at the age of 89.

ESSENTIAL FILMS

DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944)

Wilder co-wrote the screenplay from James M. Cain’s novel with legendary mystery writer Raymond Chandler. The result was the film noir classic to which all others are compared. It was nominated for seven Academy Awards including two for Wilder, one for the screenplay and one for his direction. Barbara Stanwyck’s portrayal of the murderous wife who lures insurance agent Fred MacMurray into her plot to kill her husband was the only performer nominated, but MacMurray and Edward G. Robinson as his friend, a dogged insurance investigator, are equally impressive.

SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950)

Wilder was at his most cynical in this screen masterpiece which opens with star/narrator William Holden’s corpse floating upside down in Gloria Swanson’s pool. How he got there remains one of the most riveting films noir of all time.

Neither Swanson nor Holden were the first choices for their iconic roles. Swanson was cast only after both Mary Pickford and Mae West turned the part down. Holden got the part when Montgomery Clift got cold feet two weeks before the film was set to go into production. For Swanson, a forgotten star of the silent screen and early talkies, it meant a comeback that sustained her for the rest of her life. For Holden, an amiable, if non-extraordinary star for ten years, it meant a change in his career that resulted in an Oscar for his next Wilder film, 1953’s Stalag 17 and a continuing career in which he became one of the wealthiest stars in Hollywood.

SOME LIKE IT HOT (1959)

Regarded by many as the funniest movie of all time, Wilder impeccably cast Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon as the musicians on the run from gangsters more or less believably masquerading as women in 1920s Miami with Marilyn Monroe in her warmest role as the dizzy broad who falls for Curtis in his second disguise as a Cary Grant impersonating millionaire. Veteran Joe E. Brown, however, gets the last laugh as female impersonator Lemmon’s millionaire pursuer. His closing line in response to Lemmon’s revelation that he was actually a man was so famous that a Parisian newspaper in its first page Wilder obituary in 2002 headlined “Billy Wilder dies. Nobody’s perfect.”

THE APARTMENT (1960)

Wilder skewered the layers of middle management in mid-Twentieth Century corporate America in the film for which he won three Oscars for Best Picture, Direction and Screenplay.

Jack Lemmon, Wilder’s favorite actor, had arguably his best role as the nebbish account clerk who loans his apartment key to the higher-ups for their weekly trysts with their mistresses and assorted pick-ups. Shirley MacLaine, in arguably her best role, is the elevator starter Lemmon has a crunch on, not knowing she is the mistress of personnel honcho Fred MacMurray in his best role since Wilder’s Double Indemnity.

The film has many memorable scenes, bout the best are perhaps Wilder’s replica of the man lost in the middle of a sea of desks copied straight out of King Vidor’s The Crowd and the film’s peerless New Year’s Eve ending.

ONE, TWO, THREE (1961)

Wilder went back to Berlin to film this uproarious comedy, much of which takes place at the Brandenburg gate which was closed while the film was in production. It was completed at a replica in a film studio in Bavaria.

James Cagney, in his last role before the retirement from which he would re-emerge just once twenty years later, gives one of his most vivid performances as Coca-Cola’s man in Berlin. Forced to chaperone his boss’s visting daughter, Pamela Tiffin, he has to work extra hard to keep his charge’s romance with East German Communist Horst Buchholz from her father. Arlene Francis as Cagney’s “yes mein Fuhrer” spouting wife and Lilo Pulver as a very sexy secretary add to the fun.