Audiences Are Richer for Wilder

For Billy Wilder to be voted the Thalberg Award--an honor for “consistently high quality of motion picture production”--seems so inevitable you wonder why it wasn’t on his shelf long before this, resting chummily next to his six Academy Awards. As a director, a co-writer and/or producer he’s created some of our most mordant and extravagantly cinematic images.

Think of it this way: Where would our movie memories be without Billy Wilder, one of Austria’s most addictive exports ever, right up there with the Viennese waltz and the Sachertorte.

We would have lost our most indelible image of Marilyn Monroe--astride a street grating in her white halter-top dress, trying so unsuccessfully to hold down her skirt as a rude jet of subway air blows it waist high in “The Seven Year Itch.”

We wouldn’t have followed Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis as they followed Monroe, wobbling on their high heels as they boarded the all-girl band’s Pullman car in “Some Like It Hot.”

We wouldn’t have had Barbara Stanwyck in “Double Indemnity,” implacably seductive at the top of the stairs, in blond bangs, a towel and an anklet, surveying a stunned Fred MacMurray below her. We certainly would never have had Edward G. Robinson’s great catalogue aria of the insurance business, a rapid-fire listing of the dozens of ways of suicide--which did not include leaping from the rear end of a moving train.

We would not have been inducted into the flannel-mouthed D.T.’s of alcoholism; we would not have suffered the horrors of that bat and that mouse with Ray Milland in “The Lost Weekend.”

We would never have learned that the bachelor’s best friend in the kitchen was his tennis racquet, or that his sure-fire tool on the corporate ladder was his latchkey, unless we watched Jack Lemmon wield both in “The Apartment.”

Without Wilder (and, let us never forget, Charles Brackett and I. A. L. Diamond, his impeccable and inveterate collaborators, or Raymond Chandler and Walter Reisch, his occasional ones), we would have been without “Sunset Boulevard,” and William Holden, narrating as he floats face down in that creepy swimming pool. We would have lost the chauffeur and “the waxworks,” the monkey’s funeral and Norma Desmond herself, forever big while the movies around her got small.

“Sunset Boulevard’s” acid observations about the movie business--its ability to lure, to cloud and to discard--seem exactly as correct now as when Brackett and Wilder framed them in 1950. His own insights might even have haunted Wilder a quarter-century later when he found that his industry now preferred the first efforts of film school graduates to the mature works of its classicists. Slights such as these continue to be one of the shames of a not-unshameful business.

They may have rankled Wilder too, but he rarely showed it publicly.

“I’m a wildcatter,” he said with bravura to a reporter in 1975. “I like going into unknown territory. I really don’t like making a picture that doesn’t have a chance of being a total success or a total failure.” He had always taken that risk, from “Ace in the Hole,” his prophetic portrait of the venality of the disaster-news business in 1951, to his grandiloquently daring “Fedora” in 1978.

Although he became more American than Americans, Wilder never lost his European bite. He may have co-written “Ninotchka,” one of the most ravishing of romances, and “Ball of Fire,” one of the sassiest, but he never got sloppily sentimental. Never forget that to Wilder, Joe E. Brown’s smugly satisfied, “Nobody’s perfect” at the end of “Some Like it Hot” is the perfect happy ending.

With the blackbird-bright eye Wilder has always cocked on Hollywood, it will probably not escape his notice that as a Thalberg recipient, he joins the wonderfully mixed company of Ingmar Bergman and Cecil B. DeMille. Some might even call it the perfect Billy Wilder touch of irony.