A Warm Look at Wilder’s Life, Wit

At the end of “Billy Wilder: The Human Comedy,” airing on PBS tonight, the great writer-director says that the one thing he hates more than not being taken seriously is to be taken too seriously. Director Mel Stuart and writer Robert Mundy, in their warm, brisk, one-hour account of his life and work, adhere to Wilder’s admonishments.

Of course, you want to hear more from Hollywood’s premier wit and storyteller and to see more clips from his evergreen films, but Stuart and Mundy do make the most of their hour and hit the high spots.

Because Wilder has been revered a long time and has been interviewed many times on film, Stuart and Mundy had plenty of Wilder footage to draw upon and incorporate with clips from his movies and interviews with friends and colleagues.

Most cinephiles are aware that he was born Samuel Wilder in 1906 in Austria (in a village 200 miles from Vienna, where he moved with his family at age 6) and became a newspaperman in the glittering Berlin of the late ‘20s. You might be surprised--and amused--to learn that his mother nicknamed him Billy after none other than Buffalo Bill, whom she had seen with his troupe while on a trip to America when she was a girl.

Wilder had begun to make a name for himself as a screenwriter when Hitler came to power, but when he arrived in the United States in 1934, he had only $11 and little English. After four hard-scrabble years in Hollywood, he was fortuitously teamed with writer Charles Brackett, a patrician New Englander (whose politics were to the “right of Herbert Hoover,” recalls Wilder). The unlikely but highly successful duo were on their way when Ernst Lubitsch brought them in for rewrites on “Ninotchka.”

Walter Matthau, his friend and collaborator--and this documentary’s narrator--aptly describes Wilder as having the heart of a romantic and the mind of a cynic, and Wilder has invited us to see ourselves in lots of less-than-noble types, among them “Double Indemnity’s” tough and murderous Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, “Ace in the Hole’s” ruthless newspaper reporter (Kirk Douglas) and “Sunset Blvd.’s” demented Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson).

Wilder’s people are real and involving, and he has the knack of making the unraveling of their fates vastly entertaining. “Some Like It Hot,” with Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis as inadvertent witnesses to the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre who are forced to don drag and join an all-girl orchestra (with Marilyn Monroe as its singer), is arguably the funniest movie ever made. And “Sunset Blvd.” surely sums up what the movies--past, present and future--mean, in their folly, grandeur and irresistible allure.

Audrey Wilder, Billy’s elegant wife, says of her husband, “All great men are difficult, and he may have been a headache but never a bore.” Indeed, Wilder announces his artistic credo at the very beginning of the documentary: “Don’t bore!”

* “Billy Wilder: The Human Comedy” airs on “American Masters” at 9 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28.