Masterpieces and Neglected Gems

The legendary Billy Wilder earned 21 Academy Award nominations and won six Oscars during his 50-year film career. He’s responsible for some of Hollywood’s greatest films, including “Double Indemnity,” “The Lost Weekend,” “Sunset Boulevard” and “Some Like It Hot.”

But the upcoming retrospective of his work--27 films to be shown during three weeks at the UCLA Film & Television Archive and the American Cinematheque--features more than just the best-known masterpieces by the Austrian-born writer and director. The festival is also giving fans a chance to view some neglected Wilder gems such as “The Spirit of St. Louis,” “A Foreign Affair,” “Kiss Me, Stupid” and “The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes,” as well as some early films he co-wrote with his first partner, Charles Brackett.

“He made more great movies than anybody had a right to,” says Dennis Bartok, program manager for the Cinematheque. “The span of his career is really outstanding.”

Most great filmmakers, says Bartok, only had 10 to 15 years at their creative peak. “Nicholas Ray, whom I think is one of the great masters of American filmmaking, only had from 1948 to 1960. There are a handful of directors--Hitchcock, Ford, Welles, Kurosawa--who hit that 30-, 40-year mark. Wilder is up there with the very best of them, not only in terms of the quality of his films, but his consistency.”

Notably absent from the series is Wilder’s first American directorial effort, the 1942 comedy “The Major and the Minor,” with Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland, as well as his last three films, 1974’s “The Front Page,” 1978’s “Fedora” and 1981’s “Buddy Buddy.”

“There are a few films that we didn’t include in certain instances because there were no great prints available for the series,” says Bartok. “For ‘The Major and the Minor,’ I think it’s really an entertaining film, but for me it wasn’t absolutely essential to include it. That may sound like sacrilege or heresy because it’s his first film, but again, it wasn’t a 100% complete retrospective.”

Andrea Alsberg, head of programming for UCLA’s Film & Television Archive, says that the school and the Cinematheque discovered last year that they were working on parallel Wilder retrospectives.

“We really wanted to focus on his writing,” she says. “I spoke to Dennis about it and he, at the same time, was working on a Wilder retrospective as well. He had so many films, it made sense for us to each do our own programs.”

The UCLA festival, says Alsberg, will give Wilder fans a chance to see “early work people wouldn’t even necessarily associate Wilder with.”

Among those early films featuring Wilder scripts is the 1939 comedy “Midnight,” starring Don Ameche, Claudette Colbert and John Barrymore and directed by Mitchell Leisen, which opens the festival Friday, along with the 1939 Ernst Lubitsch classic, “Ninotchka,” starring Greta Garbo. “Ninotchka” is also the first time Wilder received an Oscar nomination for his writing.

Screening on Jan. 23 is Wilder’s marvelously funny 1941 comedy “Ball of Fire,” starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck, which was directed by Howard Hawks, as well as a 1938 bomb, “Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife,” with Cooper and Colbert, which was directed by Lubitsch.

“The bombs are good, interesting bombs,” she says. “If something fails, why did it fail? It’s worth revisiting.”

The Cinematheque opens its part of the festival on Jan. 19 with the sturdy 1943 World War II thriller, “Five Graves to Cairo,” starring Erich von Stroheim.

“It is one of my favorite Billy Wilder films,” he says. “It’s tremendously exciting and atmospheric and has a great performance from Erich von Stroheim.”

Two of Wilder’s most underrated films from the ‘60s, “Kiss Me, Stupid” and “One, Two, Three,” screen on Jan. 28.

Deftly Tackling Topical Issues

“ ‘Kiss Me, Stupid’ is a film that really divided critical opinion when it came out,” Bartok says. “There were really negative reviews because it was so savage. The Catholic Legion of Decency even condemned it because they thought it was immoral, but it has an incredible performance by Dean Martin.”

“One, Two, Three,” which was released in 1961, boasts a comic gem of a performance from James Cagney, as a Coca-Cola executive in Berlin who discovers his daughter has fallen for an East Berlin Communist.

“Both films are really really topical,” Bartok says. “That is one of the incredible things about Wilder as a writer and director. He was able to tackle a lot of the topical issues of the time. He had almost a surgical touch. You look at a film like ‘The Apartment’ and he does distill a lot of attitudes, the desperate go-getting corporate frenzy going on at the time. People desperate to get ahead. It is what you see today [in business].”

Another neglected gem, 1957’s “The Spirit of St. Louis,” starring Jimmy Stewart as Charles Lindbergh, will screen Jan. 20 with Wilder’s 1953 classic, “Stalag 17.”

“It is your standard Hollywood biopic,” says Bartok of “Spirit.” “But Wilder turns it into something really amazing, by stressing the solitary, almost suicidal nature of Lindbergh’s attempt to cross the Atlantic and the loneliness and spiritual isolation that Lindbergh went through on his journey.”

Bartok is especially fond of 1970’s exceptional “The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes,” which screens Jan. 29, along with the 1966 dark comedy “The Fortune Cookie.”

“To do a film fairly late in his career like ‘Sherlock Holmes’ is really astounding,” Bartok says. “It is this beautifully elegiac period piece set in the Victorian era. You would never know that the director of ‘The Seven Year Itch’ and ‘The Apartment’ would be attracted to this kind of material.”

Wilder, says Bartok, “was in many ways the prototype of the writer-director. When we think of a lot of the other great filmmakers who were tremendous directors, like John Ford or Alfred Hitchcock, they were not great writers. But these protean characters who were able to sit down and visualize a story on a page and take it out and direct it, that is so tremendously difficult. Everyone in Hollywood at a certain point wanted to be known and still wants to be known as the ‘writer-director.’ So in a way that is the king of the Mt. Olympus of filmmaking and Wilder is sitting on top of that mountain with a savage twinkle in his eyes.”

Several screenwriters will introduce the UCLA screenings. Paul Thomas Anderson (“Magnolia,” “Boogie Nights”) will introduce his favorite Wilder film, “Ace in the Hole,” on Sunday, and David O. Russell (“Three Kings”) is set for “Sunset Boulevard” on Jan. 30.

The Cinematheque has lined up an appearance by Jack Lemmon for its “The Apartment” screening on Jan. 26; star Richard Erdman for “Stalag 17” on Jan. 20; and actress Evelyn Keyes for “The Seven Year Itch” on Jan. 21.

BE THERE

“The Billy Wilder Retrospective” runs Friday-Feb. 2. The UCLA Film & Television Archive screenings take place at the James Bridges Theater on the northeast corner of the UCLA campus. Admission is $6 for the general public and $4 for students, seniors, and children under 12. For information on the screenings, call (310) 206-FILM or visit https://www.cinema.ucla.edu.

The American Cinematheque screenings take place at the Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd. Admission is $7 for the general public and $5 for American Cinematheque members. For information call (323) 466-FILM or visit https://www.egyptiantheatre.com.