Irreverence With a Twinkle

Billy Wilder, who died Wednesday night at age 95, was once asked by a magazine if there was any film he had wanted to make but had been unable to. Well, yes, Wilder replied, there was his film about the Crusades. Those tidings were preposterous enough, because Wilder was, if nothing else, Hollywood’s most acerbic and sharp-eyed observer of strictly contemporary manners and mores.

But he went on: His story, he said, was set in a small European village from which all the men left to join a Crusade. But before they left, they had chastity belts affixed to all their wives and daughters. His film, Wilder said, would be about the village locksmith, to be played by Cary Grant.

That was more like it, a synopsis that was pure Wilder: funny, sardonic, irreverent and at the same time rooted in a keen understanding of human character.

Wilder, who hit Hollywood in 1934 not knowing a word of English but became one of its most elegant practitioners, never lost his heavy Viennese accent, nor his cosmopolitan and essentially European vision of the ways of the world. His characters were frequently flawed or at least sublimely dense, like Jack Lemmon as the amazingly naive flic in “Irma la Douce” (1963) or the TV cameraman being manipulated by the larcenous Walter Matthau in “The Fortune Cookie” (1966) (one of Wilder’s best films, denied its fullest appreciation because it was made in the by-then unfashionable black and white).

As a writer-director, Wilder had plenty of attitude, to use a current word, and William Holden once famously remarked that Wilder’s brain was full of rusty razor blades. Yet most of the time, his view of his characters was less hostile than amused, and he regarded many of them, and their ultimate destinies, with a kind of melancholy forbearance occasionally bordering on sentimentality.

Joe E. Brown’s last line in Wilder’s 1959 film “Some Like It Hot”--”Nobody’s perfect,” as he responds blandly to Lemmon’s relating that he is a man, not a woman--is the most perfect tagline in all of Wilder’s films, perhaps in all of anybody’s films. A close second is Shirley MacLaine’s concluding line in “The Apartment” (1960): “Shut up and deal.” Lemmon, as the patsy who declared his independence, and MacLaine as the seduced and deceived elevator operator who has declared her own independence and found true love, are going forward with their lives, free at last. Who needs a sunset; a game of gin is romantic enough, Wilder is saying.

Many of Wilder’s lines, on and off screen, have assumed the durability of folklore. “France,” Wilder remarked after a visit, “is an interesting country. The money falls apart and you can’t tear the toilet paper.” The evening before they were to film the funeral of Gloria Swanson’s monkey in “Sunset Boulevard” (1950), the cinematographer asked what exactly Wilder had in mind. “Oh, just the usual monkey funeral,” Wilder told him. And Robert Benchley (often quoted as the author of the line) really did say, “You must get out of those wet clothes and into a dry martini,” but it was written by Wilder in his first film as a director, “The Major and the Minor” (1942).

As a director, Wilder had a knack for smart casting and the ability to get the best out of those he cast. Fred MacMurray protested that he was a comic actor and a sax player, not up for portraying the murderer in “Double Indemnity” (1944). Wilder talked him into it and into a memorable performance. Later MacMurray balked again at being the philandering boss in “The Apartment,” arguing this time that he had just signed with Disney for some quite different films. Wilder won him over again.

The words were always what mattered to Wilder, and his visual style as a director was unobtrusive and seamless. “None of that shooting from the fireplace; whose point of view is that? Santa Claus’?” he asked.

For all his skills as a director, Wilder always said that he would as soon have been a writer exclusively; it was just that there were no longer any Ernst Lubitsches around to do his scripts justice (as Lubitsch had done for Wilder’s and Charles Brackett’s “Ninotchka” [1939]).

As an instance of the writer’s perils, Wilder learned by accident that Charles Boyer had killed a scene, involving a cockroach, that he and Brackett had written for “Hold Back the Dawn” (1941). “I can’t talk to a cockroach,” Boyer had complained to the director, Mitchell Leisen, who went along with the logic.

To even the score, Wilder said, “Charlie and I wrote Boyer out of Act 3 entirely, and gave it all to Olivia de Havilland.”

The writing was on the wall, so to speak, if you wanted to protect your words. With Brackett’s help, Wilder got to direct that first feature, “The Major and the Minor.” “Paramount thought it would be a flop,” Wilder remembered, “and I would be chastened and go back to being a nice boy who wrote. But it was a hit.”

“We’re painters,” Wilder said many, many years ago. “It’s just that our canvases cost $2 million each.” (Some of Wilder’s films cost less than $1 million, most between $2 million and $3 million.) Today, Wilder said more recently, “it costs more to publicize a film than it did to make ‘Gone With the Wind.’”

Hollywood was changing in many ways, under the continuing impact of television and the rising importance of the foreign market. Wilder seemed unsure just how he fit into the later Hollywood, or how to find ways to make the kind of films he wanted to make. Into his 80s he still hoped to make movies and, like Luis Bunuel in Spain, he still had the stamina to do it.

He had been fortunate in his writing partners--Brackett and then, for nearly a quarter-century, I.A.L. Diamond. Wilder was devastated when Diamond died in 1988, and “Buddy Buddy” in 1981 proved to be their last film, and Wilder’s.

To the end of his days, Wilder was honored and courted, an icon with jokes, an elder statesman who stood for a kind of free-spirited, highly individual and opinionated filmmaking that now seems to exist, and only with difficulty, outside the mainstream.

For a time he was a kind of senior creative consultant at United Artists. “I’m sort of an old doctor, watching the kids do their first open-heart surgery,” Wilder said. “Not that I’ve given up surgery myself,” although, as it turned out, he had.

Driven out of Europe in 1934, Wilder was one of Hitler’s many inadvertent and unintended gifts to the culture of Western civilization. There won’t be another Billy Wilder along. What you have to hope is that other filmmakers in later years will have caught something of his irreverent and questing spirit.