On Sunset Boulevard

by Ed Sikov

  The restaurant scene, in which Ninotchka breaks her shell of Soviet functionalism, remains not only a beautifully built piece of writing, but more important, a finely constructed piece of cinema. When the script was published in 1941, the critic Otis Ferguson went so far as to declare that Ninotchka (which he’d reviewed quite favorably as a film) worked not because of either Lubitsch or Garbo, but because of its “absolutely stunning screenplay by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder and Walter Reisch.” Without taking away from the writers’ achievement, however, one must note Lubitsch’s exceptional graciousness and generosity toward his characters. The scene begins with Ninotchka sitting down at a table in a working-class bistro and ordering “raw beets and carrots.” The proprietor is appalled, but he’s not in the least bit rude or dismissive to his guest: “Madame, this is a restaurant, not a meadow,” he replies. As written, the line seems sarcastic and curt. After all, he’s comparing Ninotchka to a sheep or a pig. But Lubitsch directs his actor to inflect the line with a generous spirit—a sense of airy relaxation and friendship, precisely the kind of everyday camaraderie this comrade so sorely lacks. Later in the scene, when Leon shows up, their dialogue continues on the theme of felicity: “Oh, Ninotchka, don’t take things so seriously. Nothing’s worth it, really.” She asks what she ought to be smiling at, and he responds: “At the whole ridiculous spectacle of life! At people being so serious—taking themselves pompously. Exaggerating their own importance,” after which he tips his chair over, lands on his can, and sends a tableful of dishes cascading down upon him. He’s not the least bit amused, but she finds it hysterical.

  Ninotchka’s laughter, on which the film’s advertising campaign was based, is thus a mix of cruelty and empathy. She’s the one who needs to be brought down a peg or two, but he’s the one who lands on the floor. And yet it is her shell that cracks; Ninotchka’s laughter, so sudden and unmediated by political restrictions, marks the beginning of her life as a complex woman. Through laughter, she connects with Leon; she laughs because she relates to him. Soon afterward, she buys the idiotic hat and wears it—not because it makes her look good, but because it’s silly and irrelevant. When she shows up at Leon’s door with the funnel perched on her head, she asks, “I don’t look too foolish?” Garbo delivers the line with the slightest of smiles and just a touch of embarrassment. Still, Ninotchka knows she doesn’t look foolish precisely because she transcends it; she’s radiant enough, alive enough, to sport a dunce cap.

  Later, drunk, she delivers the film’s overarching message: “Comrades! People of the world! The revolution is on the march! I know, bombs will fall. Civilization will crumble. But not yet! Please—wait. What’s the hurry? Give us our moment. Let’s be happy! We’re happy, aren’t we, Leon? … So happy, and so tired.” And at that she passes out in his arms. What’s striking here is not the escapism of the words but the weariness of the woman who utters them—the tired despair that drives her to seek refuge from the truth.

  Swana appears in the morning and points out some pertinent facts: “Yes, I know exactly how you feel, my dear. The morning after always does look grim if you happen to be wearing last night’s dress.” Swana has successfully gained possession of the jewels and offers to make a deal with Ninotchka: she offers to renounce her claim if Ninotchka leaves Leon and goes back to Moscow immediately.

  When Leon declares that he’s in love with Ninotchka, Swana isn’t impressed: “But Leon! This has the ugly sound of regeneration!” For Lubitsch, his writers, and the worldwide audience in 1939, though, the possibility of regenerating must not have sounded quite as unpleasant as it does to Swana. In the spirit of renewal, Leon and Ninotchka end up together in the gloriously remote and exotic city of Constantinople. East as well as West, the ancient capital of Byzantium becomes new again—a place of regeneration at what must have seemed like the end of the earth.

  Ninotchka’s preview, held in Long Beach, was a success. Afterward, Brackett, Wilder, and Reisch accompanied Lubitsch back to Hollywood in the studio limousine. Wilder reports on Lubitsch’s behavior as he read the preview cards filled out by the audience: “He had this very serious expression as he was reading, and you could tell that it was pretty positive. Well, he gets to this one card and he just stares at it for a while and then he breaks into this howl of laughter. He was rocking back and forth on the seat and pounding it with one hand. We were looking at each other and wondering what the hell was so funny. Finally, he hands me the card and this is what it said: ‘Great picture. Funniest film I ever saw. I laughed so hard I peed in my girlfriend’s hand.’”

  Ninotchka premiered in early October 1939, to appreciative reviews, and it became a reasonably good-size hit. But L. B. Mayer wasn’t impressed. Mayer compared Ninotchka unfavorably with any run-of-the-mill Andy Hardy movie: “A Hardy picture cost $25,000 less than Lubitsch was paid alone, but any good Hardy picture made $500,000 more than Ninotchka made.” In fact, Ninotchka made $2.2 million worldwide. And, since Lubitsch was paid a total of $147,500 with his two-picture contract for Ninotchka and The Shop Around the Corner, Mayer was just being petty. (Andy Hardy pictures may have been cheap, but they certainly cost more than $48,750.) Ninotchka resonated with audiences more than Mayer expected. By then, bombs were falling, civilization was crumbling, and Ninotchka’s plea—“Give us our moment”—was all the more poignant.

  Despite his philistine misgivings, Mayer thought Lubitsch was worth another try. In November, MGM commissioned a new screenplay to be written by Lubitsch, Wilder, and Jacques Théry. It was called Heil Darling! The three émigrés were attempting to put romantic comedy to the service of propaganda: Heil Darling! was about a cynical, self-serving foreign correspondent for ABC radio in Vienna who falls in love with a Nazi doctor. Both are rehabilitated. Paul Kohner negotiated Billy’s end of the deal. A rights question arose, since Wilder and Théry had come up with an earlier treatment of Heil Darling! while employed by Paramount. But Paramount told them the studio had no right or title to the property, and the authors were free to do with it what they wished. Around December 8, the three screenwriters delivered a draft of Heil Darling! to MGM. By the end of the month they’d been paid, after which their screenplay disappeared into the studio’s files. No one else appears to have been interested in pulling laughs out of a brittle Nazi’s love affair with a cocky, politically indifferent reporter.

  Even at the time it was written, Heil Darling! was a morally precarious tale disguised by a stock romantic-comedy plot; history only renders it more appalling by degree. Set in Vienna and Berlin in March and April of 1938, Wilder and Théry’s treatment of Heil Darling! lays out this most peculiar comedy in a cheery, ghastly arc. (What Lubitsch contributed is unclear, since the actual screenplay is lost.) “Listen, babe,” Josh Crocker tells his journalist buddy on the evening of March 11, when he fails to see why he should ignore the imminent Anschluss in favor of a Viennese all-girl band. “The Germans are always massing on some border. You’re talking like a fish. Nothing will happen, except that we’ll lose the gals. You ought to see them! Oh, stop talking about Hitler.” In the morning, with the gals having passed out in their dirndls, the boys—now a group of four—enjoy a roaring game of poker while airplanes and jackboots make distracting noises outside. “The cold facts didn’t dawn on them until Josh shouted for fresh coffee…. Josh felt as if he had been hit by one of the tanks. Personally, he didn’t give a hang, but he had talked his pals into muffing the biggest beat of the year.”

  When a rich Viennese widow named Wagner proposes that Josh marry her in order to secure her (and her money) hasty passage out of Austria, Josh accepts the offer as a pure business transaction. Since new Nazi regulations demand that anyone wishing to marry be certified as Aryan, Josh must undergo a medical examination at the Racial Bureau: “It was a doctor’s office, all right, but the walls were plastered with a variety of rather strange looking charts. There was a chart comparing an Aryan gall-bladder with a non-Aryan gall-blader, another which bore a series of differently
shaped skulls indicating the comparative value of the various races. No. 1 was the Germanic skull, naturally; No. 2 the Scandinavian skull; and so on down to No. 11, which was the skull of a monkey. No. 12, the last, was the skull of a Russian communist. There was also a map of the world, with brown spots showing which areas should go back to the Reich. Sudetenland, Danzig, half of France, and Milwaukee.”

  In the centerpiece of what is by far the most bizarre meet-cute Billy ever set down on paper, the beautiful but glacial Dr. Wilhelmine Mueller measures Josh’s skull and finds that it corresponds to that of the monkey. When the ardent Nazi physician determines that Josh’s upper lip is Aryan but his lower lip is not, she refuses to permit the marriage, at which point a further complication arises: Dr. Mueller is engaged to marry the head of the Austrian Gestapo.

  At first, Josh simply tries to sweet-talk Wilhelmine into signing his racial certification, but when they get to know each other better in Josh’s car on the way back from a pilgrimage to Hitler’s birthplace, they begin to fall tentatively, awkwardly in love. She explains Nazi theory to him—the uses of the rubber blackjack, the virtues of lebensraum, the return of German colonies. “But she really warmed up when she started on the holy mission of the Nazi empire to save the world from the Russian plague…. The moon had risen nicely and Josh gave out with a swell impersonation of Chamberlain and Donald Duck. In return, she recited for him the second chorus of the Horst Wessel song. They had a good time.” He asks if he could take her out some evening to enjoy the romantic beauty of Vienna. “She didn’t say yes—but she didn’t say no, either. Following that, he pointed out that the American equivalent for Wilhelmine was Billie. She found it strange but rather droll.” When he tries to kiss her hand, she heils him instead. “And thus began the strange love story of an American mug, descent unkown, and the blondest fruit of a certified Nordic family tree.”

  Billie Mueller’s ideological shell finally cracks along with her emotional reticence. Too bad Josh gets arrested by storm troopers. He’s thrown into the back of a car and whisked away to Gestapo headquarters, where Billie’s fiancé, the Gestapo chief Himmelreich, threatens to send Billie to a concentration camp unless Josh breaks up with her.

  Heil Darling! winds toward a clumsy resolution when four members of the German-American Bund arrive in Vienna from Milwaukee. Josh fixes them up with the orchestra girls, and he and his reporter buddies usurp their identities. Pretending to be American spies for the Reich, the boys travel to Berlin to meet with Nazi leaders. Wilhelmine, flown to Berlin on special orders, is told that she must leave immediately for America on an important mission. She says she cannot—for personal reasons. (She believes Josh has been arrested by the Gestapo.) “At this moment, from behind her a voice floated softly. ‘Baloney’ said the voice. She didn’t turn around. She knew.” In Heil Darling!’s happy final scene, “Wilhelmine and Josh stood on the sun deck, as the Normandie steamed up New York harbor. There was a lady waiting for them, with her arm outstretched, but she didn’t shout any Heils. There was a torch in her hand, you see.”

  That Nazi theories of racial supremacy might not serve especially well as the foundation of a Hollywood romantic comedy, even under the pretext of propaganda, seems obvious to the point of absurdity today. For the émigré comedy writers, the cost of alerting American audiences to the Nazi menace was that the genuine evil they’d fled had to be glossed, and given subsequent history, this central evasion is repulsive. It was one thing for refugee scripters to transform a humorless Communist and a selfish gigolo into a romantic ideal in Ninotchka. It was quite another to enlist a grim Nazi doctor as the new comedy’s love interest, especially when the racial policies Dr. Mueller enforces (even after she falls in love) resulted in the beating, killing, and quotidian harassment of real Jews, Gypsies, Poles, and Communists. The world, moreover, was that much closer to war. Still, the very tastelessness of Heil Darling! testifies to the bitter despair of its writers. Wilder and his partners tried to make light of something vile, perhaps as much to relieve their own private terrors as to sell a new film project to their American employers. Calling the Nazi racist Billie, on the other hand, was simply (if sickly) clinical.

  For Billy, Ninotchka’s success more than made up for the shelving of Heil Darling! The theme of regeneration and renewal, on which both comedies stood, found a parallel in his private life: he and Judith were awaiting the birth of a child sometime in late December. The immigrant was planting himself more and more firmly in his adoptive land. By that point Billy was an American citizen, having taken the oath earlier that year in the federal courthouse in Los Angeles (accompanied not by his wife but by Don Hartman, a screenwriting buddy at Paramount). The Wilders were living in Beverly Hills, though on the less desirable south end of town, in a rented apartment at 136 South Camden Drive. And they were making plans for their future as a family. In November 1939 they bought a piece of property on Tarcuto Way in Bel-Air with the idea of building a house. It was a charming piece of ground on a cul-de-sac; the back faced the Bel-Air Country Club. This was literally a most exclusive neighborhood; the Wilders’ deed specified that blacks and Asians were not permitted to live there. In five years, Billy had come quite a long way from the ladies’ room at the Chateau Marmont. He’d ventured even further from the little Berlin rooms he found thanks to his Communist friend Kisch.

  Just before Christmas, Billy became a father. Early on the morning of December 21, at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, Judith gave birth to twins. A baby boy, Vincent, arrived first at 6:00 A.M.; a girl, Victoria, followed at 6:08. Judith had carried them full-term, and they were both healthy and strong. In early January 1940, Judith and both of her babies left the hospital. The new family of four moved back in with Judith’s mother. When they sent out birth announcements for the twins, the Wilders listed their address as 8224 De Longpre.

  Billy immediately went back to work. His first project in 1940 was Rhythm on the River, a Bing Crosby musical. Wilder was quite familiar with the first few drafts of the screenplay he and Brackett were asked to spend a week revising. After all, he’d written them himself with Jacques Théry in the days before he’d teamed up with Brackett. He and Théry had called it Ghost Music. It was about a successful composer named Prescott who pays two ghostwriters to compose his songs for him—an attractive but naive young woman as lyricist, and a young man as composer. In the interim, Ghost Music had been going through the Paramount wringer, mostly remaining stuck. Théry himself began revising the script in mid-December 1939. Brackett and Wilder joined him in mid-January 1940. But it still wasn’t right—at least not according to Paramount executives—so on January 15, Dwight Taylor took over and spent the next five months changing things around. Even these alterations weren’t enough for the film’s star, Bing Crosby, who brought two of his own writers, Barney Dean and Louis Kaye, in to do minor fiddling before the film went into production. Wilder ended up sharing only a story credit with Théry. Rhythm on the River is credited entirely to Dwight Taylor.

  On February 12, 1940, Billy Wilder received his first Oscar nomination when he, Brackett, and Reisch were nominated for Best Screenplay for Ninotchka. In the kind of Hollywood event that inspires broad satires, Melchior Lengyel’s three-sentence idea was enough to earn him his own nomination for Best Original Story. But neither of Ninotchka’s nominations led to Oscars. When the awards were announced on February 29, the Gone with the Wind juggernaut proved too mighty, and Billy lost to Sidney Howard.

  At home on De Longpre, things seemed fine in February and March. Victoria and Vincent were thriving. A doctor performed a routine exam toward the end of March and pronounced both babies in excellent health. Then, on March 31, at 10:15 P.M., Billy Wilder’s son died. He was three months old. The cause of Vincent’s death was listed as congenital atalectasis—the boy’s lungs simply hadn’t been able to develop and grow, though the condition appears to have been a shock to everyone. Vincent Wilder was cremated on April 2.

  In June at the very latest, Billy was
back on the Paramount lot preparing his next screenplay with Brackett. His state of mind can only be guessed, because he has never publicly discussed his son’s death and what it meant to him.

  The script Wilder cowrote was called Arise, My Love, the title having been drawn from the passionate, erotic love poetry of the Song of Solomon: “The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grapes give forth fragrance. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.” In Paramount’s Writers Building, however, love was at a distinct premium. First of all, Arise, My Love was going to be a Mitchell Leisen film, and in Billy’s mind, Leisen wasn’t likely to have gained much sense since Midnight. In addition, war in Europe was no longer a threat. It had become a fact, and Billy was increasingly caught in the refugees’ bind. What could he do in Hollywood other than sign his name to well-intentioned pieces of paper and hope he hadn’t gone too far to offend any of the moguls? Hitler had invaded Poland in September 1939, so Billy’s childhood home in Krakόw was now under Nazi control. His past was threatened with full erasure—there was no way of knowing what had become of his mother and grandmother—and his son was dead.

  Added to the typical turmoil of Billy’s partnership with Brackett, these new tensions meant that life at the office was even more dangerous than usual. There was, needless to say, a lot of yelling. But once again, Brackett and Wilder pulled a fine piece of work out of their collaboration. In the years after its release, Arise, My Love was increasingly overshadowed by two other, more enduring early-wartime melodramas—Casablanca and Foreign Correspondent—but it remains a beautiful and emotionally rich work. The film’s producer, Arthur Hornblow Jr., is said to have given Brackett and Wilder nothing but a short written treatment to develop. It was about an American flier, Hornblow explained, who was involved with the Loyalists in Spain. Then, according to the story, the producer told his writers not to distort their imaginations by bothering to read the treatment he had just handed them, so Wilder and Brackett ended up composing the story entirely on the basis of Hornblow’s single-sentence synopsis.