On Sunset Boulevard

by Ed Sikov

  For Love in the Afternoon, Wilder insisted on re-creating the Paris Opéra after the Opéra refused to allow him to film on location. Trauner calmly told Billy that they would just build a set. What? Billy exclaimed. The shot Wilder wanted began on the huge central chandelier. The camera was supposed to pull back as the lights dimmed and then tilt down, past the Opéra’s tiered balconies, all full of people, and wind up onstage as the conductor mounted the podium and the music began. The largest set available at the Studios de Boulogne wouldn’t have accommodated this grand vision, so Trauner built a tiny chandelier (“the size of a pear”), took some pictures of extras wearing evening clothes, cut them up and pasted them on a painted background. “His theory was that as long as the camera moves, the characters don’t need to.”

  Trauner had guts, a trait Billy always respected: “It’s this sort of illusionism, essentially simple but totally convincing on the screen, that makes him so unique. After having worked years in small studios with small budgets, nothing scared him. And in all the years I worked with him, I never heard him say ‘impossible.’”

  Love in the Afternoon finished shooting in December and was released the following July, but only after an additional voice-over was added to the final scene. Originally, Flannagan swoops Ariane into his arms and onto the train and kisses her; her father (Chevalier) remains on the platform watching the train pull out and, finally, smiling. There was no marriage, no promise thereof, or even any indication that the lovers ever planned to make their relationship more licit than the many afternoon trysts they enjoy throughout the film. The Legion of Decency threatened to issue Love in the Afternoon a C rating—“Condemned.” So Billy had Chevalier record a line or two: “They are now married, serving a life sentence in New York.” The Legion was only mildly placated. Love in the Afternoon, the Catholic watchdogs reported, “tends to ridicule the virtue of purity by reason of an undue emphasis on illicit love.” The Legion ultimately gave the film a B: “morally objectionable in part for all.”

  Still, this was no Seven Year Itch. With Love in the Afternoon, Wilder deliberately fought the 1950s. “There isn’t a sweatshirt in this picture,” he told the press at the time. The romance between Ariane and Flannagan is suggestive but not raunchy, delicate not lurid. Asked why he hadn’t tried to make a Lubitsch-like romance before, Wilder was blunt: “Because it’s too hard to do.” More to the point, as an American director Wilder hadn’t had the chance to be as fully European as he was—or wanted to be once more. The Seven Year Itch appealed to him because it was loud and glaring and coarse, but that kind of vulgarity was fun only because Americans were such prudes. Love in the Afternoon wasn’t just set in Paris, it was filmed there, with Wilder specifically encouraging the entire company to enjoy the moods and rhythms of the city before and after every day of shooting.

  “This is the city—Paris, France,” says M. Chavasse in the opening scene of the film. “It is just like every other big city—London, New York—except for two little things. In Paris, people eat better. And in Paris, people make love—well, perhaps not better, but certainly more often.”

  A street-washing machine approaches, spraying a gush of water from its sides. It sweeps past a couple locked in a passionate embrace and drenches them; they don’t notice. “They do it anytime, anyplace,” Chevalier’s voice-over continues against a montage of kissing couples. “The butcher, the baker, and the friendly undertaker,” who whips off the widow’s veil and kisses her. “Poodles do it,” Chavasse continues. “Tourists do it. Generals do it” (a shot of two officers smooching). Wilder cuts to a shot of a mustachioed man sitting at a table next to a head of hair. “Once in a while, even Existentialists do it,” Chavasse explains as the man parts the hair in the middle and kisses the morose young woman hiding underneath.

  Love in the Afternoon is one of Billy’s most sweet-tempered films and surely the most leisurely paced. It pales next to Some Like It Hot or Stalag 17 or even The Seven Year Itch, but perhaps the disappointment lies in the fact that the bite one expects gives way to a graceful bemusement. Lubitsch’s soul suffuses it; one can hear his voice throughout. Here is Chavasse describing Flannagan: “He’s very objectionable, and quite immoral, and utterly no good.”

  Thus, while America was reveling deliriously in the Jerry Lewis era, Wilder was turning fondly to the past—to the Continental grace he had been keeping more or less under wraps as a big-budget Hollywood director of the 1940s and 1950s. Ironically, though, Wilder’s most dismissive critics were French. Enthralled by American culture and jealous of its energy, the brash Young Turk critics at Cahiers du Cinéma—François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol—were drawn to the boldface, cartoon comedy of Lewis and Frank Tashlin as well as the deadpan cruelty of Howard Hawks. Wilder, meanwhile, was too restrained. Truffaut, speaking for the group, ejected Wilder from the panthéon des auteurs on the grounds that he was merely a “lecherous old chansonnier out of touch with the world.” Stylistically, Wilder seemed to be leaning toward the French cinéma de qualité—exactly the kind of filmmaking against which the French New Wave so rudely rebelled.

  Love in the Afternoon was beautifully old-fashioned. In addition to Trauner’s restrained design for the apartment Ariane shares with her father—shabby but nice, full of arches and doorways to frame and anchor those who live there (and in that regard it’s like Jack Lemmon’s place in The Apartment, only French)—there is Franz Waxman’s sweet-tempered adaptation of the old chestnut “Fascination.” As a grace note to the aura of reminiscence that pervades Love in the Afternoon, Billy reached back even further into his own past than Lubitsch and Waxman: three songs (“Love in the Afternoon,” “Ariane,” and “Hot Paprika”) were written by Matty Malneck, one of the jazz musicians he’d met in Vienna when Paul Whiteman and his band showed up in 1926.

  Produced at a cost of $2.1 million, Love in the Afternoon was a money loser for Allied Artists, but not because it bombed particularly badly. The company was chronically underfinanced, and in order to raise the money to make the film, Allied sold the rights to foreign distribution. The film did well enough at the box office, but Allied’s own balance sheet didn’t reflect it. “It was a flop,” Billy said several years later, exaggerating the case a bit for the sake of a punchline: “Why? Because I got Coop the week he suddenly got old.”

  The Mirisch brothers were hardly unhappy with Wilder or his ability to pull films together. When they left Allied shortly afterward to forge a new federation with Arthur Krim’s United Artists, Wilder was one of the first directors they signed. Their goal: high quality, low overhead.

  Schlepping around Paris in a chauffeur-driven, chocolate brown Rolls-Royce, Billy Wilder was riding high when he filmed Love in the Afternoon, and he intended to fly much higher in the years to come. As always, other less prudent men provided an ongoing warning about the transient nature of Hollywood success. Hawks’s biographer Todd McCarthy reports that Billy met Hawks for drinks at the Hotel Raphael at the time of Love in the Afternoon. As soon as Hawks left the table for a moment, a member of the hotel staff approached Billy and asked if he knew his companion very well; the hotel was concerned because Hawks had been staying there for a full month without paying his bill. Fortunately, Hawks still had some films left in him. Preston Sturges, also broke, was on the skids artistically as well, and he had been for some time. Sturges’s biographer Diane Jacobs describes how Wilder invited Sturges to one of the Love in the Afternoon parties, “replete with caviar and champagne on the set of the Ritz Hotel. That may have been Preston’s only meal of the day.”

  The following May, Erich von Stroheim died. Paul Kohner had to take up a collection to finance the headstone. Billy promised $100. Kohner had to remind him twice to pay it.

  In December 1956, Billy and Audrey sold the house on North Beverly. They could well have afforded a palatial estate on the order of, say, George Cukor’s, but they chose instead to buy a penthouse apartment on Wilshire Boulevard. They paid $55,000 and put an
other $50,000 into renovations. Their neighborhood, full of tall residential buildings with doormen and no lawns, is unusual in that it suggests New York or Paris more than it does Los Angeles. The flat, dull plain of lower Beverly Hills gives way to rolling hills again. The tedious grid of wide, untraveled streets is defied by Wilshire’s busy, sweeping curves. The Wilders’ is an elegant address. Their biggest problem in the compact aerie was always the lack of wall space for Billy’s art.

  In January 1957, while editing Love in the Afternoon, Wilder kept his mind occupied by preparing an adaptation of Agatha Christie’s mystery Witness for the Prosecution with still another new collaborator, Harry Kurnitz (he’d already tried and failed with Larry Marcus); by mulling over another Chevalier film as well as Egy-kettö-három; and by trying to buy the rights to Carl Haensel’s Kennwort Opernball 13, a German novel about the Colonel Redl affair. By March, he added Stefan Zweig’s Amok to the list of scandals he might like to film someday: a European doctor, exiled to the tropics because of a crime he has committed, performs an abortion and demands sex from the patient as his payment; she runs away in terror; he goes berserk (hence the title), tracks her down, and extravagantly propositions her in a public place before a crowd of gasping onlookers. Billy’s desire to shock the middle class was growing fiercer.

  There were two more ideas on the table by May. First was a $2 million Audrey Hepburn–William Holden picture for United Artists. Wilder and Lew Wasserman both confidently assured UA’s Seymour Peyser that the Hepburn-Holden romance, called My Sister and I (from the comedy by Louis Verneuil) would be Billy’s next film after he made The Catbird Seat for Hecht-Hill-Lancaster. Neither, of course, ever got made. In July of 1957 Billy talked to Rex Harrison about playing Sherlock Holmes. “This should be quite a combination of two temperamental people working together,” Louella Parsons wrote with a distinctly icy edge. “Billy never used to be temperamental,” Parsons continued in an absurd fib, “but all of a sudden he is taking himself big.” Parsons kept her own temper long enough to report the latest buzz: “Wilder is planning to stage a musical about the gaslight era in London in the manner of My Fair Lady, with sexy Rexy as the star. It’s said Wilder tied up the Sherlock Holmes stories both for his stage show and for a motion picture to be made later.” Louella was right on the money with this one, and early, too: Wilder actually signed the deal with Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate later that summer.

  At the end of 1957, the fourth Mirisch was ready to sign a two-picture contract with Harold, Walter, and Marvin at their new independent production company. The Mirisch Company was formed earlier that year, the idea being that a small and efficient organization could negotiate contracts, arrange financing, sign stars, coordinate pre- and postproduction, and supervise distribution and merchandising through United Artists, all without the unwieldy fat of a large studio. (No real estate, no array of on-site crafts and technical departments, no huge payroll, no bureaucracy.) Harold was president, Marvin vice president and secretary-treasurer, Walter the executive in charge of production.

  According to Harold, Billy hadn’t yet decided whether to do the Hepburn-Holden film next or still another idea, an update of a German farce called Fanfaren der Liebe (Fanfares of Love), to which he had acquired the rights. That one was about two musicians who have to wear disguises in order to find work. The Colonel Redl idea had evolved a little further by this point. Now it starred Charles Laughton. A New York Times reporter asked Billy when the Sherlock Holmes musical would be ready. “I wish I knew,” replied Billy.

  All of these plans were being made while Billy was writing, shooting, and editing Witness for the Prosecution, which Agatha Christie herself would come to find (according to Billy, anyway) the best film adaptation of her work. If she said it, she was right. The reason was simple: Wilder rewrote Christie’s play substantially, beefed up all of her characterizations, and didn’t tamper with her clever plot. The play had opened in London in October 1953. By December 1954, it was on Broadway. By June 1955, Hollywood was waving big money around. L. B. Mayer was interested; he wanted Clarence Brown to direct the film, and he thought somewhere in the neighborhood of $300,000 was fair for the rights. Mayer was soon outbid by the producer of the Broadway show, Gilbert Miller, who snared the movie rights for $325,000. The independent film producer Edward Small then bought the rights from Miller for a whopping $435,000.

  A certain productive chaos prevailed at this point in Hollywood’s economic life. The studio era was well over, and the deck had been reshuffled so many times in the intervening years that even the old careerists were growing accustomed to being on their own, free from the studios that once anchored them. One such stalwart, Arthur Hornblow Jr., had become an independent producer. At Paramount in the early 1940s, Hornblow produced Hold Back the Dawn, Arise, My Love, and The Major and the Minor; in 1955, after spending over a decade at MGM (Gaslight, 1944; The Asphalt Jungle, 1950), he produced the gargantuan Oklahoma! as an independent production. By early 1956 he was in league with Edward Small on the production of Witness for the Prosecution. Their first choice as director was Sheldon Reynolds. This was peculiar, since Reynolds hadn’t directed a single motion picture. Having forked over close to half a million dollars simply for the rights to Witness for the Prosecution, Small and Hornblow soon came to their senses; by April they were talking to Billy, who agreed to write and direct Witness for $100,000 and 5 percent of the gross.

  Central to Small and Hornblow’s plans for the film was Tyrone Power. Lucky for them, Power was very much interested in being directed by Wilder. But Billy had other ideas for the part of Leonard Vole, the handsome but irresponsible fellow who stands accused of the murder of a lonely spinster. Billy liked Power well enough, but he really wanted Kirk Douglas. For the role of Vole’s German-born wife, Romaine, Billy thought of his old friend Marlene.

  The Kirk Douglas plan went nowhere; there was a problem with Power, too. The glamour boy and box office knockout of the late 1930s was neither a boy nor a knockout by the mid-1950s, and he had grown increasingly depressed, not only about his career’s decline but also about his troubled personal life. He did not want to do another picture.

  Regardless of who starred in the film, Billy still needed to write it. He began working, first with Marcus, then with Kurnitz, to develop what he clearly found to be merely a skeletal stage play. The reason Wilder didn’t hire I. A. L. Diamond to cowrite Witness for the Prosecution, the story goes, was that Kurnitz had already been hired, but this seems dubious; Billy himself doesn’t seem to have been involved in Witness for the Prosecution until after he met Diamond. Maybe he didn’t fully appreciate Iz until after Iz was gone. Or perhaps Diamond was unavailable; around this time he was writing Merry Andrew (1958) for Danny Kaye. Whatever the reason, Diamond failed to get the job, and Billy specifically picked Harry Kurnitz to write this murder mystery because Kurnitz was not only an Anglophile but also an experienced author of mysteries—he wrote detective stories under the name Marco Page.

  Wilder started filming Witness for the Prosecution before any of the leading roles were cast. In the summer of 1956, while in Paris preparing to film Love in the Afternoon, Billy and Audrey hopped the Channel to London, where Billy did some exterior shooting from August 9 through 11, whereupon he returned to Paris on the 12th and continued pre-production work on Love in the Afternoon.

  In September, Hornblow met with someone who was interested in the role of Romaine, soon to be rechristened Christine; Ava Gardner told Hornblow that it was Wilder, not the role, that attracted her. Billy still preferred Dietrich, though he told Hornblow that he’d go for Gardner if she was paired with Jack Lemmon. Billy was adamantly against another of Hornblow’s ideas: he did not want Rita Hayworth. In October, Hornblow traveled to Paris, where he and Billy met with Dietrich and offered her the role at a fee of $100,000. Since Power was out, they told her, she might be playing opposite Gene Kelly. This was most wishful thinking on their part. “We must face the fact,” Hornblow wrote to Small around this t
ime, “that with Power’s final refusal, even with the bait of Wilder’s direction we can’t continue to hope for a name for this Vole part.” Hornblow and Wilder then met director Joshua Logan for dinner, and Logan came up with a good idea—a young, romantic British actor named Roger Moore.

  Power was eventually wooed, partly because the producers gave him a percentage of the gross in addition to his magnificent salary of $300,000. Power and Dietrich gave Witness some star clout even though by the mid-1950s both actors were past their commercial prime, but the film really belongs to the third name on the bill—Charles Laughton. It’s unclear when Laughton agreed to take the part of Sir Wilfrid, the lawyer who defends Leonard Vole against the charge of murder, but he remains the central figure of Wilder’s adaptation. He was paid far less than Power—$75,000—but as Wilder explained at the time, “In our film it is Laughton who pulls the whole thing together. He is much more important than he was in the play. The puzzle is good, but it is still a gimmick. Laughton is a person, a man.” Laughton modeled Sir Wilfrid on a British lawyer named Florance Guedella, who’d been his own lawyer as well as Dietrich’s. Guedella had a nervous tic—he would twirl his monocle relentlessly while questioning a witness. The device serves as the bedrock of Laughton’s courtroom technique; as his biographer Simon Callow remarks, Laughton’s monocle reaches an apotheosis.

  Witness for the Prosecution began filming on June 10, 1957, at the Goldwyn Studios in Hollywood. In the play, Sir Wilfrid is a solid figure of authority and diligence; a responsible, brilliant advocate; a dull character. In Wilder’s adaptation, he’s a man of advancing age whose driving fixation on work has given him a severe heart attack, from which he is quite obviously still recovering in the opening shots of the film. In the play, the drama revolves entirely around Leonard Vole and his trial; in the film, the courtroom drama is heightened by the possibility that Sir Wilfrid will drop dead, having labored himself to an early grave. Wilder and Kurnitz wrote a bit of a gimmick into their script as well. In place of Sir Wilfrid’s innocuous servant in the play, Wilder and Kurnitz give Wilfrid a chirping dominatrix of a nurse. Billy handed the part to Laughton’s wife, Elsa Lanchester. Beloved as the monster’s hideous newlywed in James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Lanchester was an accomplished actress who was adept at excess, but she’s restrained under Wilder’s direction; in Callow’s phrase, she’s “less busily kooky than usual.” As a final touch, Wilder brought in seventy-six-year-old Una O’Connor to repeat the role she played onstage—that of the murder victim’s housekeeper, a fierce old Scotch woman with the personality of dried salted cod. (Coincidently, O’Connor also appeared in Bride of Frankenstein.)