On Sunset Boulevard

by Ed Sikov

  Harry stretches in his hospital bed and starts to swing his legs out toward the side. Willie cuts him off. “Hate to break it to you, kid, but you got a spinal injury,” he announces. “What?” “Your left leg is numb and you got no feeling in the first three fingers of your left hand.” “You’re crazy. I can move my hand and my leg.” “Sure you can, if you want to blow a million bucks.”

  Willie Gingrich is amusingly contemptible; Sandy is inexcusable. When Wilder introduces her on the telephone to Harry, he has her dressed up in a tawdry feather-boa’ed negligee. Behind her lies a naked man in a disheveled bed. “And stupid,” Harry goes on later to Willie. “Never read a book in her life.” He corrects himself. “Uh, she read one book—The Carpetbaggers. End of six months she was on page nineteen. We had no life together. No dialogue, no laughs….” When Harry and Willie go at each other in the scene in which Harry rips his back brace off, Willie snarls that Harry has no “guts,” but Harry turns not on Willie but on Sandy, bitterly calling her “that cold-blooded little tramp.” Then the phone rings. It’s Sandy. Harry climbs back into his wheelchair and reaches up for the receiver like a baby begging for its bottle. “Guess what?” Harry asks after hanging up. “Tinkerbell is coming back?” Willie asks in a particularly mean and sarcastic tone.

  Wilder shows little mercy to Sandy, but he sympathizes thoroughly with Willie Gingrich. Note the craven twinkle in Walter Matthau’s eyes when a nun arrives bearing a floral arrangement and asks if there is anything she can do; “Pray for him, sister,” says Gingrich, dripping with phony concern. Unlike Sandy’s, Willie’s mendacity is something Wilder respects. Later, when Harry wheels himself speedily out the door, down the hall, and into the elevator, he crosses directly in front of the same elderly nun. “Doesn’t it do your heart good?” she says. “I have a hunch he’ll be up and around in no time!” “Heh heh,” Willie chuckles, laying it on the line: “Look, sister, I asked ya to pray for him, but we don’t want any miracles.”

  Then there is Boom Boom. In 1966 Stokely Carmichael terrified white America with his militant call for black power. But Wilder, intent on making a film about black victimization, chose the unknown Rich, who went on to appear in only one more film before changing careers. Wilder seems to have gone out of his way to cast the part of Boom Boom as innocuously as possible. Either he purposely created a cipher into whom audiences could pour their thoughts about black men, or else he simply couldn’t deal with a magnetic black costar competing for attention with Lemmon and Matthau. Wilder did have other casting options, after all; Sidney Poitier was not the only black actor in Hollywood. In 1966, the muscular, eminently watchable Jim Brown had already costarred in his first film while continuing his professional football career. He played for Cleveland. (The team’s star player, he was excused from having to show up to film The Fortune Cookie.)

  Boom Boom’s blandness gives way a bit when he turns to drink, but by that point he’s already been emasculated by his own guilt. Two detectives, meanwhile, have staked out Harry’s place from an apartment across the street. They spy directly in the window, thanks to a camera with a telephoto lens, and they’ve bugged the apartment for sound as well. The lead detective, Purkey (Cliff Osmond in a Hitler mustache), lies on the bed while his assistant peers through the viewfinder. He’s bored, and not a little disgusted: “That colored guy has to dress him, shave him, feed him, put him to bed, carry him to the toilet, brush his teeth.… If that’s an act then I’m Soupy Sales.” His contempt applies to both performances; Boom Boom is no stronger than Lemmon. He’s literally Lemmon’s nursemaid. The detective is right: it’s not very pretty to watch.

  Wilder plays on contemporary racial issues without fully addressing any of them. The film’s climax occurs when Purkey, the detective, starts making remarks about how “our black brothers—they’ve been getting a little out of hand lately.” “Look, I’m all for equal,” he says, echoing many barroom and country club conversations of the time. “What gets me is, I’m driving an old Chevy. And when I see a coon ridin’ around in a white Cadillac …” Harry jumps out of his wheelchair and slugs him. His anger is all too easy—and all too white. Boom Boom himself never gets the chance to express anything more than guilt and, in the final moments of the film, forgiveness.

  At its best, The Fortune Cookie is about how rotten it feels to be a fake. Wilder is dead right—it feels rotten, and it looks rotten, too. Wilder was less accurate in another respect: audiences enjoyed feeling rotten, but only to a point. Commercially, Wilder reached that level with Irma la Douce. By attempting to outdo himself with his own acidity, the two films that followed were difficult for most moviegoers to watch. There is little enobling about The Fortune Cookie. The emotions it chronicles most effectively range from maudlin or sour sentimentality to thudding embarrassment and grandiose self-abasement. It is purely pathetic to see Harry Hinkle spinning around his dingy apartment in an electric wheelchair anticipating the return of a woman who doesn’t love him. Harry even does a little dance every time he moves. How elegant the gesture might be—if it weren’t insurance fraud in the service of lovelessness.

  Things go over the edge when Harry kicks Sandy. Wilder films the moment in its own separate shot, with Sandy, on her hands and knees looking for her missing contact lens, her body stretched out rump-up across the Panavision screen. Harry’s foot comes in from the left and knocks her smack to the floor.

  Wilder and Diamond explain the film’s title (however obliquely) in the fifth segment of The Fortune Cookie, “The Chinese Lunch.” Harry is watching a tiny television suspended from the ceiling of his hospital room. Willie enters, glances at the screen, and asks Harry what’s on. “An old movie about Abraham Lincoln,” Harry answers. Willie’s response is terse: “Lincoln. Great president. Lousy lawyer.” Willie’s charlatan “doctor” arrives, wheeling in a cart full of platters—it’s the Chinese food Willie has ordered for lunch. There’s a quick track forward as the doctor pulls the domed metal lid off a Chinese soup dish to reveal a plateful of drugs. “This is Doc Schindler from Chicago,” Willie explains. Harry is concerned: “You’ll be careful, Doc?” “I better be,” Schindler says in a singsong voice of experience, “because I’m on parole.” (They caught him doping a horse.)

  What happens next is very peculiar. Schindler, wielding a hypo, dives headfirst under the covers around Harry’s crotch. “I’m looking for a freckle,” he explains. Cut to Willie snapping his fingers in raw impatience, with Harry, offscreen, handling the punchline. (“Ow.”) A hatchet-faced nurse arrives at Harry’s bedside. She gasps in shock and horror as Schindler comes up for air. “He’s, uh …,” says Harry, mortified. Willie steps in quickly and covers for everyone: “We lost a shrimp somewhere,” he explains.

  Willie slams the cover back on the Chinese soup dish and tries to end the matter, but he doesn’t succeed. Harry says to the nurse, “I don’t want that, would you take it away? Take everything away.” “Are you sure?” she says with too much sympathy. “You eat it,” he snaps. “Don’t you even want the fortune cookie? Come on,” she says, waving it right in his face. “You’ve got to open your fortune cookie.” This seems more a taunt than an invitation. Harry cracks it open one-handed, reads it intently, then collapses against his pillow with a defeated expression on his face. “What does it say?” Harry quotes the fortune: “‘You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all the time….’”

  The Fortune Cookie is about fakery and shame; putting one over—or better, trying to put one over—is a central theme of Wilder’s career. But what is the nature of the pretense here? The overt subject is insurance fraud, but that’s only part of the deception. For Wilder and Diamond, a fake spinal injury isn’t funny enough on its own, so for comic discomfort they add a gag about sex and humiliation. Dr. Schindler appears as though he has just finished giving Harry a blow job; Willie’s reference to a lost shrimp only deepens Harry’s shame.

  Immediately following the opening of Harry’s disturbing cook
ie, Wilder cuts to a hospital room. Accompanied by the tense scream of a theremin, the camera cranes down as we reenter the terrain of Bellevue’s drunk tank, except that now, instead of Don Birnam, it’s Harry Hinkle under examination. And instead of nurse Bim, we find a group of doctors discussing nerve trauma and Hinkle’s paralysis. The doctor in the background has his back to the camera. “And what is your learned opinion, Professor Winterhalter?” The camera tracks quickly forward as he turns around. It’s Sig Ruman: “I have not formulated an opinion yet,” says the familiar, thickly German-accented voice, “but I have formulated a hunch.” “Oh?” says Hinkle. “Fake” says Winterhalter.

  Ruman/Winterhalter takes his dark monocle off and announces with a tone of abject contempt: “All these newfangled machines. Fake! They prove nothing. In the old days ve used to do these things better! A man says he’s paralyzed, ve simply threw him in the snake pit. If he climbs out then ve know he’s lying.” Wilder cuts to another doctor, who says in dawning horror, “And if he doesn’t climb out?” Cut back to Winterhalter, the theremin still shrieking: “Then ve haff lost the patient. But ve haff found an honest man.”

  Hinkle replies: “Wait a minute you guys, you’re not throwin’ me into any pit. And you bring just one snake in here—just one little snake! …” He leans up on his examination table, looks directly into the camera, and screams.

  The sixteenth and last chapter of The Fortune Cookie is called “The Final Score,” and in a manner of speaking Harry ultimately does—with Boom Boom. Having punted his chippy ex-wife to the floor, Harry turns to the man he snookered and victimized for companionable forgiveness on a deserted football field, a kind of comic relief in male-bonded isolation. One might call Wilder’s buddy-buddyism homoerotic—many critics do—but it’s devoid of eros. Osgood Fielding’s gaping mouth in Some Like It Hot is far more carnal than anything in the final scene of The Fortune Cookie.

  For Wilder, Harry’s erotic if pathetic attraction to the repulsive Sandy is as natural as his aching need for chaste absolution from Boom Boom. The sexlessness of these men’s relationship is crucial; it’s more antierotic than homoerotic. Wilder ends the film expressively with an extreme long shot—two tiny figures, set apart even from each other, engulfed in the vast emptiness of a floodlit stadium. This is not quite the evasion it seems. After all, Wilder is scarcely afraid of expressing homosexuality. Alone among directors of his stature, he gives voice to it methodically in his body of work, though it often seems designed more to rub Americans’ faces in a topic he knew would shock them as to express his own inevitably private interior life. Unwaveringly heterosexual in fact, Wilder is far more eclectic in his art, in large measure because he knows a little polymorphous perversity will appall and titillate the middle-American audience he never stopped viewing as insufferably hung up. In a way, when Schindler emerges from the vicinity of Hinkle’s penis, the look of horror on the nurse’s face stands as an emblematic tableau of Wilder’s rude goal with moviegoers. It’s so much the case that Wilder replays the gag in Avanti! with a planeload of passengers aghast at the sight of two men emerging together from a cramped airplane bathroom.

  It was in the context of The Fortune Cookie that the critic George Morris declared that Wilder simply couldn’t face the homosexual implications of his work. (For Morris, “the virulent treatment of Judi West’s Sandy reinforces this feeling,” as though the love of men and the hatred of women went necessarily hand in hand.) But how could Wilder not have faced them? He wrote them. Still, Wilder’s self-awareness is circumscribed. In his films, homosexuality tends to surface through and around symbology: Neff’s matches and Keyes’s cigar; Mrs. Minosa’s guilt-inducing votive candles; Harry Hinkle’s ridiculous lost shrimp and the threat of snakes.

  What Leslie Fiedler wrote in 1948 in regard to the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn holds true for The Fortune Cookie, particularly since it represents the sole treatment of race in Wilder’s career:

  The existence of overt homosexuality threatens to compromise an essential aspect of American sentimental life: the camaraderie of the locker room and ball park…. From what other source could arise that unexpected air of good clean fun which overhangs such sessions? It is this self-congratulatory buddy-buddiness, its astonishing naivete that breed at once endless opportunities for inversion and the terrible reluctance to admit its existence, to surrender the last believed-in stronghold of love without passion.

  For Wilder, “good clean fun” is impossible, of course, since nobody is ever clean, least of all his protagonists. But the football toss at the end of The Fortune Cookie restores precisely the kind of passionless love that Wilder appears to need, if for no other reason than to countermand Sandy’s despicable allure. If Fiedler’s theory holds, Wilder’s adoptive Americanism reaches its apotheosis in “The Final Score,” as Harry and Boom Boom join a line of sexless, boyishly miscegenating couples that stretches back to Ishmael and Queequeg, Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook, and of course Huck and Jim: “Behind the white American’s nightmare that someday, no longer tourist, inheritor, or liberator, he will be rejected, refused, he dreams of his acceptance at the breast he has most utterly offended. It is a dream so sentimental, so outrageous, so desperate, that it redeems our concept of boyhood from nostalgia to tragedy.”

  But the tragedy of The Fortune Cookie is compromised. This is the urban 1960s, not the romantic, woodsy or seaborne nineteenth century. Imagine Boom Boom responding to his dramatic ill use at the hands of his scheming white friend by embracing Stokely Carmichael’s justifiable rage and you see how essentially fraudulent his and Harry’s tragic romance becomes in The Fortune Cookie. As for Wilder himself, he scarcely got the nagging issue of male bonding out of his system. He returned to it in his very next film, and he did so much more overtly.

  The Fortune Cookie fared well enough with the critics, with one consistent theme: a phony spinal injury in a neck brace, a shyster lawyer, a weeping and hysterical mother, a tacky blonde in big hair and a fur, a betlaying nun, and the only decent human being is a black man, and the reviewers, all white, found him unbelievable. Vincent Canby, having taken over from Bosley Crowther at the New York Times, called Wilder “an unregenerate moralist,” his film “a fine, dark, gag-filled hallucination peopled by dropouts from the Great Society.” Pauline Kael admiringly found the film to be “very funny and very cruel,” though she believed that Wilder took “repellent advantage” of Boom Boom’s race. In a keener observation, Kael (sounding suspiciously auteurist) observed that “Mr. Wilder has a low opinion of mankind; when he scourges us, I suspect that it is not so much because he hopes to improve us as because he wishes to keep his own despair at bay.” (Strangely, Kael changed her mind completely on The Fortune Cookie in the years to come. By the early 1980s she was calling it “a sour, visually ugly comedy … which gets worse as it goes along.” As for the ending, Kael noted, “only Leslie Fiedler could care.”)

  Wilder himself is terse on the subject of The Fortune Cookie: “The film didn’t impress the critics and didn’t make money and it disappeared in the big garbage pit along with a year of my life.” The Fortune Cookie was not a total loss, however: “But it was very amusing to make. We didn’t lie, we said what we had to say, we didn’t compromise to make it commercially viable. But it’s forgotten.”

  Despite the commercial disappointment of his latest effort—and despite his own remarks about being cut off and shut out by his “old pals”—Billy Wilder was still one of the kings of Beverly Hills. Few directors could claim Billy’s lifetime batting average, both artistically and commercially, and nobody was better suited to serve as an evening’s entertainment in Hollywood. The Wilders were still at the top of the social ladder—among the highest-ranking members of an already elite group. He and Audrey were said to have “invented” The Bistro, then the most fashionable restaurant in Beverly Hills. “My pal Romanoff, you know, he closed,” Billy said. “And I wanted there to be a restaurant I would go to.”

  Kurt Niklas, the former c
aptain at Romanoff’s who became the manager and principal stockholder in The Bistro, observed that “when you’re a captain everybody tells you, ‘If you ever want to open your own restaurant, come and see me.’ It’s all baloney. It never happens. Billy was the only one I knew would be as good as his word. So when Romanoff’s closed, I went to him. Within twenty-four hours Billy had checks in the mail for $90,000.” Audrey helped, too: “We have sixty stockholders,” Niklas explained, “and the people Billy didn’t get, his wife got.” Originally, Wilder envisioned a rustic, casual sort of place with checkered tablecloths and sawdust on the floor. Audrey’s tastes prevailed, aided by Alex Trauner’s: The Bistro ended up with red carpeting, elegant dark paneling, some of the set pieces from Irma la Douce, and a lot of mirrors on the walls so that diners could spy on other tables. Billy was nonplussed. Recycling an old gag from Sunset Boulevard, he said that “the background starts out to be a flower shop and winds up as a PT boat.”

  Art and cards continued to be Billy’s passions. A bridge game met every Saturday—and Sunday. Alfred Sheinwold, the professional bridge player and nationally syndicated columnist, was a recurrent guest. “Billy is a regular winner in that game, and not because he’s a great technician,” said Scheinwold in 1966. “He can’t be bothered with that. He’s a good technician, but more than anybody else, he plays the people. Bridge players use an expression, ‘He always knows where the queen of spades is.’ The expert may try all sorts of discovery plays to find that out. Billy just looks at the people and knows.” MCA’s Lew Wasserman was cajoled into joining one of these weekend matches, despite his demurral on the grounds of being out of practice. Billy was only too happy to teach him how to play again: “You know, for a fellow who hasn’t played for a year, he certainly played badly.”