by Ed Sikov
Wilder’s camera operator was noticeably intimidated at working for the master. Asked to make a small adjustment in the framing of a particular shot, he turned to Billy and began, “With your kind permission, sir.…” “This is a Spanish court ceremony?” Billy replied. “Permission granted. I can see what your sex life is like.”
Klaus Kinski, on the other hand, was not overawed by his director. The German star kept his feelings to himself in public, but he didn’t hold back in his journal: “That piece of Hollywood shit with Billy Wilder is over, thank God,” he wrote after Buddy Buddy wrapped. “No outsider can imagine the stupidity, blustering, hysteria, authoritarianism, and paralyzing boredom of shooting a flick for Billy Wilder. The so-called ‘actors’ are simply trained poodles who sit up on their hind legs and jump through hoops. I thought the insanity would never stop. But I got a shitload of money.” Kinski, a sexual blowhard, should have gotten along well with Billy, but he held his director in total contempt. This was nothing new: “‘From now on you’ll do serious movies with Herzog and comical ones with me.’ That’s what Billy Wilder told me when we first met at the La Scala restaurant. But I think the reverse is true. For a long time Billy Wilder’s so-called comedies have been uptight and anything but funny, and your laughter freezes in the corners of your mouth. And Herzog’s so-called serious flicks would be unintentionally funny if I did what he wanted me to do.”
Kinski is crude but correct; Buddy Buddy is joyless. Billy ended this, his twenty-fifth and final film, with a freeze-frame. Held in icy stasis, Walter Matthau puffs on a big stogie, and that’s the end of it. After directing the last take of his life, Billy turned to his friend and partner and said, simply, “Izzie, nice working with you.”
Wilder’s warped romanticism died a hard death with Fedora. Buddy Buddy is by far the meanest movie of his life. Ace in the Hole looks loving by comparison. When Kirk Douglas’s head bangs on the floor at the end of that film, Wilder tempers the harshness with a sense of innocence lost. Chuck Tatum acts like he’s on top of the world when the film opens, but fate and his own flaws cut it tragically out from under him. But in Buddy Buddy, even tragedy is too sweet for Wilder. All hope has been exterminated, even in the opening scenes, and the result is the lowest of farces coupled with the least forgiving of moral judgments.
Lemmon and Matthau’s well-honed screen personalities served as the basis of the film’s marketing campaign—the Odd Couple was back, the ads declared—but Wilder made no effort to follow through on that idea. This is not a comedy about a slob forced to share living quarters with a priss; the jokes don’t hinge on dirty laundry on the floor and rotten food in the refrigerator. This is a nasty comedy in which Matthau escorts Lemmon out into the middle of a sagebrush wasteland, urges him to vomit behind a rock, and, to the sound of Lemmon’s gagging up his last meal, pulls out a revolver and tries to shoot him.
Lemmon’s Victor Clooney is an uncompromisingly sniveling pest; Matthau’s bulb-nosed venality has never been cruder. The Fortune Cookie’s Willie Gingrich is adorable by contrast. There is no moral awakening, no redemption, no honor. The wretched Clooney’s single moment of triumph occurs when he successfully murders the star witness in a hearing on organized crime. His suicide attempts are laughably inept, but the laughs are mirthless. In a bare hotel bathroom, he stands perched, one foot on the bathtub, the other on the can, as he ties a knot around an overhead pipe. Then he stops to take a leak.
However unfulfilled they may be, Wilder’s other failures bear traces of affection and wistful regret. Here, there’s nothing—no hope, no grace. In the opening sequence a mailman delivers a letter bomb, blows his victim to bits, emerges as the film’s protagonist, and lights a cigar in celebration of his little triumph. When Trabucco calmly rounds the corner after his bomb goes off, Wilder gives us shrieking suburbanites rushing past him heading eagerly toward the calamity. With underworld stool pigeons living inside these bright, bleak tract houses and a hired killer on the sidewalk, Wilder’s America ceases to offer any good cheer whatsoever. Even the lines are sullen, colorless, miserable. “Premature ejaculation means always having to say you are sorry,” says Dr. Zuckerbrot. Cruelty still provides a spark of pleasure: “You know what your problem is, Victor?” Celia observes. “You should have been born a man.” By the time Matthau snarls, “You better drive, shithead,” one begins to dream of the glory days of the Hays Office. On the other hand, Wilder and Diamond still have a bit of fun, however obvious it may be. When Trabucco puts on his clerical collar to effect his escape toward the end, Clooney has a good question: “You wouldn’t have a spare dickie, would you?”
Trabucco, for one, has dispensed with his wife:
CLOONEY: You ever been married, Mr. Trabucco?
TRABUCCO: Once, but I got rid of her. Now I just lease.
The second Mrs. Clooney runs off with the monstrous Zuckerbrot, the Nosferatu of Southern California, a man who wears around his neck the melted-down metal from Mrs. Clooney’s wedding ring reshaped into an erect cock. The creatures who populate Zuckerbrot’s clinic, meanwhile, stare sadly at projected transparencies of sex organs in a doomed attempt to rekindle the spark of their long-lost desire. Like the patient who wanders aimlessly bearing the deflated corpse of his inflatable woman, Buddy Buddy is cinema in which love and passion have evaporated, and in Wilder’s view, neither audiences nor directors can revive it by sheer force of will.
Happily bringing in a bottle of milk from his doorstep, Trabucco’s second victim, Mr. Pritzig, departs to fix himself breakfast. Detectives surround his house trying to protect him, but just as the chief begins to ask him questions, Pritzig loudly chokes offscreen. The chief runs into the kitchen to find Pritzig facedown in his cereal bowl. He lifts Pritzig’s head, looks at the milk-dripping face, then drops it back into the dish with a splash. The embarrassing ways in which people die serve as the film’s biggest laugh getters. Later, Clooney triumphantly announces to the exasperated Trabucco, “I’m going to set myself on fire!” With the only joy generated in this world coming from inspirations on how to commit suicide, the vision offered by Billy Wilder at the end of his career is so much blacker, so much harsher than any of his younger filmmaking colleagues that such hostility, coming as it does from the last master of the Hollywood cinema, is sobering indeed.
The world premiere of Buddy Buddy was held at the Avco Cinema Center in Westwood on December 8, 1981. A celebratory dinner was held afterward at the Beverly Wilshire, where the Wilders, Lemmons, Matthaus (Walter still in a neck brace), and Begelmans joined Swifty and Mary Lazar for a meal of chicken marinara and smoked salmon.
“A comedy of sustained mirthlessness” was Variety’s assessment. Sadly, the review was penned by Wilder’s longtime admirer Todd McCarthy. “The tone is so off and comic imagination is so surprisingly absent that one must wonder what the rationale for the package was beyond an attractive-sounding deal.” The Hollywood Reporter deemed it better than The Front Page but detested it nonetheless. Time’s Richard Corliss declared that “Wilder’s antique vehicle is no more than serviceable” but applauded the effort, however failed he found it. Vincent Canby in the New York Times also put the best face on things: “slight but irresistible….” Canby was most impressed by the film’s small scale; compared to 1941 and The Blues Brothers, Buddy Buddy was a relief. David Ansen, writing in Newsweek, saw Wilder and Diamond as two confused dinosaurs: “From the evidence of their shrill and unfunny gags, they stopped listening to how people talk about ten years ago, when it was still barely possible to make hippie jokes and get a laugh from the line ‘go with the flow.’” As Diamond put it all too accurately, “I think if Buddy Buddy had starred John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd and was directed by a young filmmaker it would have had a totally different critical reception.”
Andrew Sarris, still feeling guilty, took Wilder’s last film more seriously than anyone else. “François Truffaut once made the bizarre criticism of Wilder that he was too much the Lubitsch-style comedy director to handle a
Germanic melodrama like Double Indemnity,” Sarris wrote. “I think it has always been the other way around in that there was too much shame and guilt in Wilder for him to fashion a comedy without dramatic infusions of humiliation and regeneration. In this context, the material furnished in Buddy Buddy is essentially too light for the glorious gravity of Wilder to take hold.”
Earlier, Jay Weston had had the idea of remaking Love in the Afternoon with Nastassia Kinski, Klaus’s beautiful daughter. Wilder and Diamond liked the idea, Weston reported, but they worried about who could play the male lead. “They’re aware it didn’t really work the first time with Gary Cooper,” Weston told the Hollywood Reporter while Buddy Buddy was shooting, “but I’m hoping I can convince them we can cast it properly now.” Then Buddy Buddy brought in a mere $3,014,230 at the box office. There would be no Love in the Afternoon. Billy Wilder’s career was over.
And his friends had no choice but to keep on dying. Walter Reisch went in March 1983, a victim of pancreatic cancer, thus ending yet another fifty-year friendship. A few weeks later, after Billy presented the Best Director Oscar (to Richard Attenborough, for Gandhi), he was characteristically morose when he faced the reporters backstage: “I’m doing this so my relatives in Vienna will know I’m still alive.” There were, perhaps needless to say, no more relatives in Vienna. Susan Sarandon recalls another remark: “I ran into him at the Academy Awards, and I said, ‘Mr. Wilder! Why are you here?’ And he said, ‘People think I’m dead.’”
At a Film Society of Lincoln Center tribute in New York on May 3, Billy was irascible but charming. Toasters included Izzie, John Huston, Ginger Rogers, Austin Pendleton, Shirley MacLaine, Horst Buchholz, and Pamela Tiffin; Lemmon and Matthau sent their tributes in on film. The two-hour-plus event was telecast on PBS. “Hollywood has changed a lot,” Billy told the crowd in his acceptance speech. “Today, half the people you run into are on the way to China to set up a coproduction deal, the other half are on their way to Cedars-Sinai for a quadruple bypass. As a matter of fact, the entire industry is in intensive care.” Billy maintained an air of optimism, though: “What then about our industry?” he asked. “Is it really dying? Not at all. I wouldn’t worry. It has survived so much—the advent of sound and the advent of television and the Hays Office and 3-D glasses and Cinerama and Smell-o-rama—and it will survive inflation and insane interest rates and cable and satellites and Betamax and Atari and the Beverly Hills Diet. They can’t kill it; it’s too big, it’s absolutely essential—like water or oxygen or sex.”
“As for myself,” Wilder concluded, “I have absolutely no intention of retiring. As far as I’m concerned, this here ball game is going into extra innings. And I’m ready. I played winter ball in the Dominican Republic, I changed my stance, I shortened my grip, and I got me some contact lenses. There are still a few hits left in me—maybe even a triple or a home run. An evening like this is like a shot of adrenaline. And for this I am most grateful. So thank you indeed, you beautiful people out there in the dark.” Owing to the many technical misfires that marred the evening, the last part was cut off the telecast.
“Medals, they’re like hemorrhoids,” he once said: “Sooner or later every asshole gets one.” The Austrians gave him one in October. Billy was awarded the Grand National Prize, which included a hefty honorarium of $10,000; he donated it to USC’s Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies.
Billy had taken a trip to Europe in the early summer of 1982. He spent three days in Rome, where he received an award from the journal Filmcritica. The mayor of Rome showed up at the Campidoglio for the ceremony; so did Audrey Hepburn, who presented Billy with the plaque and a kiss. Some of the Italian cinema’s leading lights—Antonioni, Cottafavi, Rosi, Scola—paid homage and enjoyed a glorious buffet in the gardens of the Caffarelli villa. The next day, Billy was escorted on a tour of the Centro Sperimentale, the Italian film school. A trip to Cinecittà followed; Billy spoke for a few minutes with Franco Zeffirelli on the set of La Traviata. He was then introduced to first-time director Francesco Laudadio, who was shooting something called Grog. Fellini followed.
By the following day, June 4, Billy’s mood was strained. He was in no mood to listen to the series of papers delivered at the Filmcritica symposium held in his honor. When asked his opinion of the earnest exegeses on his work, Billy was blunt: “It is like listening to a funeral oration.” The guest of honor elaborated: “I’m annoyed when I hear names like Oedipus and Narcissus mentioned regarding my films. If I had proposed such a script to Hollywood I wouldn’t have received five dollars.” He was enjoying himself, in a mean sort of way. He invited the audience to listen to the notes he took during the presentations. With his notepad in hand, Billy read: “Go get shoes from Gucci. Tell my wife that the Bulgari jewelry is really too expensive this year. Don’t forget to steal two ashtrays from the Cafe Greco.” Having warmed up, Billy moved in for the kill: “Are you still translating?” he asked the interpreters. “I was waiting for more reactions and bigger laughs. Maybe the simultaneous translation isn’t fast enough, or maybe my jokes aren’t funny, or maybe your skill leaves something to be desired.” The guest of honor finished up: “It bothers me to always have to answer the same questions, so I’ll vary the responses: Bogart was gay, Wayne was a Soviet agent and Sylvester Stallone will be the next president of the United States. And to conclude: An homage at Lincoln Center in New York, a trophy at Cannes, now a colloquium in Rome. All that in the same year. This kind of vacation can kill you.”
32. IN TURNAROUND
The only thing that would break my heart would be if they took the camera away from me and wouldn’t let me make films anymore.
—Billy Wilder
It was all about his bad English. That was the reason Billy cited in 1986 for continuing to work with a writing partner. “I’ve been here for fifty-plus years,” he told the up-and-coming director Chris Columbus in an interview for American Film, “but I still do not trust my hanging participles or where to put the verb.” Billy mentioned another excuse as an afterthought: “Writing is also very, very lonely.”
He mused further on the subject of stringing words together into scripts: “Somebody asked me one day, ‘Is it really important that a director also knows how to write?’ And I said, ‘No, but it helps if he knows how to read.’” Wilder also took the occasion to offer some personal advice to Columbus: “Don’t slit your throat, as you will want to do when you see the rough cut. That is the most depressing thing in your life. Whether it was Ninotchka, sitting there with Lubitsch, or hits like Some Like It Hot or Sunset Boulevard, I always wanted to slit my throat because there was no rhythm there. You just think, ‘My God, my God! Is that all there is? It’s so bad!’ So I warn you. Don’t have a razor blade or fifteen Nembutals on you when you see that.”
For years Billy liked to say he wasn’t interested in working anymore—the system was too awful, current films too “mezzo-pornographic.” “They are also afraid that I will demand things they don’t agree with—afraid I’m going to make a fool of them. But I’d never do that, no matter how ignorant they are. I’m nice and gentle.” True, the newest New Hollywood—that of the 1980s—held little appeal for Billy, but the feeling was mutual. He regarded the modern, independent-production industry he helped to create with a sense of depressed contempt: “In the olden days you went to see an MGM picture. It had its own handwriting. Or you knew it was a Warner Bros. picture—Cagney and Bogart and the small actors that were under contract there. Now studios are nothing but the Ramada Inn—you rent space, you shoot, and out you go.” He’d inaugurated this system himself with the Mirisch brothers in the late 1950s, when it worked to his advantage, but thirty years later, with no new movie deals anywhere in sight, the studio system against which he once railed looked better and better. “Nobody talks about the picture, just about what kind of deal: Who presents? Whose picture is it? And all that totally idiotic crap! It’s a world with ugly, ugly, terrifying words like turnaround and negative picku
p. Although I think the two ugliest words in the world are root canal, with the possible exception of Hawaiian music.”
He wasn’t finished: “And only a fool would think that by kissing ass you will make it,” Billy announced, “because you are kissing the ass that’s going to be out on his ass a week from today and there’s going to be a new ass coming in.”
As he approached his eightieth year, Wilder maintained his office at the Artists and Writers Building in Beverly Hills and still kept trying to find work wherever he could. In October 1985, Steve Sohmer, the new president of Columbia, took Billy to lunch at Le Dome. Ignoring the fact that Pam-Pam, his first Hollywood screenwriting job, was at Columbia, and that the studio had paid for his one-way ticket out of Europe, Wilder told Sohmer that he’d dealt with Columbia only once before—when Harry Cohn supposedly sent him a bill to cover the lunch he’d eaten when pitching the Marlon Brando–Mae West Pal Joey. A few days later, Sohmer sent Wilder a note saying that a corporate audit had uncovered an instance of improper billing: “Accordingly, pursuant to Columbia Pictures Internal Audit Procedures Directive No. 417 (Correction of Misallocations), enclosed herewith please find check No. 229387 in the amount of Four Dollars ($4.00) hereby correcting said improper assessment.” It was a nice joke, but the lunch didn’t give Billy what he really wanted. He still didn’t have anything to work on.
In January 1986, with his eightieth birthday in sight, Billy landed a job: he was made special assistant to the new chairman and CEO of United Artists, Jerry Weintraub. The idea was for Wilder to provide wise, experienced counsel to an art industry run increasingly by twenty-five-year-olds waving business degrees. Weintraub began by screening one of UA’s upcoming releases for his new assistant. After the lights came up again, Billy proffered his wisdom in capsule form: “This picture is a big pile of shit,” he told the head of the studio. “Perhaps I could tell you how to make it into a smaller pile, but it will still be shit.” Ten months later, Weintraub was out of UA, and so was Billy.