Some Like It Wilder
SCREEN CLASSICS
Screen Classics is a series of critical biographies, film histories, and analytical studies focusing on neglected filmmakers and important screen artists and subjects, from the era of silent cinema to the golden age of Hollywood to the international generation of today. Books in the Screen Classics series are intended for scholars and general readers alike. The contributing authors are established figures in their respective fields. This series also serves the purpose of advancing scholarship on film personalities and themes with ties to Kentucky.
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SOME LIKE IT
WILDER
The Life
and
Controversial Films
of
Billy Wilder
GENE D. PHILLIPS
Copyright © 2010 by The University Press of Kentucky
Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Phillips, Gene D.
Some like it Wilder : the life and controversial films of Billy Wilder /
Gene D. Phillips.
p. cm. —(Screen classics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8131-2570-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Wilder, Billy, 1906-2002. 2. Motion picture producers and directors—
United States—Biography. I. Title.
PN1998.3.W56P45 2010
791.4302′33092—dc22
[B] 2009045857
This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
Member of the Association of
American University Presses
For Fred Zinnemann
Another exile in Hollywood
When you think about the breadth and scope of what Billy Wilder has written, produced, and directed, and then take into consideration that English is not even his first language, then you see that his entire output is staggering.
—Stanley Donen, film director
Contents
Foreword: Fred Zinnemann Speaking
Acknowledgments
1. From Berlin to Hollywood: The Early Screenplays
2. Champagne and Tears: Ninotchka, Midnight, and Ball of Fire
3. New Directions: The Major and the Minor and Five Graves to Cairo
4. The Rise of Film Noir: Double Indemnity
5. Through a Glass Darkly: The Lost Weekend and Die Todesmühlen
6. Wunderbar: The Emperor Waltz and A Foreign Affair
7. Dark Windows: Sunset Boulevard
8. Barbed Wire Satire: Ace in the Hole and Stalag 17
9. Fascination: Sabrina and The Seven Year Itch
10. Light Up the Sky: The Spirit of St. Louis and Love in the Afternoon
11. Remains to Be Seen: Witness for the Prosecution
12. The Gang’s All Here: Some Like It Hot
13. Love on the Dole: The Apartment
14. Love on the Run: One, Two, Three and Irma la Douce
15. Grifters: Kiss Me, Stupid and The Fortune Cookie
16. The Game’s Afoot: The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
17. The Perfect Blendship: The Front Page and Avanti!
18. Twilight Years: Fedora and Buddy Buddy
Epilogue: A Touch of Class
Filmography
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
Illustrations follow page 162
Foreword
Fred Zinnemann Speaking
After I finished film school, I got work as a cameraman in Berlin. I was fortunate to be the assistant to Eugene Schüfftan, one of the best German cameramen during the golden age of German cinema in the 1920s. One of the films that Schüfftan photographed was Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday), a semidocumentary made in 1929 about four young people spending a weekend in the country. The film was written by Billy Wilder and directed by Robert Siodmak.
I only carried the camera around and measured the focus, but I was pleased to be working with talented people like Billy Wilder and Robert Siodmak. The picture was made on a shoestring, and we had to stop every two or three days to raise more money. It was a smash hit, and Billy, Robert, and I all eventually migrated to Hollywood and became directors there.
My career in Hollywood in some ways ran parallel to Billy’s. For example, each of us made a picture in the ruins of Berlin after World War II, in 1948. I directed The Search, about displaced European children, and Billy directed A Foreign Affair, about the Allied occupation of Berlin. Both pictures were successful at the box office.
The cold war years, a period of uncertainty in the aftermath of World War II, spawned Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunt for Communists, and the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings. In 1950 Cecil B. De Mille, who was very right wing, persuaded the board of the Screen Directors Guild (SDG) to require a loyalty oath of the membership. Joseph Mankiewicz, the president of the SDG, opposed De Mille’s resolution. Billy Wilder and I, among others, signed a petition supporting Mankiewicz.
The De Mille faction sent out messengers on motorcycles late at night with a letter to each of us who supported Mankiewicz’s stand. There weren’t any direct threats in the letter, but there were heavy hints that our careers were on the line if we didn’t endorse De Mille’s resolution.
At the general meeting of the SDG membership, the crunch came when De Mille read our petition to reject his demand for a loyalty oath. De Mille said it was signed by “Mr. Vilder and Mr. Zinnemannnnn,” indicating that we were foreigners and that our petition was un-American. With that, the membership booed De Mille. John Ford got up and said, “Cecil, you’re a good picture maker, but I don’t like what you stand for.” Then Ford moved that De Mille’s motion for a compulsory loyalty oath be rejected, and it was.
Billy and I seemed to have kept pace with each other throughout our careers. We both won Academy Awards for directing features—two apiece. Billy won for The Lost Weekend and for The Apartment; I won for From Here to Eternity and A Man for All Seasons.
Although Billy and I began our careers in Germany, we have always thought of ourselves as Hollywood directors—not just because we worked in the American film industry for so many years but because we both believed in making films that would entertain a mass audience. Neither of us wanted to make pictures that were aimed at an elite—intellectual or otherwise. We always believed that motion pictures were a popular art, meant to entertain the public at large. And that is the kind of movie that we made.
Acknowledgments
To begin with, I am most grateful to Billy Wilder for granting me an extended interview in his Hollywood office, which was the starting point of this book. In addition, I wish to single out the following among those who have given me their assistance in the course of the long period in which I was engaged in remote preparation for this study. I conducted interviews with filmmaker Fred Zin
nemann about how he and Wilder started their careers together in Berlin; with Otto Preminger about acting in Wilder’s Stalag 17; with Howard Hawks, for whom Wilder cowrote Ball of Fire; and with Wilder’s friends and fellow directors William Wyler, George Cukor, John Huston, and Garson Kanin.
I met with actors Olivia de Havilland (Hold Back the Dawn), Fred MacMurray (Double Indemnity and The Apartment), Pat O’Brien (Some Like It Hot), and Christopher Lee (The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes) about working with Wilder; with playwright-screenwriter Samuel Taylor in New York about collaborating with Wilder on Sabrina; with screenwriter Ernest Lehman at the Cannes Film Festival about working with Wilder on Sabrina; with film executive Edward Small in Hollywood about executive producing Witness for the Prosecution; and with Ted Schmidt about serving as an assistant editor on Some Like It Hot.
Many institutions and individuals provided me with research materials. I would like to single out the following: the staff of the Celeste Bartos International Film Study Center of the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the staff of the Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division of the Library of Congress in Washington; the staff of the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland; the staff of the National Film Archive of the Library of the British Film Institute in London; and the staff of the Department of Special Collections of the Newberry Research Library in Chicago.
Research materials were also provided by the Paramount Collection of the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills, California; the Department of Special Collections of the Charles E. Young Research Library of the University of California at Los Angeles; the Billy Rose Collection of the Theater and Film Collection of the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center; the Film Archive of the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York; the script repositories of Paramount, United Artists, Twentieth Century–Fox, and Universal Studios; film historian and documentary filmmaker Kevin Brownlow; movie critic and film historian Andrew Sarris; Wilder scholar Bernard Dick of Fairleigh Dickinson University; Lester Keyser, professor emeritus of the City College of New York, who tracked down hard to find research materials on Wilder’s films; film historian Charles Higham; and the staff of the Rush Medical Center in Chicago, who advised me about Wilder’s films The Lost Weekend and Buddy Buddy.
Fred Zinnemann’s recollections of Billy Wilder, which appear as the foreword of this book, were adapted from my interview of Zinnemann. Some materials in this book appeared in completely different forms in the following publications: The Movie Makers: Artists in an Industry (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1973), copyright by Gene D. Phillips; “Billy Wilder: An Interview,” Literature/Film Quarterly 4, no. 1 (1976): 2–12, copyright by Salisbury University; Exiles in Hollywood: Major European Film Directors in America (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1998), copyright by Associated University Presses; and Creatures of Darkness: Raymond Chandler, Detective Fiction, and Film Noir (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), copyright by the University Press of Kentucky. These materials are used with permission.
1
From Berlin to Hollywood
The Early Screenplays
I was a very small fish in the German celluloid pond. I had worked at the Ufa studios in Berlin, but I had only been a tiny wheel in that big machine.
—Billy Wilder
“Are we rolling?—as we say on the set?” Veteran film director Billy Wilder eyes the tape recorder before him on his desk and the interviewer across from him. It is hard to believe that this energetic, articulate man began his career in films many years ago in Berlin by writing film scripts, most notably for a semidocumentary called People on Sunday (1929). After he migrated to Hollywood in the 1930s in the wake of the rise of Hitler, Wilder continued his career as a scriptwriter for such major directors as Ernst Lubitsch. When he graduated to film direction with The Major and the Minor (1942), he continued to collaborate on the scripts for his films, and he finally took over the task of producing the films he directed to ensure his artistic independence. He was, therefore, able to create motion pictures that bore the unmistakable stamp of his own artistic vision.
Although Wilder made comedies as well as dramas, his satirical purpose was the same in film after film: to expose the foibles and flaws of human nature to the public eye to stimulate audiences to serious reflections about the human condition. It has been said that if a satirist like Jonathan Swift had lived in the twentieth century, he would have written screenplays for Billy Wilder.
Wilder’s office was richly endowed with memorabilia associated with the greats of Hollywood history with whom he had worked in his long career. There was, for example, a photo of Marlene Dietrich, whom he first knew in Berlin in the early 1920s. Some of the awards he had received over the years were inconspicuously stashed on bookshelves (he won no fewer than six Oscars); they easily went unnoticed by visitors. A veteran like Wilder had no need for self-advertisement.
Early Years
Billy Wilder was born on June 22, 1906, in Sucha, a town in the Austrian province of Galicia, about one hundred miles east of Vienna, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire but is now part of Poland. He was christened Samuel, but his mother Eugenia, who had lived in New York City for a time in her youth, nicknamed him Billy. She had seen Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in Madison Square Garden and was fascinated by stories about Billy the Kid.1 Billy had a brother, Wilhelm, one year older than Billy, whom his mother nicknamed Willie. Maximilian Wilder, their father, ran a chain of railway restaurants at the depots where the trains on the Vienna line stopped. In due course Max moved on to owning a hotel for transients in Krakow called (in English) Hotel City. “My father was a failed entrepreneur; none of his business enterprises ever succeeded,” Wilder said.2
Billy Wilder was born during the reign of Emperor Franz Josef, who would figure in Wilder’s film The Emperor Waltz (1948). “Billy Wilder was part of the crowd that watched Emperor Franz Josef’s funeral procession in 1916,” writes Geoffrey Macnab. “He marveled at the scale of the pageant and the sight of the tiny Crown Prince Otto amid the black clad mourners.”3
The Wilders moved to Vienna at the outbreak of World War I and remained there after the war. The gymnasium Wilder attended in Vienna was for recalcitrant students. He had earned a reputation early on as a problem student because he sometimes rebelled against the “iron discipline” of the Vienna schools, and he often played hooky. He preferred to skip school and go to the movies. American films were widely available, and his favorite silent film star was Charlie Chaplin.
A crucial incident of Wilder’s youth occurred when he noticed a postcard addressed to his father in the afternoon mail. It was an invitation to attend the graduation of his son Hubert from boarding school. The lad in question was Max Wilder’s illegitimate son, about whom his immediate family knew nothing. Later Billy silently handed the card to his father, who made no comment about it. “My father and I had an unspoken agreement about the matter,” Wilder explained. Hubert was their secret, and that created something of a bond between father and son.4 In light of this episode, young Billy began to sense at this early age that deception was the normal climate of life—an attitude that would later surface in his films.
Wilder graduated from high school in 1924 at age eighteen with barely passing grades. Soon after, he had another traumatic experience. Having become a rabid fan of American jazz, he frequented a record shop in downtown Vienna, where he bought imported jazz recordings. One of the clerks was an attractive girl named Ilse, and Wilder began dating her—until two of his friends told him that they had noticed Ilse leaning against a lamppost in the red-light district of Vienna, soliciting customers. Wilder went to see for himself. He confronted Ilse, slapped her across the face, and angrily broke off their relationship.
According to biographer Maurice Zolotow, this bitter experience destroyed Wilder’s faith in women, and it explains the hard-bitten, cynical females who turn up in his m
ovies, from femmes fatales like Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity to the seductive spy named Ilse in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Wilder even employed a similar episode in Sherlock Holmes, wherein Holmes recalls, in a flashback, discovering that his girl was a harlot (a scene deleted from the release prints of the film). But Wilder maintained that Zolotow’s remarks amounted to a kind of “primer level” Freudian analysis. “He tried to explain why I hate women,” Wilder fumed. “Well, I don’t hate women”; so, he said, there was nothing to be explained. He added that Ilse made no lasting impression on him whatever.5
Wilder was eager to contradict Zolotow on a related point. Zolotow hazarded that Wilder fell into such a deep depression after his breakup with Ilse that he dropped out of law school after only one semester.6 It is true that Billy’s parents had hoped that he would become a lawyer and urged him to enroll in the University of Vienna after high school. But Wilder insisted, “I never attended the university at all, I would have been bored stiff studying law; and I told my parents so.”7
In any case, after he quarreled with his parents about his future, they finally relented and inquired what career he had in mind. Wilder stubbornly replied that he had set his sights on becoming a newspaper reporter. He had liked writing for his high school newspaper and thought that the life of a journalist would be more interesting and eventful than a job in an office.
In 1924 Wilder moved out of his parents’ home and got himself a tawdry flat of his own. He started his writing career by becoming a reporter for Die Stunde (The hour), a Viennese tabloid. The paper wanted to feature celebrity interviews for its special Christmas issue in 1925, so Wilder, a cub reporter full of bravado and ambition, sought out renowned Viennese figures for interviews. He succeeded in snaring composer Richard Strauss and playwright Arthur Schnitzler, but he got his comeuppance from Sigmund Freud. Wilder showed Freud his press card, and Freud promptly showed Wilder the door. The controversial founder of psychoanalysis was understandably wary of journalists, but Wilder was proud to have met Freud at all and took this rejection with equanimity.
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