Some Like It Wilder

by Gene D. Phillips

  Norma’s romance with Joe is doomed to be short-lived, however; as time goes on, Joe finds it intolerable to be supported by a wealthy, aging woman. He realizes that he is an opportunist who has sold himself to the highest bidder. He thus reflects Wilder’s favorite theme: Joe can no longer bring himself to do anything for money. Joe strikes up a relationship with Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson), another aspiring screenwriter. She calls one sequence in “Dark Windows,” a scenario of Joe’s, “moving and true.” She is confident that it could be made into a screenplay about “teachers and their threadbare lives.” Joe catches her enthusiasm, and he works on it surreptitiously with her several nights a week. But Norma inevitably discovers that Joe is seeing Betty and becomes insanely jealous.

  One fateful night, Joe finally summons the courage to tell Norma that he is terminating their sordid liaison once and for all. “Norma, you’re a woman of fifty,” Joe tells her. “There is nothing tragic about being fifty, unless you try to be twenty-five!” When she threatens to kill herself if he leaves, he replies, “You’d be killing yourself to an empty house. The audience left twenty years ago.” Norma, who has been emotionally disturbed for some time, finally crosses the brink into insanity. As Joe leaves her spectral mansion and walks across the patio, the deranged woman empties a revolver into his retreating figure; he pitches forward into the swimming pool. She shoots Joe dead, comments Steffen Haubner, “to prevent him from abandoning her, as everyone else did long ago.”67 As Joe is fished out of the floodlit pool by the police, he comments laconically on the sound track to the filmgoer, “Well, this is where you came in.”

  Shortly afterward, a crew of newsreel cameramen enter the mansion to photograph the fallen star as she is taken away by the police. But Norma mistakes the newsreel cameramen for the camera crew on a movie set and accordingly believes that she is at long last making her comeback film. Max, who has supported her fantasies about a new career all along, makes believe, for her sake, that he is Cecil B. De Mille directing her in Salome. A look of anguish crosses Max’s face when he directs the cameras toward Norma as she sweeps down the grand staircase of her exotic mansion for her final close-up. “So they were turning after all, those cameras,” Joe says over the sound track. “Life, which can be strangely merciful, had taken pity on Norma Desmond. The dream she had clung to so desperately had finally enfolded her.” The stunning finale of Sunset Boulevard makes for one of the greatest moments in all cinema.

  American films at the time tended to have more positive endings than this film does, because the studios feared that the public would reject downbeat endings. “Sunset Boulevard did not have a happy ending,” said Wilder, “because it was inevitable that Norma would go mad. No other ending would have worked for the film, and the studio at no point questioned this.”

  Most of the audience at Paramount’s advance screening of Sunset Boulevard for the Hollywood community on that April night in 1950 stood up and cheered at the film’s conclusion. Gloria Swanson writes, “Barbara Stanwyck fell on her knees and kissed the hem of my skirt.” Swanson looked around for Mary Pickford, but an old-time producer told her, “She can’t show herself, Gloria. She’s overcome; we all are.”68 Not Mae Murray, another diva of the silent screen, whom Stroheim had directed in The Merry Widow (1925). She thought the movie was overdone; “None of us floozies was that nuts!” she exclaimed.69

  Louis B. Mayer, the pompous chief executive of MGM, threw a tantrum in the lobby. “We should horsewhip this Wilder; . . . he should be sent back to Germany,” Mayer ranted.70 Then, spying Wilder, he shook his pudgy fist at him, denouncing him as a disgrace to the industry. “You have dirtied the nest. You should be kicked out of this country, tarred and feathered, you goddamned foreigner son-of-a-bitch.” In the heat of the moment, Mayer apparently lost sight of the fact that he too was an immigrant, having been born in Minsk, Russia. Tom Wood, the film’s publicist, diplomatically reported afterward that Wilder merely stuck his tongue out at Mayer. But, by Wilder’s own testimony, he responded to Mayer in kind. “Yes, I directed this picture,” Wilder said. “Mr. Mayer, why don’t you go fuck yourself!” When a friend later told him that his offensive remark might have cost him some Oscar votes, Wilder replied, “You are so right. Remind me to cut out my tongue in the morning.”71

  Wilder insisted that Sunset Boulevard “was not anti-Hollywood,” as Mayer contended. Joe Gillis was a hack and Betty Schaefer tried “to put Joe back on the right track,” Wilder explained. “I don’t say anything derogatory about pictures” in this film.72 One might even say that Sunset Boulevard proves that Hollywood was fundamentally all right, if it could turn out a picture like Sunset Boulevard, so unlike the bland, well-scrubbed “heart-warmers” being churned out by Mayer at MGM in those days.

  Very few critics panned Sunset Boulevard when it premiered at Radio City Music Hall on August 10, 1950. Admittedly, one reviewer dismissed it as “a pretentious slice of Roquefort,” but he was the exception that proved the rule.73 James Agee, who was committed to writing capsule film reviews for the Nation, contributed a five-page essay on the picture to the November 1950 issue of Sight and Sound. “It is one of those rare movies,” he rhapsodized, “that can be talked about, almost shot for shot and line for line, for hours on end. . . . I am willing to bet that it will be looked at and respected long after most of the movies too easily called great have been forgotten.”74 (For example, Compton Bennett’s King Solomon’s Mines, thought to be a major epic in 1950 and nominated, along with Sunset Boulevard, for best picture, is no longer remembered.)

  Sunset Boulevard is blessed with a superb screenplay and inspired direction, topped off by Gloria Swanson’s superlative performance as Norma and Erich von Stroheim’s indelible portrayal of Max. Moreover, the movie is sterling for Wilder’s consummate craftsmanship in producing well-defined, plausible characters. Swanson, as the obsolete screen star, has the threat of madness throughout—the cockeyed glint in her eyes implies the unruly and unmanageable passions that lie beneath her surface glamour. This keeps us watching as she leads us down the treacherous path to tragedy.

  When the Academy Awards rolled around, Sunset Boulevard nabbed eleven nominations, including best picture; Holden and Swanson for best actor and best actress; Stroheim for best supporting actor; Wilder for best director; Wilder, Brackett, and Marshman for best original screenplay; Waxman for best score; and Meehan and Dreier for best production design. On Oscar night, March 29, 1951, the only winners for Sunset Boulevard were Wilder, Brackett, and Marshman for best original screenplay; Waxman for best score; and Meehan and Dreier for best production design.

  At the Oscar party that Paramount held at the Mocambo nightclub after the ceremony, Wilder commiserated with Holden: “It was a miscarriage of justice, Bill.”75 Since Paramount had come away from the Academy Awards almost empty handed, Wilder endeavored to cheer up the gathering at the Mocambo with his sardonic humor. He told the journalists present that Barbara Stanwyck had just related to him an anecdote about an aging actress like Norma Desmond whose toy boy was spending her money extravagantly. According to Wilder, Stanwyck had inquired of the dowager, “Tell me, darling, is the screwing you’re getting worth the screwing you’re getting?”76

  Stroheim did not make the trip from Paris for the Oscar ceremonies; he was offended that he had been nominated for best supporting actor instead of best actor. So he had an additional reason to hate the role of the subservient butler to the end of his days.

  Over the years, Sunset Boulevard has continued to be singled out as a masterpiece. When the American Film Institute (AFI) honored the best one hundred films made during the first century of American cinema with a special on CBS-TV on July 3, 2003, Sunset Boulevard was near the top of the list. The release of the picture on DVD in 2008 was the occasion for renewed acclaim. The transfer to DVD is a triumph of digital technology—it is amazingly sharp, clear, and free of perceptible blemishes, and it boasts detailed commentaries.

  Wilder never forgot the very moment h
e decided to call it quits with Brackett once and for all. One day he was having a discussion with Brackett while they were sitting in Wilder’s car, parked in the studio lot. “He kind of flew off the handle,” said Wilder. The discussion turned into a violent quarrel, and they both got out of the car angry, “and that is how it ended.”77 The next morning Wilder said to Brackett with studied casualness, “You know, Charlie, after this, I don’t think we should work together any more. I think it is better for both of us if we just split up.”78

  Nearly twenty years later, one rainy Sunday afternoon at Brackett’s Bel Air home, when he was dying from a stroke, Brackett talked with Garson Kanin about his breakup with Wilder. “I never knew what happened, never understood it,” Brackett lamented. “We were doing so well; I always thought we brought out the best in each other. . . . It was shattering; it was such an unexpected blow that I thought I’d never recover from it. And, in fact, I don’t think I ever have.” Brackett concluded, “We had our disagreements, of course; but they were always professional, never personal.”79

  The point that Brackett had lost sight of was that their disagreements never ended. They had been quarreling incessantly, amid flying telephone books and ashtrays, for years. “It’s like with married people,” Wilder explained candidly; they have to argue in such a way that they don’t destroy anything basic about the relationship. “You have to be able to come back for more. Like lovers, it’s better not to go to sleep angry.”80 The collaboration of Wilder and Brackett had often been described as a marriage, but by now it was a bad marriage, according to Wilder. “We had been squabbling about every little thing.”81 Moreover, Wilder had broached to Brackett the subject of Ace in the Hole, a dark satire about yellow journalism, and Brackett wanted no part of what he termed a lurid scenario. And so the professional marriage of Wilder and Brackett finally ended in divorce, after twelve years and thirteen pictures.

  After their separation, Wilder stayed at Paramount, but Brackett moved to Twentieth Century–Fox, where he continued cowriting and producing movies. In 1953 Brackett produced and coauthored the script for Titanic for director Jean Negulesco (remade by James Cameron in 1997). Brackett, Ninotchka cowriter Walter Reisch, and A Foreign Affair cowriter Richard Breen won an Academy Award for their screenplay for Titanic.

  Wilder would stay at Paramount for another three pictures before moving on to other studios. After he broke off with Brackett, he took over from his former partner the responsibility of producing the films he directed, to safeguard his artistic autonomy. From now on, as cowriter, director, and producer of his films, Wilder would bear the brunt of whatever praise or blame accrued to his films.

  8

  Barbed Wire Satire

  Ace in the Hole and Stalag 17

  Billy Wilder is a tall, loose-jointed man with a brain full of razor blades.

  —William Holden

  Writing in the mid-1950s, film critic Manny Farber praised certain Hollywood directors like Billy Wilder who would “tunnel” beneath the surfaces of the stories they were filming and seek to illuminate, in a shrewd and unsentimental fashion, deeper truths, usually about the unglamorous side of the human condition. These directors did not get bogged down in “significant” dialogue but told their stories in a straightforward fashion that nonetheless implied subtle themes beneath the surfaces of their basically plot-oriented scripts.1 Tunneling underneath the plot to reach a deeper meaning is a particularly apt metaphor for Ace in the Hole, which deals with a mine cave-in.

  Ace in the Hole (1951)

  Ace in the Hole takes place in a rural town on the edge of a wasteland. Nevertheless, as Foster Hirsch shrewdly stresses, “Chuck Tatum merely transports a city mentality to an out-of-the-way setting.” Tatum, a former metropolitan newspaper man reduced to working for a rural rag, is “a city reporter type at heart with all the animal cunning of characters who inhabit the city jungle.”2 Tatum callously exploits the plight of Leo Minosa, who is trapped underground in a crumbling mine shaft, to advance his career. Tatum was to some extent based on Wilder, who worked for a scandal sheet in Berlin in the 1920s. “I was doing the dirty work of crime reporting,” he said. “Some of this I remembered for Ace in the Hole.”3 Wilder recalled taking the streetcar in Berlin to interview the parents of a murder victim and then taking another trolley to interview the parents of the murderer. He confessed that he made up the answers to the questions about how the murderer’s parents felt about their son, because he could not bring himself to ask.

  When Wilder delivered the finished print of Sunset Boulevard in early February 1950, severing his professional connection with Brackett for good, he began casting about for a replacement writer. He continued to feel that he had an erratic command of English. Besides, “after Brackett and I split up, I found it too lonely to write by myself.” He added, “I sure miss him.”4

  Wilder’s new writing partner was Walter Newman, a twenty-three-year-old radio writer. Wilder had heard one of Newman’s plays on his car radio and contacted him about collaborating on a screenplay. It was Newman who suggested to Wilder the concept of Ace in the Hole. After they had kicked around several possible ideas for a movie, Newman suggested the story of Floyd Collins, a cave explorer who had been the victim of a Kentucky mine cave-in twenty-five years earlier, as a good premise for a script. Wilder liked the idea of an updated version of the Collins tragedy and commissioned Newman to lay out a preliminary screen treatment of the plotline, under his supervision.

  Wilder turned over Newman’s scenario to the story department in March 1950 with the tentative title “The Human Interest Story.” About that time, Wilder invited Lesser Samuels, a former newspaperman and a contract writer at Paramount, to join the team. The front office gave the project the green light after considering Newman’s treatment. The production was budgeted at $1.8 million; Wilder’s combined salary as cowriter, producer, and director was $250,000.

  Newman’s scenario clearly followed the Floyd Collins story. On January 30, 1925, Collins was trapped by a landslide in a sandstone cavern near Mammoth Cave in central Kentucky. Robert Murray and Roger Brucker write in their book Trapped! The Story of Floyd Collins that William Miller, an enterprising reporter from the Louisville Courier-Journal, crawled into the cave “on his hands and knees” and was able to get close enough to Collins for a brief interview. Collins’s plight soon made national headlines. Throngs of sensation-hungry tourists from near and far descended on the cave site. “It was like a county fair,” Murray and Bruckner observe; “con artists abounded.” The crowds behaved as if they were at “a carnival midway. . . . In the process the majority forgot about the imprisoned man underground.”5 Miller continued to cover the rescue operation until Collins’s death finally ended his ordeal. He had been trapped in the mine for eighteen days. In May 1926, Miller won a Pulitzer Prize for his reportage.

  Wilder, Newman, and Samuels toiled on the first draft of the script throughout the spring of 1950. Studio insiders were anxious to see whether Wilder could succeed without his former writing partner. In some quarters Wilder was considered a heartless cynic whose excessive contempt for humanity had been controlled and toned down by his wise partner. Without Brackett’s steadying hand, they were certain, Wilder would fall on his face. But Wilder did not play it safe on his first film without Brackett as his chief collaborator. After all, he had chosen for his next film a story with an unsympathetic lead character: a cocksure newspaper man who exemplifies the American mania for making a quick buck, even at the expense of someone else’s personal tragedy. Furthermore, Wilder was starting from scratch on an original screenplay, instead of buying the rights to a successful play or novel. “Usually the studio prefers to bank on a sure-fire property,” he explained. Wilder was aware of the gossip in the commissary about his next film. He always viewed making a movie as climbing up to the peak of Mount Everest. The studio wags “can’t wait for me to slip into a crevasse,” he mused ruefully.6

  The first draft of the screenplay, dated May 31,
1950, has a handwritten note stapled to the first page: “Do not give out under any circumstances to anyone!” Wilder was worried that news of this scenario, which was designed to skewer the newspaper business, would find its way into the local gossip columns, precipitating an uproar in the press. The draft begins in the Albuquerque train depot, where Jacob Boot, a newspaper editor, watches a pine box being loaded into the baggage car of a train. “Good-bye, Mr. Boot,” says Chuck Tatum in voice-over; “when you write the obit, lay it on the line. All you’ve got on me! What I wanted, and what I did to get it. Remember the very first day I hit this God-forsaken town of yours?”7 It is Tatum in the box; Wilder was repeating the concept of having a talking corpse narrate the film, as Joe Gillis had narrated Sunset Boulevard.

  In the final shooting script, however, Wilder scrapped the original opening in the train station for one in which Tatum arrives in Albuquerque in a coupe with New York license plates. His convertible breaks down because of burned-out bearings and is laid up for repairs in a local garage. Tatum, who is down on his luck, takes the occasion to inquire about a job on the Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin. He makes his pitch to Jacob Boot, managing editor of the Sun-Bulletin, but Boot is not particularly impressed. Tatum, it develops, has been kicked off some top eastern dailies for dishonesty and drinking on the job. When Boot inquires whether Tatum drinks a lot, Tatum replies with a typical Wilder witticism: “Not a lot, just frequently.”

  Boot prominently displays his paper’s motto, “Tell the truth,” in an embroidered sampler hanging above his desk, “as a sign of his and the newspaper’s guiding ethic.”8 Tatum, whose ethical standards are “flexible,” to say the least, sees that Boot will need a lot of persuasion to hire him. So he launches into a high-pressure spiel: “Apparently you haven’t seen my byline; that’s because you don’t get the Eastern papers out here. Mr. Boot, I’m a $250 a week newspaperman. I can be had for $50. I can handle big news and little news. And if there’s no news, I’ll go out and bite a dog, to create some. . . . Make that $45.”9 Boot is overwhelmed by the sheer force of Tatum’s braggadocio and hires him for a salary of $60 a week.