Some Like It Wilder

by Gene D. Phillips

  Wilder stubbornly refused to acknowledge that Ace in the Hole was a ferocious condemnation of the human race. But he realized in retrospect that, when a director stages an incident of this kind—in which a character’s life hangs in the balance—usually the audience implicitly assumes that he will show the helpless person being saved in the nick of time, thereby releasing the tension that has built up in the audience. Consequently, the audience feels cheated if the threatened peril actually overtakes the innocent party and they are denied the satisfaction of seeing the individual emerge unharmed. In depicting this gruesome calamity as he does, Wilder is rather like the director of an old silent serial, showing the heroine who is tied to the railroad tracks really being run over by the oncoming train. Wilder reflected that portraying this sympathetic man perishing in such a dreadful fashion was a cardinal sin; it elicited a severely negative audience reaction. “At the very least, I should have had Leo’s demise occur off screen,” he said. “But I am always rewriting my films in my head years after they are finished.” In any event, he always thought of Ace in the Hole as “the runt of the litter.”

  Shortly after he read the scalding reviews of the movie, Wilder witnessed an auto accident while driving down Wilshire Boulevard. “Somebody was run over right in front of me; I wanted to help the guy who was run over.” A newspaper cameraman came out of nowhere and took a picture of the injured party. Wilder called to him, “You’d better call an ambulance.” The photographer replied, “I’ve got to get to the Los Angeles Times; I’ve got a picture here that I’ve got to deliver!” Wilder concluded, “You put that in a movie, and the critics think you’re exaggerating.”34 Emphasizing just how callous and insensitive “the gentlemen of the press” can be, Wilder also recalled a reporter once asking him “how did I feel when I learned my mother had died at Auschwitz.” He concluded, “It makes you wonder just how cynical Ace in the Hole really was.”35

  Panic broke out at the studio when Ace in the Hole failed to leave the starting gate. The American press made such an outcry against the picture that Y. Frank Freeman, who was still vice president at Paramount, dispatched relays of publicity agents to city desks around the country to explain that “the picture’s depiction of trashy journalism was not directed against the Fourth Estate as such,” but only against its bad apples.36 No dice. The mass audience still stayed away in droves.

  The film was better received overseas; Europeans did not mind a Hollywood film criticizing the American press. In fact, the movie won a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Freeman decided that the favorable publicity attending the Venice award, along with a more benign title for the picture, might resuscitate the film’s chances of finding an audience in the United States. He accordingly attempted to tie “a pretty bow” around the movie by retitling it The Big Carnival and reissuing it in the domestic market. He made this decision without Wilder’s knowledge or consent; Wilder was so incensed that for the first time he began to consider leaving Paramount for good. At all events, when the picture did not go well with the substitute title, said Wilder, “they changed it back again to Ace in the Hole; but it was too late.”37

  Wilder had been the kingpin at Paramount; now some people around the studio shunned him. His gut reaction to his detractors at the studio was, “Fuck them all—it is the best picture I ever made!” Still, he continued, “Ace in the Hole cost me power at the studio.”38 The fact that it was his first picture without Brackett boded ill for Wilder’s future, according to studio insiders. They were saying that Ace in the Hole was a flop because Wilder no longer had Brackett to guide him in writing a screenplay. Moreover, Richard Lemon notes, “He was warned that his next picture had to earn enough profit to cover both movies.”39

  In 1952 a journalist named Herbert Luft submitted a hostile essay about Wilder’s films—especially Ace in the Hole—under the title “A Matter of Decadence,” to the Quarterly of Film, Radio, and Television. Because it was clearly one-sided, the editors wisely invited Charles Brackett, who was now president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, to supply a rebuttal. Brackett graciously agreed to do so, particularly because he wanted to demonstrate that he still had faith in his erstwhile collaborator. Brackett accordingly wrote an essay titled “A Matter of Humor.” The essays were published together as “Two Views of a Director” in the Fall 1952 issue of the Quarterly.

  Luft weighed in with the objection that Wilder, “like many Germans”—though Wilder’s heritage was Austrian—“depicted only the weaknesses and shortcomings of the American people in films like A Foreign Affair, Sunset Boulevard, and Ace in the Hole.” Luft contended in his broadside against Wilder that these films denigrated America and that Wilder was himself anti-American.40 Brackett replied emphatically that he found Wilder “sassy and brash and often unwise; but he was in love with America as I have seen few people in love with it.”41

  Luft reserved his biggest blast for Ace in the Hole, which in his judgment was Wilder’s most corrupt film: it implies not only that newspaper reporters are prone to sensationalize the news but that Americans are insensitive sensation seekers who “take guided tours of the cave where a man is virtually buried alive.”42 Brackett maintained that, on the contrary, Ace in the Hole was “in the vein of American self-criticism which has been a major current in our national literature since the days of The Octopus and The Jungle.” Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901) and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) were in the muckraking tradition of American letters—social protest novels deploring the plight of the downtrodden working classes in America. In conclusion, Brackett noted Luft’s contention that Wilder flayed the characters in his films and explained that Wilder rather acknowledged that “time, which flays us all mercilessly,” spares no one.43

  Wilder’s brooding tale is galvanized by Kirk Douglas’s astounding performance as the tormented protagonist. When Douglas won the AFI’s Life Achievement Award in 1991, George Stevens Jr. paid this tribute to him: “No other leading actor was ever more ready to tap the dark, desperate side of the soul and thus to reveal the complexity of human nature. His special gift had been to show us the flaws in every hero and the virtues in every heel.”44 Douglas’s Chuck Tatum certainly exemplifies Stevens’s statement.

  Ace in the Hole has been rediscovered as a picture of quality in recent years by critics and film historians. On August 16, 2002, the AFI officially proclaimed this movie as an overlooked masterpiece by presenting a special screening of the picture in Los Angeles, hosted by film director Neil LaBute (In the Company of Men). The rediscovery of the film was highlighted by a full week’s run at New York’s Film Forum in January 2007, in which a newly restored print was screened. On that occasion, Wilder was called “the most precise, indeed, relentless, chronicler of the postwar American scene, in shade as well as light, the motion pictures have ever produced.” Manohla Dargis praised how nimbly Ace in the Hole presents Wilder’s jaundiced view of American hucksterism.45

  After Wilder’s partnership with Brackett ended, he tried out a number of script collaborators, but none more than once, because, in his estimation, they did not cut the mustard. Wilder parted company with Newman and Samuels by mutual agreement after Ace in the Hole foundered. None of them wished to tackle another screenplay together, with that fiasco hanging over their heads. Wilder next turned to Edwin Blum, a veteran screenwriter whose credits included The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939), Basil Rathbone’s first outing as Holmes, and Jules Dassin’s The Canterville Ghost (1944), an Oscar Wilde fantasy with Charles Laughton. Blum was under contract to Paramount, and the studio executives considered him an experienced screenwriter.

  Stalag 17 (1953)

  Wilder knew he had to be very cautious in the selection of his next project, in the wake of his recent debacle. He reasoned that a popular Broadway play would be a safe bet. “I used to go to New York every year and see the new plays,” he told me, “and when I saw one I liked, I considered filming it.” He eventually chose Stalag 17, a smash
hit by Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski. The production, directed by Jose Ferrer, had opened at the Forty-eighth Street Theatre on May 8, 1951. Wilder had seen it on his excursion to New York and considered it a valuable property. The play is set in a German prisoner-of-war camp during World War II—a prison camp very much like the one in which Bevan and Trzcinski had been interned.

  When Wilder suggested the project to Paramount, however, he found that a reader in the story department had earlier submitted an unfavorable report on the original version of the play, which had opened in a trial run in Philadelphia on April 6, 1949, with the unwieldy title Stalag XVII-B. The reader’s report said that the play was “monotonous and lacking in action” and recommended that the studio not acquire it for filming. But that report was filed before the revised version of the play opened on Broadway in 1951 and became a runaway success. When the play was resubmitted to Paramount, the studio brass this time around found it a very promising property. At Wilder’s behest Paramount shelled out one hundred thousand dollars for the screen rights in August 1951.46 The jungle telegraph at the studio spread the word that Wilder was once more in the studio’s good graces.

  Bevan and Trzcinski described the play as a comedy-melodrama about American GIs interned in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp. It is marked by liberal doses of raucous barracks humor, but it is rooted in the despair of men confined in a squalid prison compound for the foreseeable future. Blum did not immediately understand why the play appealed to Wilder and asked him what he saw in it. Without batting an eyelash, Wilder replied, “There are guys running around in their underwear. . . . You didn’t see it, so you don’t appreciate it.”47 Blum was still incredulous about the merits of the play, but he had just been put on salary at one thousand dollars a week; hence he was not inclined to argue the point.

  The title of the play refers to a German Stalag, short for stamm lager (prisoner-of-war camp). The real Stalag 17 was situated on the outskirts of Krems, Austria, near the Danube and less than fifty miles from Vienna. Stalag 17 and The Emperor Waltz are the only two Wilder pictures set in his native Austria. Wilder preferred to overlook that his homeland was part of the Nazi empire at the time Stalag 17 takes place, so the setting of the film is not identified as Austria.

  Wilder retained the fundamental story line of the play. The prisoners endeavor to smoke out a Nazi informer their captors have planted in their midst, disguised as an American prisoner. Their chief suspect is J. J. Sefton, a loner and a blackmarket profiteer whom they dislike and distrust. Hence Sefton is determined to uncover the real spy and avoid being his scapegoat.

  Wilder set out to spruce up the play, first of all with some new characters. He created Sefton’s minion Cookie (who would be played by Gil Stratton Jr.) to provide a voice-over narration. Stratton said, “Billy wanted the narration, so that, if something in the script needed to be explained,” he could cover it with a line added to the narration. Stratton continued, “The original script opened in the Paramount barbershop, where Cookie is a barber after the war.” Y. Frank Freeman, the vice president of Paramount, comes in for a haircut, and Cookie asks him, “Why haven’t you made a picture about POWs, when you have made movies about flyers and infantrymen? I was a POW.” With that, Cookie begins to recount his experiences in Stalag 17 to Freeman, and the events of the film are portrayed in flashback. “At the end, the picture comes back to the barbershop,” Stratton explained. “Cookie tells Freeman that Sefton reenlisted when the Korean War broke out, and is now in Korea,” pulling off the same kinds of scams on the other soldiers that he did in Stalag 17. Since Wilder never got along with Freeman, it is amazing that Freeman agreed to do a cameo in Wilder’s movie. Be that as it may, Wilder retained the narrator but scrapped the prologue and epilogue in the barbershop. “And he was right not to use this material,” concluded Stratton, since Wilder thought it was a bit arch.48

  Another key character whom Wilder invented for the movie was Colonel von Scherbach, the commandant of the prison camp, who is referred to in the play but never appears on stage. Wilder called on his fellow Austrian émigré director Otto Preminger to play the commandant. Preminger told me, “I played only Nazis during the war, because there were no Nazis available to do it. Later on I played the Commandant for my old friend Billy Wilder in Stalag 17.”49 In his first scene, Preminger sets the tone for his depiction of the nasty commandant as he snarls, with maniacal glee, “Nobody has ever escaped from Stalag 17—not alive, anyway.” It was ironic that Preminger played Nazis so convincingly, since he was, like Wilder, “a Jewish refugee who had to flee from Hitler.”50 Preminger’s enacting the role of a Nazi officer in the present film recalls Erich von Stroheim’s playing Rommel in Five Graves to Cairo, although von Scherbach is certainly more stiff-necked and inflexible than Rommel in the earlier movie.

  There is one strategic question that confronts any filmmaker who wants to film a stage play: To what extent should the play be opened out spatially for the screen, by including more settings than were possible in the theater, to exploit the greater flexibility of the motion picture medium? Asked this question, Wilder answered that, on the one hand, he wanted to build up the claustrophobic atmosphere of prison life in Stalag 17 by emphasizing in his visual compositions the cramped conditions in which the prisoners live: “I wanted the audience to experience the confinement of the prisoners, and therefore I shot no scenes outside of the prison compound.” Indeed, Stalag 17 is Wilder’s most enclosed film. On the other hand, Wilder said, he would not consider having the movie take place entirely on one set, barrack 4, which is crammed with bunks. He opened out the play for the screen effectively, explains Holden’s biographer Bob Thomas, “by taking the action outdoors into the muddy prison yard, so he could get some of the drama out in the open.”51

  What’s more, in transposing Stalag 17 from stage to screen, Wilder decided to write into the action events that take place offstage and are merely related in dialogue passages in the play. For example, the scene in which Commandant von Scherbach interrogates Lieutenant Dunbar (played by Don Taylor in the film), a prisoner accused of sabotage, is staged in the commandant’s office in the movie.

  Wilder also added some incidents to the screenplay that are not in the play at all. They are built around Sefton’s character as a crafty con man who learns to capitalize on the misery of his fellow inmates by pandering to the lowest tastes of his fellow prisoners of war and bartering with the prison guards for cameras, bottles of wine, and other contraband items.52 His foot locker becomes a treasure chest of cartons of cigarettes, watches, and other amenities. Sefton obtains a makeshift telescope from one of the guards. He then charges his fellow inmates two cigarettes or a candy bar as admission for a peep show he has set up in the barracks—through the telescope, they can ogle the naked female prisoners as they parade by the dusty window of the delousing shack in the women’s compound across the way. “You couldn’t catch much through the steam,” Cookie comments in his voice-over narration. “But believe you me, after two years in that camp, just the idea of what was behind that steam sure spurred up your voltage.” Donald Bevan explained, “The Russian broads,” as the GIs call them, “were not in the play, but similar incidents did happen in a POW camp.”

  Wilder obviously made some significant alterations in the play when he adapted it for the screen. In the process, with Blum’s assistance, he rewrote most of the play’s dialogue. Bevan did not mind, but his coauthor, Trzcinski, was offended by the many changes. He complained that he no longer recognized the play that he and Bevan had written. Trzcinski had a small part in the film, as a prisoner named Triz, but he stopped speaking to Wilder after shooting was finished. “If I’d been him, I would have stopped too,” Wilder admitted.53 Nevertheless, Wilder was sure that he had vastly improved the play by revising it for film as he did.

  As usual, Wilder did not complete the shooting script until the last minute. The shooting script is dated January 30, 1952, four days before principal photography was scheduled to begin. Con
sequently, Wilder was once again tardy in making a copy of the script available to the industry censor; it was delivered to Breen’s office on February 1. The rowdy barracks humor, which offers much-needed comic relief from the picture’s darker moments, bothered Breen the most. He objected to the crude phrases employed by one GI to another such as, “Why don’t you take this whistle and shove it?” Wilder sought to justify such rough language as typical of soldiers in wartime. One of the inmates, Stosh Krusawa, an oversexed lug, is fittingly nicknamed “Animal.” He is a “brawny, unshaven retard in long johns.”54 Stosh asks a prison guard whether some of the Russian broads from the neighboring compound might visit the GIs’ barracks. He urges, “Just get us a couple with big glockenspiels!”55 Following his customary procedure in negotiating with Breen, Wilder made a token gesture of cooperation by changing a few lines, such as the one about the whistle. But he politely ignored some of Breen’s other objections. Thus the double entendre about the “glockenspiels” remained in the shooting script.56

  The Christmas party scene, which is not in the play, in particular disturbed Breen. In it Stosh gets soused on the potent schnapps Sefton brews from potato peels, which Harry, Stosh’s sidekick and a real chump, says tastes like nitric acid. Strictly for laughs, Harry stuffs straw under his hat and masquerades as Betty Grable, Stosh’s favorite pinup. The prisoners have voted Grable “the girl they would most like to have behind barbed wire,” and Harry once promised to get Stosh a date with Grable after the war. In his woozy state, Stosh mistakes Harry for Grable. As the phonograph is playing a popular song of the time, “I Love You,” Stosh timidly asks Harry for a dance. Wilder conveys Stosh’s illusion by superimposing a photograph of Grable over a shot of Harry, who then turns into Grable. Stosh is in a trance until the hallucination wears off. When Stosh finally recognizes Harry as his dance partner, he bursts into tears.