Some Like It Wilder

by Gene D. Phillips

  “We are concerned about the scene in which Harry and Stosh dance together,” Breen declared in a letter. For starters, Breen was uncomfortable with Harry’s cross-dressing. “If there is any inference in the finished scene of a flavor of sex perversion, we will not be able to approve it under the Code.” Breen further thought that Stosh should not be crooning some bars of “I Love You” to Harry, nor should he call Harry “darling.” Breen was also unnerved by Stosh’s “snuggling” with Harry as they danced because it implied a hint of sexual pleasure on Stosh’s part.57

  Wilder promised to consider Breen’s suggestions carefully but not necessarily to implement them. Reportedly, Blum asked Wilder what he intended to do about the dance sequence, and Wilder replied, “Not a damned thing!” Truth to tell, the scene remained unchanged in the final shooting script, and Breen did not raise the issue again.58 After all, innuendo is a slippery target for a censor. Furthermore, Breen, who had held his office since 1930, was soon to retire and be replaced by his chief assistant, Geoffrey Shurlock. Perhaps because his time in office was running out, Breen was not as strict about implementing the censorship code as he had been in the past.

  Wilder, with Blum’s aid, had turned out a fine screenplay, one that Wilder was proud of. Be that as it may, Edwin Blum, like Raymond Chandler before him, vowed never to collaborate with Wilder again. Blum regarded the writing role he had been assigned as “little more than a butler” or glorified stenographer. “My name is in the credits, but I don’t think of the script as mine. Oh, I made some important contributions,” especially in beefing up the characterization of Sefton. “When you work with Billy, he rules you a thousand percent. I know . . . the more he likes you, the more sarcastic he gets. But I couldn’t take the insults.” Blum recalled one of Wilder’s insulting diatribes: “My God, I have a cretin collaborating with me! You should listen to the rotten words he uses,” Wilder exclaimed to their fellow screenwriters at the writers’ table in the commissary. “Eddie, when I had Charlie Brackett as my partner, he came up with exquisite words. . . . He was a literate man, not an ignoramus like you.”59

  Wilder never noticed his inconsistency in admitting that he needed a collaborator because “I speak lousy English” and criticizing Blum’s vocabulary. One day, when he was really fed up, Blum retorted, “Billy, you roar like a lion; but you got no teeth. All I feel is soft, flabby gums.”60 That shut Wilder up—for the moment, at least. Asked about Blum, Wilder responded, “I worked with him on the script of a very good picture, Stalag 17, but I never worked with him again.” In Wilder’s opinion, Blum did not make a significant contribution to the script.61 Like Chandler, Blum failed to mention when complaining about Wilder that Wilder kept him on salary throughout the production period and consulted him about script revisions along the way. This was an unusual courtesy for a screenwriter at the time.

  In casting the picture, Wilder recruited some actors from the Broadway play, including Robert Strauss (Stosh) and Harvey Lembeck (Harry), who were priceless as the dimwitted prison pals. Wilder needed a major star familiar to the mass audience for Sefton; the studio at first urged Charlton Heston on Wilder. But Wilder eventually decided Sefton was too much of a conniving, hard-bitten hustler to be played by Heston, who normally played nobler types. Stalag 17 was ahead of its time in presenting an American soldier as an antihero, before it had become fashionable in the American cinema to present such a character in unflattering light. Wilder finally picked William Holden, who had become an important star after Sunset Boulevard. At first Holden rejected the role; he had attended the play in New York and walked out after the first act. He found the stage play dull and thought Sefton was merely a garden-variety con man. But Holden changed his mind when he read the script, in which Wilder and Blum had cleverly built up Sefton’s role and made him a heel who turns out to be a hero. With Stalag 17 Holden became Wilder’s favorite leading man. “My love will always be with Mr. Holden,” he said.62 Sig Ruman, a veteran of Ninotchka and The Emperor Waltz, played Johann Sebastian Schulz, a barracks guard who clowns around with the inmates at times (his favorite wisecrack to Harry is “Droppen sie dead!”). But Schulz is a lot slyer than he appears—he is in cahoots with the barracks informant.

  Ernest Laszlo had served his apprenticeship as camera operator on The Major and the Minor and other films. Since then he had become a director of photography in his own right and had earned recognition for films like Rudolph Maté’s film noir D.O.A. (1950). He did so by achieving a more realistic look for the films he photographed, instead of the usual “soft, glossy visual style” of most Paramount films.63 As such, he was the perfect choice for Stalag 17. Laszlo’s atmospheric cinematography captured the sordid setting of a POW camp, utilizing deep grays and blacks in keeping with the somber dramatics.

  The studio allocated a budget of $1,315,000 for Stalag 17, somewhat less than the budget for Ace in the Hole, but still adequate for Wilder’s needs. Wilder’s fee for coauthoring the screenplay and directing and producing the picture would be $250,000. The budget was sufficient to allow the production staff to build Wilder his very own prison camp for filming exteriors at Snow Ranch in Calabasas, California, forty miles northwest of Hollywood. Production designers Franz Bachelin and Hal Pereira constructed wooden shacks and barracks for the prisoners, along with gun turrets and observation towers for the guards.

  The weatherman predicted plenty of rain in Calabasas during February 1952, when Wilder would be shooting there for ten days. That guaranteed gray skies and acres of mud, which contributed to the bleak landscape of the camp. All in all, Wilder was successful in creating the degraded atmosphere of the prison compound. When the viewer sees the mud and lice that are so characteristic of a prison camp, it is difficult to believe that the film was shot almost entirely in a Hollywood studio and on a ranch in Southern California.

  Principal photography began on February 2. Preminger, with his thick German accent, was central casting’s concept of a Nazi. He had a reputation for berating cast and crew at the top of his voice on the set. He once endeavored to put a nervous actor at ease by glaring at him nose-to-nose and hollering, “RELAX!” On the first day of shooting Stalag 17, Preminger was fidgety about appearing in front of the camera for the first time in a great while. As a prank, Wilder pasted his face against Preminger’s and shouted, “RELAX!” Only Wilder could have gotten away with that. One actor noted that Preminger was parodying himself in Stalag 17. He added that the commandant whom Preminger played was “Otto on a good day.”64

  Preminger told me, “I had trouble remembering my lines.”65 Wilder recalled that, when Preminger forgot a line, “he would get very embarrassed and say he was rusty because he hadn’t acted in so many years. So he said he would send me a pound of caviar every time that he had a day when he blew his lines. Well, several pounds of caviar arrived for me in the course of shooting that film, but Preminger gave a fine performance.” Wilder said elsewhere, “Directors are not difficult to direct, because they remember the problems which they have had with their actors when they are directing. As a result, they will bend over backward to be helpful.”66

  Wilder could be as stubborn as a Prussian general in dealing with the studio brass. He was summoned by the front office and advised that it was improper for Stosh and a couple of the other prisoners to be wearing filthy underwear. He was told that he must stop having the men “running around looking so dirty.” Wilder responded with acrimony: “Like hell I will! I will close down the picture, and you can have somebody else do it.”67 The men wore their grungy union suits for the rest of the movie.

  Holden occasionally lost his patience during shooting. The actors who had appeared in the stage play had developed a camaraderie, and they sometimes indulged in boisterous horseplay between takes. Wilder did not mind, but it irked Holden, who finally snapped one day and yelled, “Goddammit! Can’t you guys shut up for a minute? Some of us are trying to get some work done!”68 Strauss and the others who were making a commotion were startled by
the scolding and complied. Holden took his role very seriously indeed. He was uneasy about the fact that Sefton was trafficking in blackmarket goods with the Nazi guards. Holden wanted the audience to like Sefton because he wanted them to like him. “Could I have a line or two that shows that I really hate the Germans?” Holden implored Wilder. But Wilder refused. Sefton was “an unsentimental opportunist,” he explained to Holden. Otherwise he could not have been so successful in conning the guards and the other prisoners with his crooked deals.69

  Some sources say that Holden did not become a problem drinker until he was making The Bridge on the River Kwai on location in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1956. But Gil Stratton said that he noticed Holden occasionally taking a nip from a flask when he was off the set. Holden sometimes appeared on the set with dark circles under his eyes and was a little unsteady, indicative of a night of drinking.

  Because all the action of the film takes place in and around barrack 4, the central set, the scenes in the script could be shot in sequence. In this manner the actors could develop their roles as the plot evolved. As the shooting progressed, Wilder fell five days behind schedule, largely because heavy rains caused delays at Snow Ranch. In addition, Wilder and Blum had continued to revise the script scene by scene throughout the shooting period. They had on occasion gotten behind, and this held up the shooting. Don Hartman, who had followed Buddy De Sylva as head of production at Paramount, finally decreed that Wilder had one more week to finish shooting. Wilder announced that he was finished with rewrites, and he promised to shoot the remaining scenes with maximum efficiency during the last week of filming. Cast and crew agreed to make up for lost time by shooting on three nights until the wee hours of the morning. The production wrapped on March 29, 1952, almost on schedule. Wilder brought the film in for $1,661,530; the front office decided that this was close enough to the original budget, $1,315,000, and did not complain.

  During the shooting period, Wilder and supervising editor Doane Harrison, along with the film’s editor, George Tomasini, worked out a plan whereby, through careful editing and artful tracking shots, the tempo of the film would never drag, even though much of the action is concentrated in the narrow confines of barrack 4. Hence the final editing of the movie during postproduction went along briskly. This was the only film Tomasini edited for Wilder; he went on to edit seven pictures for Alfred Hitchcock.

  Franz Waxman was on hand to compose another score for a Wilder film. Wilder’s instructions to Waxman were simple: “Main title and end music; and in certain sections a drum only.” Wilder did allow for source music, as in the Christmas party scene, in which Waxman approximated a dance band playing popular songs that were ostensibly coming from the barracks phonograph. Waxman was in complete accord with Wilder in relying primarily on percussion for the background music throughout the film. Percussion instruments by themselves, Waxman noted, can sound very sinister and menacing in a melodramatic movie about prisoners of war.70

  During the opening credits, a military band plays “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” featuring brass, snares, and a glockenspiel. The march music accompanies a tracking shot of a Nazi guard with a German shepherd patrolling along a high wire fence. As the story gets under way, it is clear that Stalag 17 is essentially a whodunit. Sefton must finger the Nazi informer masquerading as an American prisoner if he is to quell his fellow inmates’ suspicions about him—they call him a “kraut kisser.”

  Wilder injects some neat humor into the melodrama to keep the movie from becoming too grim. In Trzcinski’s cameo as Triz, he insists on washing his socks in the same kettle in which the inmates’ potato soup is boiled, despite their vigorous protests. Even Preminger does a comic turn. Commandant von Scherbach is traipsing around his office in his white silk socks while he interrogates Dunbar, who has been convicted of an act of sabotage. The commandant phones one of the high command in Berlin at one point. While waiting for the call to go through, he has his orderly help him put on his cumbersome black boots so that his superior officer can hear his heels clicking together as he stands at attention. After he hangs up, he has the orderly remove the boots. Wilder was proud of this gag.71

  Sefton continues his efforts throughout the movie to uncover the real traitor lurking in the barracks. As luck would have it, Sefton quite by accident secretly notices Price, one of the inmates, smuggling a message to a Nazi officer. Sefton subsequently unmasks Price before his fellow inmates; they sheepishly admit that they scapegoated him. Having redeemed himself in the eyes of his fellow prisoners, Sefton then volunteers to secretly escort Dunbar out of the camp before the commandant can have him executed for sabotage. Sefton is about to follow Dunbar through the trapdoor in the barracks floor, which leads to the escape tunnel that will take them out of the compound. Before Sefton descends, Andrew Sarris writes, Sefton “bids a properly cynical adieu to his prison camp buddies”: “If I ever run into any of you bums on a street corner, just let’s pretend we never met before.” But Wilder judged Sefton’s parting words to be too spiteful, so he later added a shot of Sefton popping back up through the trapdoor “with a boyish smile and a friendly salute; he then ducks down for good.”72

  In a chilling scene, the other prisoners arrange a condign punishment for Price. They wait until dark and force him out of the front door of the barrack, right into the glare of the searchlights in the prison yard. The Nazi guards mistake him for a prisoner who is attempting to escape and immediately gun him down. Afterward the GIs lie back on their bunks. Cookie begins to whistle “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” a reprise of the march employed in the opening credits. Then, as Jay Nash and Stanley Ross write, “a full orchestra picks it up and thunders triumphantly at the finish.”73

  Audiences found Wilder’s adroit mixture of raucous comedy and spinetingling melodrama very entertaining. The movie is studded with many sharp, earthy one-liners and is also a masterful, gripping motion picture. After a successful advance screening hosted by Paramount in May 1953, the picture opened to enthusiastic notices when it was released nationwide in July. Stalag 17 grossed $10 million in its first six months of release, making it Wilder’s biggest hit for Paramount so far. The studio had warned Wilder that Stalag 17 had to earn a profit to wipe out the deficit left over from Ace in the Hole. Stalag 17 did in fact make enough money to cover both movies.

  At the Academy Award ceremony on March 25, 1954, William Holden, who shrewdly underplayed the role of Sefton, won an Oscar for his assured performance. Holden’s wife, Ardis, who was by all accounts a shrew, told him, “Well, you know, Bill, you really didn’t get the award for Stalag 17,” in which she felt his performance was only adequate. “They gave it to you for Sunset Boulevard.”74 According to Sam Staggs, “Holden’s life had begun already to assume the lineaments of The Lost Weekend”; he drowned his resentment toward his wife in drink at an Oscar party.75 He was still seething when they arrived home. The inebriated Holden missed the driveway and plowed into a lamppost, tearing a fender off his Cadillac. He woke the next morning, still wearing his tuxedo and sitting in an easy chair, with his golden statuette in his lap.76

  Wilder was nominated for best director but lost to Fred Zinnemann, who won for From Here to Eternity. Wilder did not mind losing to his old friend. By the time of Stalag 17, some of the promising young filmmakers who got their start on Menschen am Sonntag had fallen on dark days. Robert Siodmak’s Hollywood career was faltering, and he would soon reverse course by returning to Germany to make pictures. Edgar Ulmer had never risen above making low-budget program pictures for the cost-conscious independent studios collectively known as Poverty Row (where Billy’s brother Willie had also wound up). Only Wilder and Zinnemann were still thriving in Hollywood.

  The German censorship board banned Stalag 17 from being exhibited in Germany in 1953. (A Foreign Affair had likewise been banned in Germany in 1948; it remained so until 1977.) In 1956 Wilder received a letter from George Weltner, the Paramount executive in charge of worldwide distribution, indicating that t
he film could be released in Germany—provided that, when the dialogue was dubbed into German, the spy hiding among the prisoners “is not a Nazi, but a Polish prisoner of war” who has sold out to the Nazis. Wilder replied to the Paramount high command, “Fuck you, gentlemen! You ask me, who lost my family in Auschwitz, to permit a change like this? Unless somebody apologizes,” Wilder said, he would never make another film for Paramount. “I never heard anything from Paramount,” Wilder concluded; “no apology, no nothing.”77 For the record, Stalag 17 was not altered when it was released in Germany in 1960.78 It was well received by the press and public there. Wilder himself was pleased with the movie. “Along with Sunset Boulevard, it is one of my favorites,” he declared unequivocally.79

  With Stalag 17, Wilder had made a successful Broadway play into an equally successful movie. By so doing, he had been reinstated as a major player at Paramount. For his next project, he chose another promising Broadway play, Sabrina Fair, which he would bring to the screen as Sabrina, a romantic comedy with Audrey Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, and, once again, William Holden. But at this point Wilder had been associated with Paramount for sixteen years, and he was growing restless.

  9

  Fascination

  Sabrina and The Seven Year Itch

  Vexed again; perplexed again;

  Thank God, I can be oversexed again.

  Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered am I.

  —Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers,