Some Like It Wilder

by Gene D. Phillips

  Nevertheless, since The Apartment had encountered no serious difficulties with the industry censor or with the legion, Wilder was not prepared for some of the major critics’ hostile reactions to the movie. Hollis Alpert’s piece in the Saturday Review was typical of the reviews that had nothing good to say about the picture at all. The message of this “dirty fairy tale,” wrote Alpert, was that “the quickest way up the executive ladder is pimping.”57 Dwight Macdonald complained in Esquire about the manner in which Wilder mingled comedy and drama, “shifting gears between pathos and slapstick without any transition.”58 Damning with faint praise, Andrew Sarris felt that “only Jack Lemmon kept The Apartment from collapsing into the cellar of morbid psychology.” Still another critic said that even Lemmon could not save the picture; his nervous, insecure rendering of Bud’s character made the reviewer want to reach for a Valium.59

  To those who charged that the movie lacked an uplifting tone, Wilder commented, “In my opinion The Apartment is a highly moral picture. If I wanted to show two people emancipating themselves, I had to dramatize first the mess they wanted to emancipate themselves from. . . . Every picture I make involves people making moral choices. How can I show that without showing the seamy side of the world?”60 Bud and Fran offer the possibility of decency against which the prevailing corruption can be measured; this is the moral dimension with which Wilder imbues the tale. Still, Wilder maintained that he never intended to impart a strong moral message in his films. “Once in a while,” he admitted, “maybe we smuggle in a little contraband message” for the audience to consider. “But I never ram a lecture down their throats, because they’d recoil,” he explained. “I do hope they’ll leave the theater a little enriched.”61

  Looking back on the movie, Wilder was particularly hurt by the epithet “dirty fairy tale” that was attached to The Apartment. Gehman reminded Wilder that Charles Brackett once said his work was characterized by “an exuberant vulgarity.” Wilder replied, “I have been pursued for years by that nasty word vulgarity. The bad taste thing.”62 Moreover, Wilder was miffed that some critics would accept serious adult themes in foreign-language movies but not in American films. “If I made a picture about the sex life of fishermen in Sardinia,” he groused, the critics would love it, “as long as it had a certain morbid message and was slightly out of focus.” It would win a prize at some festival in Zagreb. He concluded, “What seems to make European pictures appear more adult than ours is that we don’t understand the dialogue.”63

  Wilder gives The Apartment a wistful, melancholic quality, befitting a story that deals with an ambitious social climber. Sinyard writes of Bud, “He has a change of heart which, although belated, asserts Wilder’s belief in the redemption of character.”64 The picture reflects a belief in human values, set against life in the urban jungle. Wilder saw no conflict between his cynical wit and his hope for humanity.

  When Academy Awards night, April 17, 1961, rolled around, The Apartment boasted nine nominations and copped five awards. Alexander Trauner won for his production design and Daniel Mandell for his film editing. Wilder accepted his first Academy Award as best director since The Lost Weekend fifteen years before. Never known for his humility, he thanked the members of the academy “for being lovely, discerning people.” When the screenplay also won an Oscar, Wilder simply said, “Thank you, I. A. L. Diamond.” Diamond in turn said, “Thank you, Billy Wilder.” Wilder was then awarded a third Oscar as producer of the best picture of the year; it was presented, appropriately enough, by his dear friend Audrey Hepburn. The Apartment is one of the very few comedies ever to win best picture.

  Wilder became the second filmmaker in motion picture history to win Academy Awards for best director, best screenplay, and best picture. The triple crown had been first bestowed on Leo McCarey for Going My Way (1944). After presenting Wilder with the best screenplay award, playwright Moss Hart (The Man Who Came to Dinner) leaned over and whispered in Wilder’s ear, “This is the moment to stop, Billy.”65 The remark gave Wilder pause, because he was all too aware that The Apartment would be difficult to top. To George Cukor, Wilder’s Oscars “implicitly represented a sort of delayed recognition on the part of the film industry of Wilder’s previous film, Some Like It Hot,” which surely deserved to be crowned with an official prize from the academy.66

  When Wilder accepted the best picture award for The Apartment, he noted that it really belonged to Lemmon and MacLaine, both of whom had been nominated; he termed them his “two most valuable players.” Lemmon lost to Burt Lancaster, who played a Bible Belt preacher in Elmer Gantry; MacLaine lost to Elizabeth Taylor, who played a call girl in Butterfield 8.

  The multiple Oscars helped The Apartment’s box office performance. It brought in $6.5 million in domestic rentals and an additional $2.7 million from its distribution overseas. The Mirisch Company and UA were extremely pleased with the film’s performance. In addition, more than one critic felt that, in the light of The Apartment, Wilder had finally reached the high level of his fellow immigrant directors, including Wyler and Zinnemann.

  Wilder recalled that, while he was in Berlin working on his next film, One, Two, Three, he was invited to a meeting of the East German Film Club, which had just run The Apartment. “They told me that the picture really showed the depravity of the capitalist system, how a man can further his career by filthy tricks—a typical New York story. I said this kind of thing happens in every big outfit, with the bosses having their afternoon trysts.” Wilder contended that the movie was not meant to expose the crass materialism of the United States. “I said the story could happen any place, in Brussels or Bucharest.” He believed the theme of the film was universal.67

  “After one of my films went into release,” Wilder told me, he often thought of things in the picture that could have been improved. “The Apartment is a particular favorite of mine among my own movies, because it is the one in which I made the fewest mistakes.”

  The Apartment has continued to be singled out as a masterpiece over the years. When the AFI picked the one hundred best comedies in 2000, The Apartment was high on the list. It was also selected in Premiere magazine’s 2006 nationwide polls as among the greatest screenplays and the greatest comedies of all time. Finally, in 2007, the Chicago Tribune canvassed members of the acting community in Hollywood about their favorite films. Near the top of the list was The Apartment.

  Wilder realized that he had reached a creative peak with The Apartment. But he was not prepared to accept Moss Hart’s advice and quit while he was ahead. He could not promise that his next project, a comedy set in postwar Berlin, would be another top-notch picture. At the very least, “I wanted to give United Artists and the Mirisch Company a movie that was going to make some money for them.”68 He felt he owed them that.

  14

  Love on the Run

  One, Two, Three and Irma la Douce

  I’ve reaffirmed my lack of confidence in my fellow men.

  —Rock Hudson as Robert Talbot in the film Come September

  “Don’t ask me why, but I just got the feeling I wanted to make a picture again in Germany,” Wilder said; “I hadn’t done one since 1948, when I did A Foreign Affair.”1 He explained to a German interviewer, “Of course I was bitter after the war; but today it’s a closed chapter. I have buried my anger and my hate. The wounds are healed. It is absolutely, totally forgotten. I even miss Germany again today. I’m homesick for Berlin.”2

  Wilder had a penchant for choosing story material from obscure European literary sources. These stories would be unfamiliar to American film critics, who could consequently not complain that he had not been faithful to his source story. The literary source for Five Graves to Cairo, for example, had been Hotel Imperial, a play by Lajos Biró. Wilder’s next film would be derived from a play by another Hungarian playwright, Ferenc Molnar.

  Wilder had seen Molnar’s one-act play Ein, zwei, drei (One, two, three) on the stage in Berlin in 1928. Wilder remembered vividly the incredible per
formance on the Berlin stage of Max Pallenberg as Norrison, a highstrung Parisian banker. Pallenberg was noted for delivering his dialogue in a fast staccato, like the rapid chatter of a machine gun. The whole play takes place in Norrison’s office. Lydia, the daughter of a Swedish tycoon who is one of Norrison’s prize clients, is the banker’s houseguest. During her stay she secretly weds Anton, a rabid Socialist taxi driver, and becomes pregnant with his child. Norrison has to hastily turn Anton into an imitation aristocrat, worthy to be the son-in-law of his wealthy client, before the industrialist meets Anton. Norrison does so with the help of an army of clothiers.

  What would happen, Wilder wondered, if he set Molnar’s farce in Berlin during the cold war? In Wilder’s screenplay, Norrison, the banker, becomes C. R. “Mac” MacNamara, chief representative of Coca-Cola in Berlin. Scarlett Hazeltine, the scatterbrained daughter of Wendell Hazeltine, an executive at Coke’s home office in Atlanta, is staying with Mac and his family in Berlin. During her sojourn she surreptitiously marries an East German Communist, Otto Piffl, and is now expecting his child, “a bouncing baby Bolshevik,” according to Mac. When Wendell Hazeltine and his wife decide to come to Berlin for a visit, Mac must transform Otto, a scruffy dropout, into a capitalist and an aristocrat by means of a host of tailors and haberdashers to impress Scarlett’s parents.

  Although Coca-Cola plays a significant role in the script, Wilder never personally liked Coke. While a tabloid journalist in Berlin in 1929, Wilder wrote that “Coca-Cola tastes like burnt pneumatic tires.”3 He admitted privately in later years that he never had any reason to change his opinion of Coke. Wilder made Mac an executive of the Coca-Cola Company and not of a fictitious soft drink company for the same reason that Frank Flannagan, Gary Cooper’s character in Love in the Afternoon, worked for Pepsi-Cola: Wilder abhorred the use of phony brand names in films. “When you have that,” he insisted, “believability goes out the window.”4 What’s more, Wilder claimed that, after the release of Love in the Afternoon, he had promised the Coca-Cola Company that he would one day make a film that featured a Coke executive. After all, the tie-in with Coke in a film, the bosses at Coke knew, would reap a great deal of publicity for their product.

  One, Two, Three (1961)

  Wilder could think of only one actor who could deliver dialogue at the triphammer tempo of Max Pallenberg: James Cagney. He contacted Cagney very early in preproduction at his residence in Martha’s Vineyard, to lure him to commit to the part. The sixty-one-year-old actor had been beset by some unworthy material in recent years; consequently, he was delighted to appear in a promising film like One, Two, Three. Wilder was glad that he got Cagney when he was still “working on eight cylinders. For me there’s never been anybody better on the screen.”5 When Wilder gave Cagney the screenplay, Cagney noticed the foreword: “This piece must be played multo furioso—at a rapid-fire, breakneck speed: 100 miles an hour on the curves, 140 miles on the straightway.”6 “I can see why he thought of me,” Cagney writes in his autobiography; “I’ve been a rat-a-tat talker all my life.” During the shooting period, Cagney found himself spitting out his words “like bullets from a machine gun.”7

  One, Two, Three has some resonances of Ninotchka, which Wilder coscripted for Lubitsch in 1939. Otto Piffl, like Ninotchka, is saturated with Communist doctrine but eventually finds that capitalism is not so bad after all, once he experiences romance with someone from a capitalist country. One, Two, Three has another link to Ninotchka: Mac is determined to expand Coca-Cola’s market into Eastern Europe at any cost. To do so, he must negotiate with (that is, bribe) three petty Russian trade commissars: Peripetchikoff (Leon Askin), Borodenko (Ralf Wolter), and Mishkin (Peter Capell). They are modeled on the three bumbling Russian envoys in Ninotchka: Buljanoff, Iranoff, and Kopalski. The three inept commissars in One, Two, Three are likewise dim bulbs. At one point, for example, the benighted Peripetchikoff declares that he and his comrades rejected a shipment of Swiss cheese because it was full of holes. Like their counterparts in Ninotchka, the three commissars are seduced by the decadent pleasures of the West. As Wilder opined apropos of Ninotchka, he thought the fact that Russian diplomats would fall prey to the onslaught of our capitalistic world was quite funny. The same holds true for the present film. In One, Two, Three, when someone asks Peripetchikoff, who is a devious crook at heart, “Is everybody corrupt?” he replies, “I don’t know everybody!”

  In adapting Molnar’s play for film, Wilder and Diamond opted to retain the original title, which the German film historian Harald Keller explains this way: “One, two, three—When Mac snaps his fingers in rapid succession, his minions know to jump into position. MacNamara’s impatient thwacking of ‘one, two, three’ stamps out the beat” of the movie.8

  After World War II, writes Douglas Brode, “no world problem loomed more ominously than the division of Berlin into the East and West sectors,” which separated capitalists from Communists.9 In the screenplay of Wilder’s movie, he and Diamond were impartial in lampooning both factions. There is, of course, the trio of Russian trade commissars. Wilder satirized the Germans on the other side of the iron curtain in the person of Schlemmer (Hanns Lothar), Mac’s spit-and-polish, heel-clicking aide-de-camp. Schlemmer endeavors to hide that he served in the infamous SS corps of the Nazi army. Asked by Mac about his nation’s history, Schlemmer explains that he worked in the underground—not the resistance movement but the subway system, as a motorman! He denies that he knew what the Nazis were doing aboveground. Wilder is satirizing the attitude he often encountered immediately after the war when he was attached to the OWI film unit. Many Germans maintained quite disingenuously that they were ignorant of the brutal crimes committed by the Nazis. Schlemmer inadvertently gives his Nazi past away when he recognizes a newspaper reporter “as his old SS commander.”10 He then saves face by maintaining to Mac that he did not join the SS willingly; “I was drafted!” He further explains, “I was only a pastry cook in the officers’ mess.”

  Since Wilder and Diamond created MacNamara with Cagney in mind, it is not surprising that they quote from two of Cagney’s most renowned pictures in the screenplay. When Mac gets fed up with Otto’s tirades against the United States, he grabs a grapefruit from the dinner table and threatens Otto: “How would you like a little fruit for dessert?” Cagney thus recalls how he pushed a halved grapefruit in Mae Clarke’s face in The Public Enemy. There is also a sight gag that recurs throughout One, Two, Three. A cuckoo clock features a flag-waving miniature figure of Uncle Sam while playing George M. Cohan’s “Yankee Doodle Dandy” every hour on the hour. This is an allusion to Cagney’s Oscar-winning portrayal of Cohan in the movie of the same name.

  What’s more, a U.S. military policeman (Red Buttons) does an imitation of Cagney’s screen persona (just as another actor imitated George Raft’s screen image in Some Like It Hot). The MP hitches up his pants with his elbows and growls, “Okay, Buster!” Cagney pretends not to notice that Buttons is parodying his mannerisms while addressing him. Cagney in turn does an impersonation of his old pal Edward G. Robinson, who also got his start in gangster pictures at Warner Bros. in the 1930s. When Mac hears that Scarlett Hazeltine’s parents have learned that she is expecting a baby with her Communist husband, he mumbles, “Mother of mercy, is this the end of little Rico?” Cagney “renders that line of dialogue as an impromptu homage to Robinson,” who played mobster Rico Bandello in Little Caesar.11

  Kevin Lally hazards that the screenplay for One, Two, Three “probably contains the highest number of gags per page” of any Wilder-Diamond script.12 The writers pitched their best jokes to Cagney’s character, since Mac is obviously the center of the movie. In defending Western civilization against Otto’s jibes, Mac pontificates, “Look at it this way, kid: Any world that can produce the Taj Mahal, William Shakespeare, and striped toothpaste can’t be all bad.” Endorsing Wilder’s audacious humor, Axel Madsen writes, “Only Wilder could have planted in James Cagney’s mouth,” when the Communists are hijacking a shi
pment of Coke, this line: “And they don’t even return the empties.”13

  Some early coverage in the American press about Wilder’s movie criticized him for poking fun at the U.S. presence in Berlin, epitomized by MacNamara, who is a bona fide screwball. They even accused Wilder of being un-American for making this picture. “I am a very devout, naturalized American citizen,” Wilder replied; “I believe I can do more for my country with a healthy belly laugh than by waving the flag.”14

  Having spent eight months writing the script for One, Two, Three with Diamond, Wilder launched into preproduction. He was looking for a young German actor who could play Otto Piffl. He managed to corral Horst Buchholz, who had already gained international recognition by appearing in a Hollywood Western, The Magnificent Seven (1961). At a casting meeting, Wilder declared, “I’m tired of clichéd typecasting—the same people in every film.” For the role of Mac’s wife, Phyllis, he continued, “let’s get someone whose face isn’t familiar to moviegoers. Why don’t we get Arlene Francis?” Francis was a television personality, known especially as a regular on the TV game show What’s My Line? Francis played Mac’s wife as “warm and sensible,” two things that Mac himself decidedly was not. Since she had not appeared in a movie for more than a decade, Francis felt like a newcomer when she arrived on the set. Wilder immediately put her at ease by saying, “Now that you’re here, we can start.”15

  Behind the camera, Wilder secured the services of cinematographer Daniel Fapp, who had just completed the shooting of Let’s Make Love, a Marilyn Monroe vehicle. Because they had both done a picture with Monroe, Wilder felt that he and Fapp regarded each other with the camaraderie that characterized the survivors of the Titanic. Fapp was new to the Wilder camp, as was composer André Previn. Interestingly enough, Previn was himself a native of Berlin; he was born there in 1929. He studied music at the Berlin Conservatory before his family immigrated to the United States in 1939. Previn began writing film scores at MGM while still in his teens. By the time he came to write the background music for One, Two, Three, he had already won two Oscars: one for arranging the Lerner and Loewe score for Gigi (1958), and one for adapting the George and Ira Gershwin score for Porgy and Bess (1959).