Some Like It Wilder

by Gene D. Phillips

  After the preview of The Fortune Cookie, Wilder felt that the audience’s reaction, as reflected in the preview cards, was fairly positive. Still, he decided to make a couple of minor adjustments: He cut three minutes of “excess baggage,” that is, superfluous dialogue. He also asked Previn to replace the waltz music that accompanied Harry and Boom Boom tossing a football around the empty stadium at the fade-out with a rousing march played by a brass band. Also, because “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To” already figured prominently in the background music, Previn employed the tune to accompany the opening credits, orchestrated with an old-fashioned big band sound.

  The film’s first episode, “The Accident,” concludes with Harry being carted off the playing field on a stretcher. He is on his way to St. Mark’s Hospital, where he will be attended by nursing sisters. Diamond quipped that, to appease the legion, instead of having hookers, as in Wilder’s two previous movies, “we have nuns in this one!”62

  “The Brother-in-Law,” the next episode, begins with Whiplash Willie Gingrich, an ambulance-chasing lawyer, keeping vigil next to Harry’s hospital bed. The wily, unscrupulous Willie is a grotesque figure straight out of Dickens. Matthau’s performance as a hoax-peddling fraud is marked by ticks and funny vocal inflections. Willie earned his nickname because he specializes in turning whiplash cases into lucrative lawsuits. And so he badgers Harry into exaggerating his injuries to extort a hefty sum of money from the insurance company. “We’re going for all the marbles, kid,” Willie assures Harry with maniacal glee. Despite serious misgivings, Harry goes along with Willie’s crooked scheme. Willie reassures him, “The insurance company is loaded; they will take our payoff out of petty cash!” He adds, “We’re in this together—straight down the line.” This is precisely what Walter says to Phyllis when they finalize their scheme to bilk the insurance company in Double Indemnity.

  “The motives underlying this Wilderian deception are exceptionally base,” Morris writes.63 Harry agrees to the swindle only because Willie convinces him that his estranged wife, Sandy (Judi West), will be reconciled with him once he comes into a great sum of money. Harry and Sandy were married on the Fourth of July. Ironically, that was the day Harry lost his independence—he remains emotionally dependent on his erstwhile wife, though she dumped him for a failed musician.

  In reality, Sandy is no prize. For one thing, she is not very bright. Sandy has read only one book—The Carpetbaggers. But she never got past page 19 because she found the trashy novel too sophisticated. Nevertheless, Harry wants her back. When Willie talks on the phone to Sandy in New York, Wilder adroitly uses the wide-screen format to reveal Sandy’s true character. We see Sandy on the left side of the screen as she talks to Willie; she is wearing a tawdry negligee. On the right side of the screen, a naked man is asleep in a disheveled bed. As Sandy is described in the screenplay, she does not have much class, but “there is something very provocative about her.”64

  Sandy agrees to come to Cleveland, ostensibly to care for Harry, but the mercenary female actually covets her share of the insurance settlement. She has confidence in Willie as a shyster lawyer. “Willie,” she later comments, “could find a loophole in the Ten Commandments.”

  Boom Boom (Ron Rich) is distraught when he hears that Harry is seriously injured and, for the time being, confined to a wheelchair. To make amends, he becomes Harry’s caretaker once he is released from the hospital, so it is Boom Boom—not Sandy—who becomes Harry’s nursemaid. The two men gradually become fast friends. Consequently, Harry develops severe scruples about inflicting a specious burden of guilt on Boom Boom.

  It is significant that Wilder released The Fortune Cookie in 1966, when the civil rights movement was going strong, epitomized by demonstrations for racial equality led by Martin Luther King Jr. (after whom Wilder named Luther “Boom Boom” Jackson). The African American Boom Boom is one of the very few honest individuals in the picture. British critic Frieda Lockhart comments that “the Negro footballer is too good to be true.”65 Actually, it seems that Wilder conceived Boom Boom as a contrast to Willie. Indeed, Harry’s conversations with Boom Boom serve to balance his encounters with Willie. As Steve Seidman puts it, Boom Boom functions as the “good conscience” figure in Harry, while Willie functions as his “bad conscience” figure. This proves to be a very effective way of dramatizing Harry’s inner conflict on the screen.66

  Meanwhile, a trio of lawyers representing Consolidated Life, known as the Legal Eagles, engage Chester Purkey (Cliff Osmond), a dogged private eye and surveillance expert, to keep tabs on Harry. “The ‘respectable’ insurance firm’s methods, including bugging their opponent’s apartment, are almost as nasty as Whiplash Willie’s tactics,” writes Lockhart.67 The private detective, sneaking around in his cheap raincoat with his hidden microphones and cameras, poking clandestinely “into the most intimate activities and conversations,” Stephen Farber states, “is the most repulsive character in the film.”68

  The Legal Eagles eventually decide to settle Harry’s claim with a check for two hundred thousand dollars rather than face the endless courtroom battle Willie has threatened them with. But Purkey, like a crafty card sharp, has one last wild card up his sleeve. When he goes to Harry’s apartment to collect his surveillance equipment, he makes calculated racial slurs about Boom Boom. He observes, “What gets me is, I’m driving an old Chevy; and I see a coon riding around in a white Cadillac.” Harry, furious, finally gives the game away by rising from his wheelchair to slug Purkey. For good measure, Harry decides to sock Purkey again, so he shouts to Purkey’s cameraman in the apartment across the street, “Roll ’em, Max!” This is Wilder’s reference to the last sequence of Sunset Boulevard, in which Max is directing the newsreel cameramen who are photographing Norma. Undaunted, Willie informs Purkey that he plans to sue him for his racist remarks on behalf of the NAACP. Moreover, having realized at long last that the self-serving Sandy’s concern for him was motivated solely by money, Harry kicks his ex-wife out the door.

  At this point, the viewer might recall the fortune cookie that Harry opened earlier in the film. Its message quoted Abraham Lincoln’s dictum, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”

  Once again, Wilder was criticized for sweetening his bitter brew by providing a film with an unwarranted upbeat ending, whereby Harry experiences a sense of moral regeneration just when the insurance payoff is within his grasp. Louis Giannetti has a thought-provoking response to this objection. He reminds us that many of Wilder’s films are about morally weak individuals like Harry who return to the path of virtue by film’s end. “But in Wilder’s world,” he adds, “virtue must be its own reward.” Wilder’s characters might manage to save their self-respect—but that is all they salvage. “The spoils of their calculations are reluctantly sacrificed when they decide to give up their schemes,” as when Harry blows the whistle on the insurance fraud. Therefore the ending of The Fortune Cookie, like that of The Apartment, is less positive than it might appear.69

  Wilder himself responded to those critics he termed “Jack the Rippers,” who claimed that the “shower bath of sentiment” at the film’s end was a concession to the box office. He explained that he wanted to give the audience “a little bonus at the end,” because “it would have been dismally depressing otherwise.”70

  Once Harry is able to reject his scheming brother-in-law, he reverts to his kind and honest nature.71 In the film’s epilogue, titled “The Final Score,” Harry goes looking for Boom Boom to make amends for the anguish he has caused his pal. Harry locates him in the deserted football stadium. After Harry apologizes, the pair reaffirm their comradeship by contentedly tossing a football back and forth like a couple of adolescent boys. Wilder makes the same point with Harry and Boom Boom’s impromptu game of touch football that he made with Bud and Fran’s gin rummy game at the conclusion of The Apartment: it is easier to play the game of life with someone
else than to have to go it alone. So the final line of The Fortune Cookie is Harry’s shout, “Come on, play ball!” as the game of life goes on.

  Dick notes that “the basic decency of Harry and Boom Boom contrasts sharply with the mendacity of Harry’s ex-wife Sandy and his brother-in-law Willie.” Little wonder, then, that at film’s end Harry “seeks out the only person who has not sunk into the bogs of greed—Boom Boom.”72 Wilder’s interest in male bonding in his movies goes back to Walter Neff and Barton Keyes in Double Indemnity and Sefton and Cookie in Stalag 17. But Farber declares that “homosexuality plays a furtive role in a number of Wilder’s films,” including The Fortune Cookie.73 Homosexuality does surface in some of Wilder’s films, but The Fortune Cookie is not one of them. To find homosexuality in this picture is to underestimate the value Wilder places on male friendship in his films.

  The Fortune Cookie opened in theaters across the country on October 19, 1966, to largely favorable notices and good box office returns. Critics noted the laugh-a-minute repartee peppered with the bitter satirical asides that distinguish Wilder’s work. The fundamentally positive reception of the film went a long way in aiding Wilder to put the fiasco of Kiss Me, Stupid behind him.

  Richard Schickel found the film a wily morality tale about chicanery and deception, punctuated with Wilder’s customary corrosive wit: “A jackhammer of a film, savagely applied to those concrete areas of the human spirit where cupidity and stupidity have been so long entrenched; it is a bitterly, often excruciatingly funny movie.” Wilder, he continued, “is just about the only American director of comedy who finds his material in the artful exaggeration of all-too-recognizable human and social traits. He has a cold rather than a warm comic spirit. . . . If you can stand the chill, I think you’ll find plenty of truth in what he has to say.” In his unqualified rave, Schickel called Matthau “the W. C. Fields of the 1960s,” noting that he shared with Fields “an undeniably comic orneriness.”74 Matthau indeed steals the picture in an act of the grandest larceny, and he won an Academy Award for his role as the conniving Willie.

  Wilder brought in The Fortune Cookie $5,000 over budget, but the Mirisch brothers did not complain. After all, the movie grossed $5 million domestically, with an additional $1.8 million coming from overseas; the film’s profit was double that of its cost.

  Wilder was relieved that he experienced no censorship problems with The Fortune Cookie. As it happened, Monsignor Little, his nemesis all the way back to The Seven Year Itch, retired in 1966 and was replaced by his executive assistant, Father Patrick Sullivan. Shortly after his appointment, in a press release dated December 8, 1965, Sullivan proclaimed that the Legion of Decency had changed its name to the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures (NCOMP). The organization had dispensed with its more militant name, which seemed to connote a vigilante group, “to emphasize the more positive approach to films that the office was espousing.”75 NCOMP was more interested in endorsing good films than in spying out sensual footage in movies it disapproved of.76

  What’s more, on September 20, 1966, Geoffrey Shurlock announced that the censorship code had been revised yet again, with a view to “the expansion of the artist’s freedom.” This was a move that Wilder certainly welcomed, just as he had the modifications in the legion’s policies. The latest revisions in the code set the stage for the unveiling on November 1, 1968, of the film industry’s own rating system. The new system would evaluate movies “on a sliding scale ranging from family-friendly to adults only.”77 The film censor’s office, like the legion, also acquired a new name; it became the Code and Rating Administration (CARA).

  Jack Vizzard, Shurlock’s chief assistant, observed that non-Catholic and Catholic moviegoers alike preferred to follow the industry’s ratings rather than those of NCOMP. As a result, the studio bosses no longer allowed the Catholic organization to affect the moral content of movies.78

  The inauguration of NCOMP and CARA made Wilder feel as if he had been let out of reform school as he began to work on his next picture, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. When it was finally released in November 1970, it would be Wilder’s first feature in four years, the longest hiatus in Wilder’s career. He had so many setbacks during the production of the film that it seemed that he had joined the ranks of such hard-luck filmmakers as Orson Welles.

  16

  The Game’s Afoot

  The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes

  Women are not to be trusted; not the best of them—a twinkle in the eye, and the arsenic in the soup.

  —Robert Stephens as Sherlock Holmes

  in the film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, like Agatha Christie, was one of the foremost writers of classic British detective stories. Conan Doyle’s armchair sleuth, Sherlock Holmes, can find the solution to any mystery with his ingenious faculties of deduction. But Conan Doyle’s stories are not merely exercises in puzzle solving; he portrays his hero’s encounters with the evils of society in a vivid and compelling fashion.

  Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh in 1859; he was educated in a Jesuit school and at Edinburgh University, where he earned his medical degree in 1885. He decided to augment his meager income as a doctor by trying his hand at writing detective stories. The character of Sherlock Holmes was inspired by Joseph Bell, a physician who taught Conan Doyle in medical school. Bell employed his astute powers of deduction to diagnose patients’ ailments and even infer details of their past lives.1 Conan Doyle said that he created his fictional detective with similar powers of deduction, “to treat crime as Dr. Bell treated diseases.” Holmes became the world’s first consulting detective, a genius at unraveling the threads of a mystery.2

  William Gillette wrote a play, Sherlock Holmes (1899), in which the playwright played Holmes on tour for three decades. It was Gillette who coined the celebrated phrase, “Elementary, my dear Watson.” The first important Sherlock Holmes on film was John Barrymore, who starred in Albert Parker’s silent film version of Gillette’s play in 1922. Although some exteriors were shot in London, the film is too faithful to the Gillette original, with some scenes seeming stage bound. Still, critics thought that Barrymore had captured Holmes, as when he fixes the villain with a penetrating, hawklike stare. Gillette’s play was revived on Broadway in 1974 in a production that I saw at the Broadhurst Theatre. Robert Stephens, who would play the title role in Wilder’s film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, also starred in the revival in New York.3 But the best-known interpreter of the Holmes character was Basil Rathbone, who played the detective in fourteen films between 1939 and 1946. Rathbone told me in correspondence in 1966 that the first film in which he played Holmes was also the best: The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939), directed by Sidney Lanfield.

  At that film’s end, Holmes says, “I’ve had a strenuous day; oh, Watson, the needle!” No screen hero had ever made such a daring and nonchalant confession to drug addiction. Not until Wilder’s film thirty-one years later would Holmes indulge his drug habit on-screen. Between the release of Lanfield’s film and the release of Wilder’s, Geoffrey Shurlock had, on December 11, 1956, announced that, “in keeping with present-day conditions,” his office was rescinding the ban on illegal drugs as a subject for films.4 So Wilder was free to treat Holmes as an addict.

  Wilder set his movie in the Victorian era, the period in which Conan Doyle wrote his stories of the great detective. In their original screenplay, Wilder and Diamond devised new adventures for Holmes, none of which were derived directly from the Conan Doyle stories. “I didn’t want merely to do a remake of The Hound of the Baskervilles,” Wilder said. He did not incorporate any one story into his scenario; he borrowed from two stories for the cases he invented for his movie, using these two stories as points of departure.

  Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans” (1905) deals with Colonel Valentine Walters’s theft of the secret blueprints of a submarine from the British navy office. Walters attempts to sell the
plans to a German espionage agent. This story inspired the episode in Wilder’s picture that revolves around Britain’s secret efforts to perfect a submarine for wartime use.5 Queen Victoria is mentioned in the original story,6 but she makes an actual appearance in Wilder’s film. In the picture, Queen Victoria “rejects the use of a submarine as a warship” and calls a halt to the development of the submarine for wartime use. Bernard Dick comments that this is Wilder’s “ironic gloss on Britain’s unpreparedness for submarine warfare at the outbreak of World War I.”7

  Irene Adler is the model for Ilse von Hoffmanstahl in Wilder’s movie. In “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Irene is the devious female who outwits Holmes at every turn and finally manages to flee England before he can expose her for endeavoring to blackmail the king of Bohemia. Like Irene, Ilse outwits the master sleuth, “the only woman ever to do so.”8 In Conan Doyle’s story, Watson says, “The best plans of Mr. Sherlock Holmes were beaten by a woman’s wit. . . . When he speaks of Irene Adler, it is always under the honorable title of the woman.”9

  Holmes’s perennial popularity helped Wilder convince Walter Mirisch, the studio chief, to approve his own Holmes movie.10 UA, the distributor, followed suit. “The three greatest figures in fiction for the screen,” Wilder said in his pitch to Mirisch, “are Robinson Crusoe, Tarzan, and Sherlock Holmes.” Wilder aimed to do an in-depth study of Holmes, whom he esteemed as a most intriguing character. “I think of this picture as my valentine to Sherlock,” he said.11 Mirisch assigned the movie a $6 million budget, one of the largest of Wilder’s career.12

  “I wanted to show Holmes as vulnerable, as human,” said Wilder. “In my picture he does not solve the mystery; no, he is deceived” by Ilse, the beautiful German spy who masquerades as Gabrielle Valladon, a Belgian damsel in distress.13 “We treated Holmes with respect,” Wilder insisted, “but not reverence.”14 The screenplay does not hesitate to examine Holmes’s apparent disdain for women and his addiction to cocaine, not to mention Holmes’s ambiguous relationship with Watson. “It’s more The Odd Couple than Conan Doyle,” Wilder said, “only with a Victorian backdrop—two bachelors cohabiting.”15