Some Like It Wilder

by Gene D. Phillips

  Wilder still had a penchant for slipping wisecracks about other movies into a script. The countess recalls losing an Oscar to the actress “who played a nun with tuberculosis.” Audrey Hepburn, Wilder’s old friend, had played that part in The Nun’s Story (1959), but it was for Roman Holiday that she won an Academy Award. And, as the New York Times pointed out, Wilder “shaped and toughened the story in ways that inevitably recall Sunset Boulevard, as does the casting of William Holden, the gigolo in Sunset Boulevard, as the seedy, down-on-his-luck producer Barry Detweiler, in Fedora.”13

  Wilder eventually grew tired of “dragging my ass along Hollywood Boulevard” like Barry, looking in vain for a studio to fund his film.14 In desperation he turned to his agent Paul Kohner to obtain financing for Fedora from a German studio, since Kohner, another refugee from Hitler’s Germany, still had connections in the German film industry. Kohner put in a call to the production chief at Bavaria Film Studios in Munich, where Wilder had shot One, Two, Three, and inquired whether he would like Billy Wilder to make a picture there for the studio. Kohner got an affirmative response and informed Wilder that the movie would be financed through Bavaria Film Studios’ subsidiary, Geria Films. The budget was fixed at $6.7 million.15

  “I have some kind of reputation in Germany,” Wilder mused; “why, I don’t know, because, when I left Germany, I was just one of the writers at Ufa. Suddenly the mantle of F. W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, and Ernst Lubitsch falls on my shoulders.” Geria Films held a reception for Wilder to announce the production. “My God,” thought Wilder, “old Ufa is going to rise again!”16

  Universal still held the distribution rights to Fedora as a result of its original investment in the project. So Wilder, nursing a grudge against the studio, bought out Universal’s interest in the picture. In effect, Wilder personally reimbursed Universal for its purchase of the screen rights to the Tryon novella for him. As one Hollywood insider put it, “Sid Sheinberg not only pulled the rug out from under Billy, he tried to sell it back to him!”17

  Wilder’s original casting plan was to have the same young actress play both Fedora, now known as Countess Sobryanski, and her daughter Antonia. He would age the actress for the scenes in which she played the countess. He selected Marthe Keller after attending an advance screening of Bobby Deerfield (1977), in which she played opposite Al Pacino. Keller was a Swiss actress who had appeared primarily in French films. Wilder eventually decided that Keller would be satisfactory as Antonia, but he feared that she lacked the range to play the elderly countess. Moreover, he found Keller temperamental and sensed that she would be difficult enough to handle in playing the one part. So Wilder needed another actress to play Antonia’s mother.

  His first choice was his old confrere from his Berlin days, Marlene Dietrich, whom he had directed in two films. He quickly sent off a copy of the screenplay to the reclusive Dietrich at her Paris apartment. Wilder later remembered that she shot back the screenplay to him by return mail, “as if she couldn’t get rid of it fast enough.” She attached an abrupt note: “I hated the script, and I don’t know why you want me to do it. How could you possibly think that?”18 Perhaps Dietrich felt that the increasingly strained relationship of Fedora and her daughter Antonia was uncomfortably close to her problematic relationship with her own daughter, Maria Riva. Moreover, Dietrich, at her advanced age, no longer wished to be photographed.

  Keller herself suggested the German actress Hildegard Knef for the part. “Twenty years Dietrich’s junior, Hildegard was Marlene’s protegé,” writes David Riva, Dietrich’s grandson; she was also one of Germany’s top stars.19 Moreover, Knef had scored a personal triumph on Broadway in 1955 in Silk Stockings, a Cole Porter musical derived from Ninotchka. She had played in some Hollywood films, but she was better known for her European pictures.

  Michael York plays himself in Fedora, as do Arlene Francis (who was in One, Two, Three) and Henry Fonda, who plays the president of the motion picture academy. The presence of these individuals, Wilder pointed out, adds an authentic flavor to the film, just as the appearances by Cecil B. De Mille, Buster Keaton, and Hedda Hopper do in Sunset Boulevard.

  Although the cinematographer Gerry Fisher (The Go-Between, 1971) had not worked with Wilder before, composer Miklos Rozsa and production designer Alexander Trauner were creative associates of Wilder’s from way back. Rozsa was collaborating on his fifth Wilder film and Trauner on his eighth.

  Principal photography began on June 1, 1977, in the Greek isles, where Fedora goes to live after her retirement from the screen. Wilder and his film unit started out on the island of Corfu, with four days of exteriors. They moved on to the island of Mandouri, where Trauner had found an isolated house that would serve as Fedora’s Villa Calpyso. Wilder wanted so much to finish on time and not go over budget, to please his German investors, that he reduced the rehearsal time on each scene. Keller complained that she never felt that she had nailed her characterization of Antonia “because Billy Wilder never discussed anything. You had to do what he said; and I felt a bit like a marionette.”20

  Wilder and his production unit moved on to Bavaria Film Studios to shoot interiors. Fisher had exploited the natural locations in the Greek islands to exquisite effect. While shooting the scenes in Fedora’s mansion, with its dilapidated grandeur, on the studio soundstages, Fisher gave the film a bleak look, “reflecting the wasteland of the spirit” experienced by the inhabitants. As Verina Glaessner writes, in these latter scenes Fisher helped to undercut the “inherent nostalgia” of this tale of old Hollywood.21

  Rex McGee records that, “in late July, Wilder and Diamond viewed about an hour of the footage” already edited by Stefan Arsten, and they “decided that they needed a new editor.”22 So Wilder fired Arsten and phoned Ralph Winters, who had cut Avanti! and The Front Page. Winters was involved in another film, but he suggested Fredric Steinkamp, who had won an Academy Award for coediting Grand Prix (1966). Wilder was also much impressed with Steinkamp’s editing of Bobby Deerfield.

  In August Wilder and his production team moved on to Paris, to finish the shoot at the Studios de Boulogne, where he had filmed Love in the Afternoon. Here Wilder staged Fedora’s elaborate funeral, which is held in Paris. Trauner outdid himself by constructing a huge set, complete with marble pillars, splendid candelabra, and a wrought iron gallery above the casket, where the countess and her entourage sit, presiding over the proceedings. “This is a triple-A funeral,” Wilder beamed. But “behind Wilder’s jauntiness on the set,” journalist Mary Blume observed, “the pressure shows. He has started smoking again, trying to limit himself to a particularly nasty French cigar, of which even he can only smoke three a day.” Wilder confessed that shooting indoors for long periods gave him cabin fever. “Being quarantined on a sound stage and not being able to walk down a Paris boulevard,” he said, “is like being a pianist in a bordello while hearing the people screwing on every floor. It makes you crazy.”23

  Principal photography wrapped on August 31, 1977, with Wilder having gone a few thousand dollars over budget, not enough for his German investors to complain about. Within a few days, he was back in Hollywood. Wilder and Steinkamp rented an editing suite at Twentieth Century–Fox to cut the film. They finished the first cut on October 20.24

  During postproduction, a serious problem developed for Wilder. He was convinced that Antonia and the countess should have the same voice, since the daughter was impersonating her mother throughout much of the movie. But Marthe Keller and Hildegard Knef did not sound enough alike to sustain the illusion. Wilder decided to have the same German actress, Inga Bunsch, rerecord both Keller’s and Knef’s dialogue. Knef resented this turn of events: “First he destroys my face,” when Fedora is disfigured; “now he takes away my voice. What is left?”25 Surprisingly, Keller accepted Wilder’s decision to redub her voice, although she insisted that her own voice be employed in the final scenes of the movie, when Antonia is no longer masquerading as Fedora.

  Miklos Rozsa was summoned to view t
he rough cut in October so he could get going on his background music. He was glad to be collaborating with Wilder again. In a 1974 interview, he said that he never forgot how Wilder went to bat for him when Louis Lipstone, head of Paramount’s music department, disliked the dissonance in Rozsa’s scores for Wilder’s pictures. Rozsa would telephone Wilder and say, “Billy, save me from this son-of-a-bitch!” And Wilder would always oblige.26 Rozsa recorded his score with a symphony orchestra in mid-December 1977. He matched Wilder’s film about old Hollywood with a “deliberately nostalgic” accompaniment.27

  Lorimer Productions, the American representative of Bavaria Film Studios and Geria Films, was supposed to arrange for the distribution of the movie nationwide. On March 15, 1978, Wilder screened Fedora for Lorimar executives. Their verdict was that the film ran long at 128 minutes, and they declined to release the film at that length. Wilder and Steinkamp accordingly excised 15 minutes from the film.28

  On May 12, Wilder held a preview at the State Theatre in Santa Barbara, where Sherlock Holmes had had a favorable sneak screening. “The first half of Fedora played well,” McGee reports, “but midway into the film the audience began to get restless.” There were a number of inexplicable laughs, known in the industry as “bad laughs.”29 David Picker, a UA executive, told me in conversation after a screening of a UA film in 1980 that he had attended the Santa Barbara preview of Fedora. That did not deter him from picking up the distribution rights of Fedora after Lorimer lost interest in the movie. He did so “for old times’ sake,” he explained; after all, UA had previously been Wilder’s distributor for fourteen years.

  Fedora had its official world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on the closing night of the festival, May 30, 1978. The premiere was preceded by a retrospective of Wilder’s movies. “The French are great homage givers,” Wilder joked, with a mischievous smile; they even had one for Jerry Lewis.30 The response to Fedora was sharply divided: European critics loved it. American reviewers did not cotton to it, and some sneered or laughed inappropriately. Andrew Sarris commented, “The usual collection of freeloading trend-setters were reportedly laughing at all the wrong places. There is nothing quite so hideously heartless as the idiot cackle of the in-crowd when it senses that a career may be on the skids.”31

  Still, the screening at Cannes gave the film worldwide publicity, and Wilder was keenly disappointed that UA did not release Fedora in the United States soon after. By then he had been involved with the picture for well over two years. “In that time I could have made three lousy pictures, instead of one,” he quipped.32 As a matter of fact, UA kept Fedora on the shelf until May 1979—a full year after its Cannes debut. To make matters worse, “the limited release and publicity hampered the film’s chances for success,” Glenn Hopp points out.33 Wilder complained about UA’s “releasing it in an insulting and perfunctory way and spending peanuts on the advertising campaign.”34

  Like Sunset Boulevard, Fedora uses a flashback format to tell its story. The present film begins with Fedora (actually Antonia) throwing herself in the path of an oncoming train, just as the tragic heroine of Anna Karenina does. This precredit sequence continues with Arlene Francis, playing herself, announcing Fedora’s death on a TV newscast. After the opening credits, there follows Fedora’s wake, held in her florid mansion in Paris. “As the crowds file past her coffin,” Morris writes, “the jigsaw puzzle of Fedora’s past is pieced together through the recollections of her retinue and one of the mourners, Barry Detweiler.”35 It is their reminiscences that are portrayed in flashback throughout the movie. “She was going out in style,” says Barry, in voice-over on the sound track, “complete with TV cameras, like a goddamned Hollywood premiere.”

  The real Fedora explains to Barry in a tête-à-tête during the wake that she took the name of Countess Sobryanski after Antonia began impersonating her, since the count was Antonia’s father. Nevertheless, she and the count never married; they were separated by World War II. She could not acknowledge Antonia’s existence because of the morals clause in her contract with MGM. “Remember those days?” she asks Barry. “You couldn’t have an illegitimate child” because that constituted “moral turpitude,” which could cause an actor to be suspended indefinitely.

  The countess narrates for Barry the horrific episode in which the plastic surgeon Vando’s botched experiment (after two decades of success) disfigured her face. Dr. Vando (José Ferrer) explains that, after the failed treatment, “an infection set in; there were complications.” He adds ominously, “You can’t cheat nature without paying the price.” Fedora, “wheelchair-bound because of a facelift run amok,” retires from the screen.36

  Henry Fonda, playing himself, is the president of the motion picture academy. Early in the film, he makes a pilgrimage to Fedora’s secluded island retreat to present her with a special Oscar for lifetime achievement. Antonia agrees to double for her mother for the occasion and succeeds in fooling Fonda. Afterward Fedora conceives the plan of continuing her career with Antonia standing in for her. For years Antonia impersonates her mother, both on- and offscreen, until Antonia becomes soured on the masquerade. Matters come to a head when she costars with Michael York, playing himself, in The Last Waltz, a period costume picture. Antonia is shown shooting a syrupy scene for the picture with her leading man. The opulent ballroom filled with waltzing couples recalls Wilder’s own Emperor Waltz, indicating that Wilder was quite capable of self-parody. At heart, Antonia is still a young girl. She falls hopelessly in love with Michael, but she is prohibited by her mother from revealing her true identity to Michael in order to perpetuate the illusion of the “ageless Fedora” for her fans.

  Antonia is faced with the prospect of continuing to impersonate her mother while being deprived of a life of her own. As Kevin Lally notes, Antonia’s mother is able to continue her career vicariously, “by robbing her own daughter of her identity.”37 Antonia sinks into a deep depression and takes refuge in drugs, ending her film career. Barry Detweiler comes to Europe to visit the reclusive Fedora. He hopes to coax her into making a comeback in a remake of Anna Karenina, called The Snows of Yesteryear, so that he can revive his own stalled career as a producer. Of course, it is Antonia he meets in the guise of Fedora. She declines his offer of a comeback, but they part on friendly terms. “Time catches up with us all,” she says as he leaves.

  Soon afterward Barry returns to Europe for Fedora’s funeral; it is only then that he learns from the countess, and from others as well, the truth behind Antonia’s tragic life and death. By film’s end, the movie has come full circle; it concludes by returning to Fedora’s wake, which is really Antonia’s wake. At one point during her conference with Barry, Countess Sobryanski, the real Fedora, raises her veil to expose her withered countenance. Her action is a metaphor for the manner in which she has lifted for Barry the veil of secrecy.

  Barry reflects that an actress must be sugar and spice on the surface, “but underneath, cement and steel.” Antonia, unlike her mother, was not made that way. At this point, Michael York appears at the wake and approaches the coffin. He places a red rose on Antonia’s chest—for him, as for the endless stream of mourners, Antonia is Fedora.

  “You sure know how to throw yourself a funeral,” Barry remarks to the countess. She muses that Fedora is a legend, and “a legend must not linger beyond her time. Monroe and Harlow, they were the lucky ones.” Before the end credits roll, Fedora adds, “Endings are very important—the final close-up—that is what people remember; the legend must go on.”

  The film played first-run engagements in select cities. Richard Schickel, calling the movie “old hat” in Time, pronounced Wilder’s “melodramatic manner of storytelling” to be old-fashioned.38 Admittedly, Wilder responded, his care for narrative structure and character development had become unfashionable in Hollywood. “They call it old-fashioned; that’s the only way I know to work.” So “that’s the way I’m going to do it until they take the cameras away.”39 Elsewhere he added, “They say Wilder
is out of touch with the times. Frankly, I regard that as a compliment. Who the hell wants to be in touch with these times?”40

  The negative buzz about the picture occasioned Vincent Canby’s remark that “Fedora is such a seasoned, elegant, and funny film that it exists serenely above lobby talk.” Because “Wilder’s reputation is subject to more revisions than a White House press release,” Canby emphasized “the necessity, finally, to recognize Billy Wilder as the major filmmaker he is.” Fedora was the work of “a brilliant, irascible man who is nearly thirty years more experienced in the woeful ways of the world than he was when he made Sunset Boulevard.”41 The film’s humor is grotesque, sometimes disturbing; the movie is a unique blend of austerity and romanticism. Moreover, Keller’s performance was underrated, even by Wilder. As Antonia, she starts out fragile and then reveals strength and calculation as she attempts to evade the power of those who would control her.