Some Like It Wilder

by Gene D. Phillips

  Fedora did poorly at the box office after its initial engagements in big cities and did not reach a wide audience elsewhere. Be that as it may, the picture was well received in Europe, especially in Germany, where Knef was still a star, and in France, where Keller was popular.

  Although Fedora received unenthusiastic notices when it appeared, like The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, it has over the years earned a solid critical reputation as an elegant, entertaining film that reaches the lofty realm of tragedy. In 2002, the Times of London went so far as to call Fedora “perhaps the richest of Wilder’s later films.”42 Cameron Crowe comments, “If Fedora missed the upper rung of Wilder’s greatest work, it’s only a matter of inches.”43 Morris concurs that Fedora “is a worthy addition to the work of one of the supreme artists of the American cinema.”44

  For William Holden, alcohol had been a problem as far back as Sabrina. By 1977, when he made Fedora, “he realized his most significant accomplishments were behind him. He grew despondent and isolated, and his drinking worsened.”45 On November 16, 1981, Holden was found dead in his apartment by the building manager. His death was caused by his tripping over a throw rug while intoxicated, “then falling into the sharp edge of a bedside table.”46 The following month, Wilder told the New York Times, “To be killed by a bottle of vodka and a night table—what a lousy fadeout for a great guy.”47

  Asked why he kept working if he felt out of place in the current Hollywood climate, Wilder answered, “If only to get away from the vacuum cleaner. I come to work the typewriter” in his office. In one of his more melodramatic moments, Wilder declared in a 1978 interview, “I will kill myself after this interview; I have just come to the conclusion that it’s no use.”48

  Nevertheless, Wilder’s thoughts inevitably turned to his next picture as he searched to find “something that is negotiable with studios.” The modest ticket sales of Fedora had made the movie a calamity for Wilder, given his recent track record. It was tougher than ever to sell a new project to a studio. Moreover, he had to be cautious in selecting a project now that there were not many bullets left in “the elderly gun.” After making Fedora in the Greek islands, Munich, and Paris, Wilder renewed his resolution to shoot his next movie in greater Los Angeles, since location shooting in Europe was expensive. Furthermore, “I don’t have to climb any fucking mountains,” he explained, and “I don’t have to eat crappy food and have diarrhea.” Shooting around Los Angeles, “it takes only seven minutes to get to a location.”49

  In the wake of Universal’s vetoing Fedora, Wilder was afraid that the major studios had written him off as over the hill. He had grown tired, he said, of pitching projects to young executives who were former employees of the studio mailroom. Much to his surprise, Jay Weston, a producer at MGM, invited him to make Buddy Buddy. The project was offered to him, Wilder emphasized; he did not have to audition: “No screen test!” Nevertheless, it was not a project that he would have chosen; “it chose me.” He continued, “Maybe I was a little tired of hitting my head against the wall; maybe it was a little dented.”50 Still, one reason that Weston’s offer appealed to him was that Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau agreed to costar in the picture if Wilder directed.

  Buddy Buddy (1981)

  The film was to be based on a French play by Francis Weber, a boulevard farce titled L’emmerdeur. Weber also wrote the screenplay for the 1973 French film version directed by Edouard Molinaro. The movie was also called L’emmerdeur but was released in the United States the following year as A Pain in the Neck (or A Pain in the Ass). Wilder’s Buddy Buddy is a black comedy about the friendship that gradually develops between a tough Mafia hit man (Walter Matthau) and a woebegone individual (Jack Lemmon) who contemplates suicide after his wife leaves him. In the French movie version, Lino Ventura, an Italian actor, played the tough contract killer, Milan, and Jacques Brel, a popular French entertainer, played the would-be suicide, Pegnon.

  One reason that Weber’s play appealed to Wilder was that it carried some resonance of the first screenplay he coauthored at Ufa, Der Mann, der seinen Mörder sucht (The man who tried to get himself killed, 1931). In it a pathetic wretch bent on killing himself becomes involved with a thief (rather than a hit man).

  On May 12, 1980, Wilder drove through the gates at MGM after an absence of four decades. The studio had changed in many ways. James Aubrey, known in the industry as “the smiling cobra,” had been appointed president of MGM in 1970, with a mandate to bail the studio out of debt. Aubrey went on an economy drive while the studio was fending off its creditors. By the end of the decade, however, the studio was back on track, and David Begelman was brought over from Columbia as production chief, with a view to stepping up production. “They want to bring back the roaring lion,” said Wilder.51 One of the first projects Begelman approved was Buddy Buddy.

  The studio was anxious to get moving on Buddy Buddy, since it boasted two top stars and a major director. Wilder and Diamond were encouraged to write their screenplay with dispatch. They complied by finishing the first draft in July 1981, after only two months, a much speedier job than was customary for them. In their script Milan became Trabucco, a paid assassin who has contracted to eradicate a crucial witness in a Palm Springs land fraud scandal. Pegnon is renamed Victor Clooney, a prudish censor employed in the Office of Standards and Practices at CBS-TV. His screwball wife, Celia, is enrolled in a sex clinic called the Institute for Sexual Fulfillment, where she has fallen in love with the director, Dr. Zuckerbrot.

  The screenplay bears the marks of a typical Wilder scenario. When Victor assumes, quite wrongly, that Trabucco sympathizes with him about his wife’s desertion, Victor says he has always believed “in the kindness of strangers,” quoting Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). The stool pigeon Rudy Gambola is called “the man who knew too much,” the name of a 1956 Hitchcock picture.

  On the one hand, Victor’s efforts to develop a friendship with Trabucco recall Wilder’s trilogy about male bonding. On the other hand, there was a measure of tenderness in the friendships portrayed in The Fortune Cookie, Sherlock Holmes, and The Front Page; there is none in Buddy Buddy. Victor’s attempts to ingratiate himself with Trabucco are ill advised, to say the least. Wilder “cast a cold eye” on the theme of male bonding in the present film. After all, notes Axel Madsen, he spent his formative years in Berlin during the Roaring Twenties, a crucible of disenchantment, a society full of decadence. He learned to reflect bitterly “upon man’s essential, constitutional foolishness.”52

  In rounding out the cast of Buddy Buddy during preproduction, Wilder selected Paula Prentiss, a comedienne, to play Celia. Prentiss was adept at playing flighty females, as in The World of Henry Orient opposite Peter Sellers (1964). Wilder selected German actor Klaus Kinski to play Dr. Zuckerbrot. The brilliant but unbridled actor was best known for his German films with Werner Herzog, such as Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (Aguirre, the Wrath of God, 1972). Joan Shawlee, whose first Wilder film was Some Like It Hot, was back again, this time as the receptionist at the sex clinic who cheerfully repeats to callers the institute’s slogan, “Ecstasy is our business.”

  Wilder decided on the county courthouse in Riverside, California, about an hour’s drive from Los Angeles, as an important location site for the movie. The screenplay dictated that there be a hotel across the street from the courthouse, so production designer Daniel Lomino constructed a mock-Spanish hotel facade in a parking lot facing the courthouse.

  Principal photography began on February 4, 1981. Wilder filmed exteriors in and around Riverside throughout February. Cinematographer Harry Stradling Jr. (The Way We Were, 1973) had a reputation for being at his best while shooting outdoors with color photography. His reputation was fully justified by his camerawork around the county courthouse.

  Wilder was scheduled to spend March and April shooting at MGM in Culver City. After the first two weeks of filming, he realized that he had “taken a wrong turn” in casting two comedians in the leads. “I needed
someone serious as the hit man, like Clint Eastwood, instead of a comic actor like Matthau,” Wilder explained. Indeed, Lino Venturo, who played the contract killer in the French film, was a serious actor who specialized in playing tough guys. Wilder complained that, if the studio had not insisted that the script be finished in a scant two months, he would have seen that he had gone wrong and taken the time to go back to the drawing board. But at this point the production was moving forward, and he had to continue. He would have liked to walk off the picture, “but if I had backed out, they would have said it was because I was too old.”53

  To make matters worse, during the eighth week of shooting, Matthau took a serious fall while rehearsing a scene in which Trabucco escapes from the police by sliding down a laundry chute in the hotel. Matthau was to land on a mattress beneath the chute, but the mattress was not placed in the proper position. So when Matthau tumbled out of the chute, he landed on his back and hit his head on the concrete floor of the soundstage. Chris Lemmon writes that his father, “beside himself with concern, thought that was the end for his good buddy. He folded up his jacket and placed it under Walter’s head.” Then, “with tears in his eyes, he looked down at Matthau and asked, ‘Are you comfortable?’ ” Matthau replied, “I make a living.”54 Matthau was in the hospital for only three days, but he hobbled around on crutches and wore a neck brace for three weeks. He recalled the heart attack he suffered while filming The Fortune Cookie. “Every time I work with Billy Wilder,” Matthau observed, “I either get a heart attack or fall down and break my back.”55

  Klaus Kinski, a great German character actor who was also a pugnacious and unruly performer, shared Dietrich’s opinion of Wilder as too officious on the movie set. “No outsider can understand,” he writes in his autobiography, “the blustering hysteria and the authoritarianism of shooting a picture for Billy Wilder. The so-called ‘actors’ are simply trained poodles, who sit up on their hind legs and jump through hoops.”56 It is somewhat surprising that middle European actors like Kinski and Dietrich did not get along with Wilder, himself a middle European, on the set.

  For his part, Lemmon noticed that Wilder seemed more tense while shooting this picture than he had on any of their previous pictures together, since he wanted very much to show the studio brass that he could still make a picture on schedule and on budget. He was not as open to actors’ suggestions as he had been when Lemmon worked with him before. “There was a little less freedom for the actors,” and Lemmon therefore kept his suggestions to himself.57

  Still, Wilder had not lost his sense of humor. The camera operator found “the master” intimidating; the young man would ask Wilder’s “kind permission” to adjust the lens. Finally Wilder just told him what he had said to Raymond Chandler four decades earlier: “For God’s sake, we don’t have court manners around here.” At all events, the production wrapped on April 27, 1981. After directing the last scene on the docket, Wilder turned to Diamond and said, “Nice working with you, Iz.”58

  During postproduction, Buddy Buddy was scored by Lalo Schifrin, who had done the music for films like Dirty Harry (1971). Schifrin could underscore a film in the traditional symphonic manner of composers of the Hollywood studio period like Franz Waxman and Miklos Rozsa. But his eclectic style also reflected his taste for modern music, especially jazz. By the time he wrote the music for Buddy Buddy, Palmer notes, Schifrin had become “the most prominent and productive member of the new generation of film composers.”59

  After Schifrin had recorded his score and Wilder had collaborated with editor Argyle Nelson on the rough cut, MGM had a test screening of the picture. The younger members of the audience found the movie dull in spots, even though the film ran only ninety-eight minutes—the shortest movie Wilder had made since Five Graves to Cairo. Diamond commented afterward that teenagers “watch television in fifteen-minute chunks, and they aren’t interested in following a plot.”60

  Buddy Buddy begins with Trabucco driving down a palm-lined street in suburban California. Schifrin accompanies the scene with “The Gnomes,” a bizarre theme borrowed from Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Trabucco checks in at the Ramona Hotel in Riverside and sets about meticulously assembling his high-powered rifle in his hotel room. He places it on a tripod in preparation for picking off Rudy Gambola, the mobster who is to testify that afternoon in the courthouse across the street. Trabucco aims to prevent the stool pigeon from getting a chance to sing.

  Meanwhile, Victor Clooney, the clumsy schnook in the room next door, plans to kill himself because his wife, Celia, has run off with Dr. Hugo Zuckerbrot, the shady director of the Institute for Sexual Fulfillment. Victor ties the rope from the window curtain around a pipe in the bathroom and stands on the toilet seat. But he is such a loser that, when he steps off the toilet seat, the pipe bursts and he is deluged with gushing water. Trabucco hears the ruckus and checks out the adjoining room. He introduces himself to Victor as an expert in “pest control.” Victor tells Trabucco his sad story, and the assassin, suspecting that Victor’s suicide attempts will result in the police swarming all over the hotel, cunningly offers to drive Victor to the sex clinic to see Celia.

  Victor assumes that Trabucco’s offer is the act of a true friend, but Trabucco tells him ruefully, “I’m nobody’s friend.” The naive Victor responds, “People are basically good; take you for instance.” Little wonder that Buddy Buddy has been called Wilder’s blackest comedy.

  The sequence at the sex institute offered Wilder a chance to open out the play for the screen, since the play is set entirely in the hotel. Victor is shocked to learn from Celia that she has had her wedding ring melted down and that it now hangs, shaped like a gold penis, around Zuckerbrot’s neck. Victor, the conservative TV censor, cannot bring himself to utter the word penis, so he refers to the golden keepsake with “the p word.”

  Unfortunately, Victor gets nowhere trying to win back his wife, so both he and Trabucco wind up returning to the hotel. Victor, who is determined to kill himself, tells the clerk to prepare his bill. “Are you checking out?” the clerk inquires, and Victor responds, “You might say that.” Back in his hotel room, Trabucco hears what sounds like a gunshot from Victor’s room, only to find that Victor has just popped the cork of a champagne bottle. He is planning to toast Celia before “checking out.” This gag, of course, was lifted from the last scene of The Apartment. Wilder saw nothing wrong with stealing from himself.

  Celia reads the suicide note that Victor left with her. Although she does not want to reconcile with him, she asks Zuckerbrot to go to the hotel and talk him out of killing himself. At the hotel Zuckerbrot runs into Trabucco and assumes that he is Victor. Zuckerbrot injects Trabucco with a sedative because Victor is “a fruitcake”—Dr. Eggelhofer’s term for Earl Williams—and he thinks he is sedating Victor.

  Now Trabucco, groggy from the tranquilizer, is in no condition to shoot Gambola. He convinces Victor that Gambola is a “goddamned stoolie,” a sleazy Mafia hood who does not deserve to live. Wilder sees to it that the mobster is not the object of the audience’s sympathy, so that they do not really care if he is assassinated. Moreover, Trabucco tells Victor, if he does not rub out Gambola, the mob will exterminate him in reprisal. Still grateful that Trabucco drove him to the sex clinic to see Celia, Victor agrees to carry out Trabucco’s contract killing as a favor: “I owe you one.” After assorted twists and turns in the plot, Victor succeeds in blowing Gambola away. He and Trabucco escape from the hotel by diving down a laundry chute into a laundry basket and exiting through the basement.

  The cops have cordoned off the street as a crime scene. So Trabucco disguises himself as a priest, donning a Roman collar and black shirt, and places a small statue of Christ on the dashboard of his car. Trabucco talks to Captain Hubris, the officer in charge, in a phony Irish brogue. Hubris requests that he give the last rites to Gambola, an Italian Catholic. Trabucco marshals every Latin phrase he can think of and “blesses” the dying gangster: “Tempus fugit” (time
flies), “e pluribus unum” (out of many, one), and “caveat emptor” (let the buyer beware). Hubris then allows Trabucco to drive through the roadblock with Victor.

  In the epilogue, Trabucco has escaped to a deserted tropical island. He is in a South Sea paradise—until Victor arrives in a sailboat. Victor is likewise a fugitive, having blown up the sex clinic! Celia has deserted Zuckerbrot and taken off with the clinic’s female receptionist. Victor still blindly believes that in Trabucco he has found a true friend, and the disgruntled Trabucco realizes that he is stuck with Victor indefinitely. He surreptitiously suggests to his native houseboy that the local tribe reinstate its ancient custom of making human sacrifices to the gods, with a view to offering Victor as a candidate. The movie ends with a freeze-frame of Trabucco chomping on a cigar. “It is the final black moment of Wilder’s career,” notes Hopp. His last film concludes with no moral awakening, no redemption for the two fugitives.61

  The world premiere of Buddy Buddy took place at Avco Centre Cinemas in Westwood on Friday, December 8, 1981. The film opened on December 11 to largely disappointing reviews. On the positive side, Vincent Canby in the New York Times called the film “the breeziest comedy Wilder has been associated with in years.”62 On the negative side, Kevin Thomas wrote in the Los Angeles Times that “Buddy Buddy isn’t all that funny.” The humor on the sexual revolution of the 1970s triggered by Zuckerbrot’s sex clinic was “pretty familiar by now,” and the film was only “mildly amusing.”63 David Ansen weighed in with a review in Newsweek headed “Some Like It Not.” He declared that Wilder’s untypically creaky slapstick and leaden gags made him wonder when Wilder was last at the movies. Was the director who was once ahead of his time now behind the times?64

  Dr. Jack Green, a behavioral psychologist at Rush Medical Center in Chicago, called the picture “a romp about would-be assassins, inadequate husbands, immoral therapists, and errant wives. Wilder plays out his own attitude relative to the mob, the police, and psychiatry. In other venues, Wilder has demonstrated genius. In this tribute to inadequacy, he has shown everyone in it at their worst; no one is likeable and everyone is one-dimensional. There is an aftertaste of disdain that overlays the film.” A psychiatrist at the center said, “The purpose of the profit-oriented Institute of Sexual Fulfillment is total sexual freedom for all (illustrated by the nude customers and a man in a bathrobe carrying a blow-up doll), and a corrupt CEO ‘Doctor’ who has an affair with Victor’s wife, with no regard to the consequences—Victor’s suicide attempts. . . . The image of an analyst of German extraction (like Freud)” is of someone who “promotes promiscuity and sexual gratification . . . under the guise of ‘research.’ ”65