The Private Life of Billy Wilder

Abstract

What is Billy Wilder serious about? To interviewers, he professes himself a modestly clever showman with no deep-dish aspirations. More privately-as evidenced, perhaps, by the large picture of Ernst Lubitsch hanging on the wall above his desk-he seems to cherish an ideal of grace and elegance. His detractors correctly find that he lacks Lubitsch's mellowness and go on to conclude, in Andrew Sarris's words, that he is too cynical to believe even his own cynicism. Others accuse him of being a secret sentimentalist, or worse, an entertainer who spoils the fun by sneaking across little messages about human rottenness. The most damning criticism, though, is that he has contempt for his characters. What made Lubitsch great was his capacity to stand outside his characters without caricaturing them. Wilder slams away at his targets, piling on the ironies as cheerfully as Hitchcock spins off plot-twists. He ridicules the young Communist in One, Two, Three by having him shout now on it's Piffl against everyone and everything! but the satire strikes so close to center that the gag sticks in our throats. Wilder makes nihilistic sport of every political and moral idea and ideal held by each of the conflicting characters, and his gags about Nazis are surprisingly flippant for an Austrian Jew who lost members of his family in Auschwitz. Wilder's profusion of gags seems to mask a desperation-a fear, perhaps, of telling the truth about his own emotions. If everything is foolish, then nothing is unbearable. (We recall Neitzsche's words, A joke is an epitaph on an emotion.) Only in the superb, unjustly slighted Ace in the Hole does Wilder give full vent to the disgust buried deep beneath his blase exterior. The popular and indeed quite beguiling Wilder image has been summarized in two recent books, Axel Madsen's Billy Wilder and Tom Wood's The Bright Side of Billy Wilder, Primarily, neither of which rises much above the level of dinner-table japery. Wilder's quipster posture, unfortunately, also encourages a wise-guy approach to his films. It is easy to pick at his view of life, to call him a junior-grade Swift; these books do nothing to answer such accusations. Neither goes beyond a you-won'tbelieve-this attitude toward his outrageous plots and characters to uncover the man himself. His considerable talent is hardly touched upon. Perhaps the darker Wilder of Ace in the Hole can be introduced as his defense. It may not possess the multi-levelled dexterity of his masterpiece, Some Like It Hot, but it is an unguarded glimpse into Wilder of which he speaks warmly in his interviews-the runt of my litter, he once called it. Wilder's forte is the great American congame. In practically all of his movies (original stories and adaptations alike) the plot revolves around some sort of swindle. On the most harmless level the deception is a romantic intrigue, as in Sabrina and Love in the Afternoon. More culpable are the husband of The Seven Year Itch, ineptly attempting to cheat on his wife, and Jack Lemmon, the young executive on the make in The Apartment, lending his apartment as a base for his boss's extramarital affairs. From