Billy Wilder, the director who hid the twentieth century inside a joke

Billy Wilder

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	June 22, 1906 Sucha, Galicia, Austria-Hungary
Died	March 27, 2002 (95)
Occupation	Director, Screenwriter, Producer
Known for	Some Like It Hot, Sunset Boulevard, The Apartment
Awards	7 Academy Award · Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award (1988) · Palme d'Or · BAFTA · AFI Life Achievement

There is a scene in Sunset Boulevard — not the famous one with the swimming pool, but the quieter one near the beginning, when a broke screenwriter walks into a dead woman’s mansion and starts rearranging her life to suit his own — that captures something essential about the man who directed it. Billy Wilder understood, better than almost anyone who worked in Hollywood, that people organize their lives around comfortable fictions. He understood this because he had spent his entire career dismantling them, gently, with a joke.

He was born Samuel Wilder in a small Galician town that was then part of Austria-Hungary and grew up in Vienna, that particular city that taught its inhabitants to deliver the worst news in elegant prose. He worked as a journalist before he was twenty, covering crime and politics and the brilliant, doomed café society of a city balanced at the edge of catastrophe. When he moved to Berlin in the late 1920s, he found a film industry breaking rules as fast as the economy collapsed around it. He co-wrote twenty-five German screenplays in four years.

The Reichstag fire changed everything. He left Berlin a week after it burned, with a suitcase and the reflexes of a crime reporter who recognized danger. What he could not know at the time was that this instinct — that reporter’s quick read of a room turning dangerous — was the only reason he was alive to make any films at all. He went back to Vienna in 1935 to persuade his mother, his stepfather, and his grandmother to leave. They refused. His stepfather died at Belzec in 1942, his mother at Plaszow in 1943, his grandmother at Nowy Targ the same year.

He arrived in Hollywood in 1934 speaking so little English that he memorized dialogue from American novels to teach himself the language. What he ended up writing in that language has not been equaled. His collaborations with Charles Brackett produced Ninotchka and Ball of Fire. With Raymond Chandler — a partnership so combustible both men required a mediator — he wrote Double Indemnity, a murder plot so precisely engineered that it turned film noir into a proper art form. He followed it immediately with The Lost Weekend, a portrait of a writer who cannot stop drinking, so honest about alcoholism that the liquor industry reportedly offered Paramount a million dollars to suppress it. The Academy gave it four Oscars instead. Cannes gave it the Palme d’Or.

Sunset Boulevard arrived in 1950 with a dead man narrating from a swimming pool, a silent film actress playing a silent film actress going mad, and a portrait of Hollywood so precise in its cruelty that Louis B. Mayer told Wilder at the premiere he should be ashamed for biting the hand that fed him. Wilder’s reported reply — that Mayer was the hand that should be ashamed of what it fed — circulates as apocrypha, but the film itself is the argument, and it has never required a footnote.

The standard account presents Wilder as a brilliant cynical entertainer who happened to make some challenging films. This is too comfortable. Ace in the Hole, his 1951 film about a journalist who prolongs a trapped miner’s ordeal to extend his own career, was so merciless in its diagnosis of media appetite and public complicity that it failed at the American box office entirely. Wilder considered it his best film. Audiences who arrived expecting another Double Indemnity found something closer to a mirror and chose not to look. He had done the same with The Lost Weekend, which was considered unmakeable. He would do it again with The Apartment, where the sexual politics of corporate America were dissected with a smile so polished that audiences missed the knife until the third act.

Some Like It Hot — the most radical comedy in American cinema, in which two men spend an entire film in dresses and the world ends up, more or less, fine with it — was so far outside what the Production Code permitted that Wilder simply pretended not to notice the Code and dared the censors to say in public what they objected to. The line that closes the film, “Nobody’s perfect,” was reportedly improvised by co-writer I.A.L. Diamond; Wilder recognized it immediately as the thesis statement of his entire career. The Apartment followed a year later, winning three Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director, and making him the only filmmaker to claim all three awards — director, producer, writer — for the same film.

His second wife, Audrey Young, whom he married in 1949, was with him until the end. The loss of his mother was not something Wilder discussed directly, but it is present in the architecture of his films: the men who build elaborate systems to keep emotion at a distance, the survivors who stay alive by pretending to be someone else, the women who outlast every man who underestimated them. The films know something they never quite say.

He made his last film, Buddy Buddy, in 1981. The final two decades of his life he spent collecting art — Picasso, Klimt, Schiele, Miró, a collection that reflected the same quality of attention he brought to scripts — and talking, at length and on record, to anyone interested enough to ask. He died on March 27, 2002, in Beverly Hills, ninety-five years old. What remains are perhaps twenty films that have not aged, and the clearest evidence that the twentieth century’s definitive mode was not tragedy but a particular kind of comedy: one that always knew exactly what it was covering up.

Featured Films

Tags: Double Indemnity, Billy Wilder, I.A.L. Diamond, Jack Lemmon, Some Like It Hot, Sunset Boulevard

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