Billy Wilder

• Born: June 22, 1906
• Birthplace: Sucha, Galicia, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Sucha Beskidzka, Poland)
• Died: March 27, 2002
• Place of death: Beverly Hills, California

Polish-born screenwriter and film director and producer

Wilder was responsible for some of the most original and controversial Hollywood films made between the 1940’s and the 1970’s, including the first serious examinations of alcoholism, Hollywood’s obsession with youth and success, and newspapermen who transform tragedy into mass-media entertainment.

Area of achievement: Entertainment

Early Life

German-speaking Jews Eugenia and Max Wilder were traveling to inspect his railroad restaurants when Billy Wilder (bihl-ee WIL-dur) was born. Eugenia nicknamed him Billie because, when she had lived in the United States as a girl, she had become fascinated with Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show. (Later, when Wilder learned that Billie was a feminine spelling, he became Billy.) Unsuccessful in business in Kraków, Max moved his family to Vienna, just as the Austro-Hungarian Empire was disintegrating after World War I. There, the family eked out a spare existence.

Wilder escaped into films and jazz, learning a little English from song lyrics. Employed as a reporter, he met American band leader Paul Whiteman, known as the King of Jazz. A Whiteman fan, Wilder displayed his knowledge of jazz and of good late-night entertainment to the band leader, and they became friends. With Whiteman’s encouragement, Wilder followed Whiteman to Berlin in 1926.

Wilder prospered in 1920’s Berlin, with its many newspapers, its large Jewish population, and its intellectual and artistic café life. He wrote celebrity interviews and crime reports, worked as a professional dancer, and ghostwrote many silent films. With friends, he created an unexpectedly popular film, Menschen am Sonntag (1929; People on Sunday), which simply showed how ordinary people amuse themselves on their day off.

By the late 1920’s, Wilder was earning good money, had bought his first car, and was beginning an art collection. By the 1930’s, however, he was alarmed by the rise of the Nazi Party. As Nazi attacks on Jews increased, Wilder sold his possessions and left for Paris. He had no work permit and still wrote in German, but he found film work. This led to a one-way ticket to Hollywood. He sailed for New York in 1934, taking with him a few English phrases and some English-language novels. In 1935, he returned to Vienna to encourage his mother and stepfather to leave. They refused. In 1945, Wilder returned to Germany as a U.S. Army colonel, working to ensure that postwar German entertainment was free of Nazi influence, viewing horrifying-concentration-camp films for a never-released documentary, Die Todesmühlen(The Death Mills), and tracing his mother, stepfather, and grandmother to their deaths in Auschwitz concentration camp.

Life’s Work

After six months’ work with Columbia Pictures, Wilder secured an immigrant’s visa in Mexico, recording this experience in a film, Hold Back the Dawn (1941); he became a U.S. citizen in 1939. At first hampered by his poor knowledge of English, he quickly learned the language through radio, reading, and sports. In 1936, he teamed with novelist and screenwriter Charles Brackett, a New Yorker educated at Williams College and Harvard Law School. Their tumultuous partnership made them Hollywood’s most successful writing team for a decade. Wilder needed Brackett’s ear for English; Brackett needed Wilder’s vigor and cinematic genius. Their first collaborations included Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938) and, a major hit, actor Greta Garbo’s Ninotchka (1939), both directed by Ernst Lubitsch.

After conflict with another director, Wilder began directing, quickly learning to take no more shots than he needed so that his films could not be changed by film executives and cutters. His successes included The Major and the Minor (1942), with Ray Milland and Ginger Rogers, and Five Graves to Cairo (1943), with Franchot Tone. The film noir Double Indemnity (1944), with Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, was the first in a series of powerful Wilder films portraying men who, through weakness or vulnerability, find themselves overwhelmed by situations they cannot control. MacMurray plays a likable insurance agent whose death results from weakness and poor judgment, groundbreaking material in a day when censors wanted characters who were clearly good or evil.

Wilder followed this with The Lost Weekend (1945), with Ray Milland, the first serious study of an alcoholic. A Paramount Pictures executive balked at releasing the film, but, once released, it was successful, winning Academy Awards for Best Picture, for Wilder as Best Director and Best Screenplay, and for Milland as Best Actor. A Foreign Affair (1948), with Marlene Dietrich, was controversial, with its less-than-idealized depiction of American military men occupying Berlin. As director, Wilder constantly encountered would-be censors: A Foreign Affair was denounced in the U.S. Congress. By then his success was so solid that he could ignore both censors and irate studio heads.

The Wilder-Brackett collaboration ended with Sunset Boulevard (1950), with Gloria Swanson and William Holden, a bleak look at Hollywood’s has-beens and failures, although Wilder’s sardonic humor shines through, even in his serious films. Thereafter, Wilder worked with other collaborators, especially I. A. L. Diamond. Wilder also produced many of his later films. Among them were two distinguished comedies that offered Marilyn Monroe the best roles of her career: Some Like It Hot (1959), with Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, which was picked in 2000 by the American Film Institute (AFI) as the best comedy of the first century of American filmmaking, and The Seven Year Itch (1955). In 1957, Wilder expanded popular mystery writer Agatha Christie’s 1925 story and 1953 play, Witness for the Prosecution, into a film starring Marlene Dietrich and Charles Laughton.

Other successful films included Ace in the Hole (1951), about a journalist, played by Kirk Douglas, who exploits a cave accident for its news value and causes the cave victim’s death; Stalag 17 (1953), with Holden, about American prisoners of war; Sabrina (1954), with Audrey Hepburn, a romantic comedy; The Apartment (1960), with Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine, about what happens when a man allows his apartment to be used by his bosses for sexual trysts; and Irma La Douce (1963), with Lemmon and MacLaine. The films Wilder made late in his career were box-office failures. The Apartment later became the stage play Promises, Promises (1968), and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Sunset Strip, based on Wilder’s film, opened in 1993.

Wilder was also an important art collector. He was married twice and had one daughter. Wilder died in Beverly Hills of pneumonia at the age of ninety-five.

Significance

Often described as cynical, Wilder simply insisted on portraying the world as he had experienced it: Life is fragile, the future is unpredictable; human relationships are unstable and often deceptive; events can overwhelm individuals; and ordinarily decent people can be corrupted. To present his worldview, he needed control of his material. Despite his original ignorance of the English language, he was among the first immigrants in Hollywood to succeed as writer, director, and producer. He received six Academy Awards, the 1988 Irving Thalberg Memorial Award, and, among many other honors, awards from the Film Society of Lincoln Center (1982), the Directors Guild of America (1985), and the American Film Institute (1986). In 1990 at the Kennedy Center, President George H. W. Bush honored Wilder’s achievements. In 1993, President Bill Clinton awarded Wilder the National Medal of the Arts.

Bibliography

Chandler, Charlotte. Nobody’s Perfect: Billy Wilder, A Personal Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002. Informal biography based on personal conversations.

Hopp, Glen. Billy Wilder: The Cinema of Wit, 1906-2002. Köln, Germany: Taschen, 2003. Illustrated discussion of Wilder’s films, commentary on his film style, and some biographical material. Filmography excludes most European work.

Phillips, Gene D. Some Like It Wilder: The Life and Controversial Films of Billy Wilder. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010. Emphasis on American, not European, work. Bibliography. Filmography excludes most European work.

Sikov, Ed. On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder. New York: Hyperion, 1998. Six chapters focus on Wilder’s early life, his work in Paris and Berlin, and his Jewish identity. Filmography. Bibliography.

Staggs, Sam. Close-Up on Sunset Boulevard: Billy Wilder, Norma Desmond, and the Dark Hollywood Dream. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002. Details about Wilder’s production, cast, and coworkers, with speculations about film’s influences and reasons for failure of Wilder’s last films.

Zolotow, Maurice. Billy Wilder in Hollywood. 1977. Reprint. New York: Limelight, 1996. General popular biography. Filmography.