Billy Wilder: Sunset Boulevard

The USPS recently issued a set of four stamps honoring great film directors and the films for which they are most remembered. The four selected are: John Ford (The Searchers), John Huston (The Maltese Falcon), Frank Capra (It Happened One Night), and Billy Wilder (Some Like It Hot). We shall explore the lives and work of these directors. In this post LR Simon discusses Sunset Boulevard (1950).

When we first see William Holden’s Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard, his body is floating face-down in a swimming pool. The deceased Gillis narrates the story of his own demise, a device that is difficult to do at all well. Director Billy Wilder pulls it off in his 1950 classic, usually listed as one of his best films, and one of the best films about Hollywood ever made.

In Sunset Boulevard, aging silent film star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) dreams of a comeback and hires struggling screenwriter Gillis to edit her screenplay. Gillis believes the script is bad, but editing a bad script is preferable to moving back to Ohio. Desmond’s fragile state of mind and her equally fragile ego keep Gillis not only in Desmond’s employ, but also in her mansion.

Many details distinguish Sunset Boulevard from other films of the early 1950s, including the romanceless romance between Gillis and the significantly older Desmond, as well as the fact that so few of the characters are likeable. Wilder ensures that the audience will understand or sympathize with the characters, who throughout the film engage in damaging or self-destructive behaviors; the director then serves up one of the great unhappy film endings.

Film students and writers in every medium should watch Sunset Boulevard as an example of how to do (almost) everything you’re not supposed to do as a writer.

References and Recommended Reading

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Wilder

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_Code

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1432/the-art-of-screenwriting-no-1-billy-wilder

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunset_Boulevard_(film)

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19990627/REVIEWS08/906270301/1023

Billy Wilder: Double Indemnity

The USPS recently issued a set of four stamps honoring great film directors and the films for which they are most remembered. The four selected are: John Ford (The Searchers), John Huston (The Maltese Falcon), Frank Capra (It Happened One Night), and Billy Wilder (Some Like It Hot). We shall explore the lives and work of these directors. In this post LR Simon discusses The Double Indemnity (1944).

James M. Cain’s 1935 novella Double Indemnity centers on a murder plot by a woman (Phyllis Dietrichson, played by Barbara Stanwyck) and an insurance agent (Walter Neff, played by Fred MacMurray) with whom she has an extramarital affair. They meet when Neff makes a house call for a routine renewal of an automobile insurance policy. Dietrichson asks him how she could take out an insurance policy on her husband without his knowledge; he realizes she’s plotting murder and wants nothing to do with it. She shows up at his apartment and persuades him to help her. He goes along with the plot, beginning with getting Mr. Dietrichson to sign an insurance policy that includes a double indemnity clause that doubles the insurance payout for accidental death.

The complicated plot is handled deftly by co-writers Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler. Wilder and Chandler had a prickly relationship during the writing of the screenplay. Chandler had assumed that he would write the screenplay alone, and asked for a sample script for use as a formatting reference. Wilder thought the result was largely unusable with the exception of some lines of dialogue, and explained that they would have to work together. Wilder considered the collaboration to be helpful and that “[w]hat we were doing together had real electricity”. He considered Chandler a great writer, but not a great screenwriter. Chandler’s view of Wilder was considerably less charitable.

Double Indemnity drew great interest from several studios shortly after its publication, but when Joseph Breen of the Hays Office sent a message to the studios that the nature of the characters and plot would render the story unfilmable, all offers on the story were withdrawn. Of concern to the Hays Office were plot elements dealing with adultery, depicting the method of committing a murder, and the original ending, which involved the two main characters committing suicide. When Wilder took on the task of adapting the story to film, he altered the story to have Neff sent to the gas chamber for murdering Dietrichson and conspiring with her to murder her husband. The Hays Office considered the gas chamber scene too gruesome to pass muster with the local censorship boards; Wilder realized, however, that the film really ended at the familiar scene at the elevator, with Neff dying in colleague and mentor Barton Keyes’ (Edward G. Robinson) arms.

References

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Wilder

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_Code

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1432/the-art-of-screenwriting-no-1-billy-wilder

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Indemnity_(film)

Billy Wilder: The Major and the Minor

The USPS recently issued a set of four stamps honoring great film directors and the films for which they are most remembered. The four selected are: John Ford (The Searchers), John Huston (The Maltese Falcon), Frank Capra (It Happened One Night), and Billy Wilder (Some Like It Hot). We shall explore the lives and work of these directors. In this post LR Simon discusses The Major and the Minor (1942).

The Major and the Minor was the first American film Billy Wilder directed. Wilder learned about filmmaking from editor Doane Harrison while making this film. Harrison taught Wilder about editing in camera to prevent the studio from making changes.

Ginger Rogers plays Susan Applegate, a scalp massager for the “Revigorous System,” who quits after a client makes a pass at her. She wants to take the train home, but she only has enough for a child’s fare, so she tries to make herself look like a 12-year-old in order to get a ticket. She ends up hiding in Major Philip Kirby’s (Ray Milland) cabin when she’s seen smoking. She convinces Kirby, who has poor vision, that she’s a frightened child, and he allows her to stay with him in his cabin. The train stops for flooding on the tracks and Susan is diverted from her journey home to stay with Kirby’s fiance’s family until her own family can pick her up. As with any screwball romantic comedy, the story makes the audience want the leads to get together while simultaneously throwing obstacles in the way of the desired end.

Although the story presented Wilder and his co-writer Charles Brackett opportunities to push the limits of the Hays Code, there seem to have been no issues with the story’s content.

Critical reception at the time was generally positive, but it is one of Wilder’s lesser and less well-remembered efforts. Rogers’s performance was perfectly suited to the film—she’s fun to watch without trying too hard. Milland was an excellent choice for Kirby; he’s likeable enough to allow the audience to overlook his obliviousness, both when it comes to Susan’s age and to his fiance’s character.

References

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Wilder

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_Code

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Major_and_the_Minor

Billy Wilder: Some Like It Hot

The USPS recently issued a set of four stamps honoring great film directors and the films for which they are most remembered. The four selected are: John Ford (The Searchers), John Huston (The Maltese Falcon), Frank Capra (It Happened One Night), and Billy Wilder (Some Like It Hot). We will be exploring the lives and work of these directors. In this post LR Simon discusses Some Like It Hot (1959).

Sex comedies produced before the demise of the Hays Code may seem quaint by modern sensibilities, but that’s largely because of the Code; writers and directors like Billy Wilder pushed the Code’s limits on a regular basis. Wilder had been pushing the Code’s limits since his American directorial debut, The Major and the Minor, but he hadn’t released a film without the Production Seal of Approval until 1959’s Some Like It Hot.

Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon play struggling jazz musicians, Joe and Jerry, who witness the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929; they’re spotted by the murderous gangsters, including “Spats” Colombo (George Raft), so they have to flee. They do this by disguising themselves as women and joining Sweet Sue and her Society Syncopators, an all-woman band heading to Miami. Joe becomes enamored of the band’s frontwoman, Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe), while Jerry (as Daphne) receives unwanted attention from the band’s male manager Mr. Bienstock (Dave Barry) before attracting more attention from Osgood Fielding III (Joe E. Brown). Joe persuades Jerry to keep Osgood occupied so he, as Junior, another alter ego, can entertain Sugar on Osgood’s yacht. As things become increasingly complicated, Joe and Jerry realize they have to leave the band, but they come to this decision as a convention of the Friends of Italian Opera opens at the hotel where they are staying. Among those attending the convention are Spats and his cohort who recognize Josephine (Joe) and Daphne as the witnesses to the massacre.

Some Like It Hot challenged several rules of the Hays Code, including scenes that imply sex between unmarried men and women, blurring of sex roles (Joe and Jerry’s transvestitism), Bienstock’s sexual harassment of “Daphne,” and the suggestion that there might not be anything wrong with homosexuality, as implied by the film’s final line.

While “Junior” was seducing Sugar, Osgood proposed to Daphne, who accepted. In the film’s final scene, Daphne tries to get out of the engagement by listing any number of her faults (she smokes, she can’t have children, etc.), leading to Osgood’s famous last words: “Well, nobody’s perfect.”

Wilder relates the story behind one of the most famous lines in cinema:

“Diamond and I were in our room working together, waiting for the next line—Joe B. Brown’s response, the final line, the curtain line of the film—to come to us. Then I heard Diamond say, ‘Nobody’s perfect.’ I thought about it and I said, Well, let’s put in ‘Nobody’s perfect’ for now. But only for the time being. We have a whole week to think about it. We thought about it all week. Neither of us could come up with anything better, so we shot that line, still not entirely satisfied. When we screened the movie, that line got one of the biggest laughs I’ve ever heard in the theater. But we just hadn’t trusted it when we wrote it; we just didn’t see it. ‘Nobody’s perfect.’ The line had come too easily, just popped out.”

References

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Wilder

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1432/the-art-of-screenwriting-no-1-billy-wilder

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Some_Like_It_Hot

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_Code

USPS Director Stamps: Billy Wilder

The USPS recently issued a set of four stamps honoring great film directors and the films for which they are most remembered. The four selected are: John Ford (The Searchers), John Huston (The Maltese Falcon), Frank Capra (It Happened One Night), and Billy Wilder (Some Like It Hot). We will be exploring the lives and work of these directors over the next few weeks. In this post LR Simon discusses the career and influence of Billy Wilder.

Like the other directors featured in this series, Billy Wilder started his film career as a writer. He had worked as a journalist in Berlin before becoming interested in film and writing screenplays. He wrote the screenplay for Emil and the Detectives (1931), and then moved to Paris as Hitler came into power. He made his directorial debut in France with Mauvaise Graine (1934), moving to Hollywood before its release. His first big American hit as a writer came in 1939 with Ninotchka, and he made his American directorial debut with The Major and the Minor in 1942. He would go on to direct Double Indemnity (1944), arguably the best noir film; Some Like It Hot (1959), one of the best-loved comedies in film history; and Stalag 17 (1953), one of the best prisoner of war films.

Because he was a writer, Wilder believed that films were at their best when the script was honored. He became a director in large part to protect his scripts from misinterpretation. Once a director, he began to tailor scripts for actors, because he thought all actors have limits; this, however, did not keep him from casting against type—Fred MacMurray was not a likely choice to play a scheming insurance salesman in Double Indemnity, for example.

Wilder had great admiration for directors who were also writers, such as John Huston and Akira Kurosawa, but also for directors who respected the writers, such as Ernst Lubitsch, for whom he wrote several screenplays. Wilder learned much about directing from Lubitsch—not only how to respect the script and the medium, but also “to do things as elegantly and as simply as possible.” Despite directors’ having much more influence on set than writers (during the studio era, writers were not allowed on set), Wilder did not subscribe to “auteur theory”:

Film’s thought of as a director’s medium because the director creates the end product that appears on the screen. It’s that stupid auteur theory again, that the director is the author of the film. But what does the director shoot—the telephone book? Writers became much more important when sound came in, but they’ve had to put up a valiant fight to get the credit they deserve.

Wilder’s influence on cinema extends beyond the technical—many of his films pushed the limits of what was acceptable under the Hays Code. Double Indemnity centers on marital infidelity, a topic that the code made almost impossible to treat honestly on film. Some Like It Hot features transvestitism and a nod to homosexuality, and was released without a Production Code Seal of Approval; it was a huge critical and box-office success, and may have been the single most important film in terms of ending the power of the Hays Office.

While Wilder’s legacy of expanding acceptable content in films is important—invaluable, even—some of his attitudes are less honorable. For example, Wilder was never blacklisted, but he had no sympathy for those who were, and he held some blacklisted artists in disdain. Of course, nobody’s perfect.

References

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Wilder

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1432/the-art-of-screenwriting-no-1-billy-wilder