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
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