Billy Wilder
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Like many people my age, my first brush with the work of director Billy Wilder happened within the institution of education. My college’s film history class screened his 1944 classic DOUBLE INDEMNITY to illustrate the conventions of the noir genre, my professor taking great pains to hammer home the fact that the images and ideas…
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Following the disappointing reception of what he intended as his swan song– 1978’s FEDORA— director Billy Wilder went into an unofficial retirement. However, he continued to write new projects with his scripting partner I.A.L. Diamond, in the hopes they’d cook up an idea worth mounting one last physical effort for. At the dawn of the…
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At 72 years old, the venerated Hollywood director Billy Wilder had a much higher proportion of yesterdays than he had tomorrows. He was intent on spending those few remaining tomorrows doing what he loved: making movies. Retirement was, quite simply, not an option. While he was in relatively good health, his advanced age meant that…
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The journalism satire “The Front Page”, written by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, had been the subject of a filmed adaptation several times before– once in 1931, and another time in 1940, under the title HIS GIRL FRIDAY (2). With the boundary-busting era of New Hollywood firmly under way, executives at Universal apparently felt the…
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As a director who valued the primacy of writing over all else, Billy Wilder often used stage plays as the source material for his feature-length film projects. While he was looking for a project to work on following the disappointing reception of 1970’s THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, Wilder was contacted by the agent…
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As the twentieth century entered its seventh decade, one of its most prominent cinematic artists was also entering the twilight of his career. After twenty-one feature films, a handful of them among the most celebrated films of all time, director Billy Wilder labored under the growing realization that perhaps his best days were behind him.…
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Academy Award wins: Best Supporting Actor In 1966, the venerated director Billy Wilder celebrated his 60th birthday. He had already accomplished so much in his six decades of life, yet he showed no signs of slipping quietly into retirement anytime soon. The pace of his output was beginning to slow, of course, but his dance…
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After achieving success with his boundary-pushing sex comedy IRMA LA DOUCE (1963), director Billy Wilder and his writing partner I.A.L. Diamond attempted to strike gold once again by adapting another provocative play into a feature film. Their new effort was based on a play by Anna Bonacci titled “The Dazzling Hour”, but Wilder’s misanthropic sense…
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The great irony of director Billy Wilder’s life is arguably that, while he was one of the classical Golden Era’s most-lauded filmmakers, he might have been even more influential had he been born only a decade later. By this, I mean that his desire to explore authentically complex adult relationships and controversial subject matter was…
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Riding the wave of critical adoration for 1960’s THE APARTMENT all the way to Oscar glory, director Billy Wilder entered the decade at the utmost peak of his powers as a filmmaker. The film’s success would rightly become the capstone to a career that was emblematic of the Golden Age of Hollywood, but unfortunately for…
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Inducted Into the National Film Registry: 1994 Academy Award Wins: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Art Direction, Best Film Editing The 1960’s was a decade of great upheaval in American social mores, especially when it came to the subject of sex and its depiction in mass media. The rigid respectability and chastity…
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Inducted into the National Film Registry: 1989 Academy Award Wins: Best Costume Design An artist’s primary responsibility to the public is to use his or her chosen medium to hold up a mirror to society, to challenge systemic and institutional complacency. Long-established social and moral codes must be questioned and criticized for the greater cultural…