By Alex Hudson

April 29, 2002

Visionaries see the world with a slightly skewed perspective. Their perception of things is startlingly clear or alarmingly unclear. The line between madness and genius is thin, and visionaries straddle this line, knowingly and tantalizingly walking the tightrope of sanity for the benefit of their visions. Some filmmakers are visionaries. Most are just mad. One such visionary-as-director is Billy Wilder.

In a 52-year span, Billy Wilder directed 26 films, wrote 60 screenplays, received 21 Oscar nominations, won six Oscars, elevated the careers of some of this century's finest film actors and influenced generation after generation of filmmakers. And he changed cinema forever.

Beginnings

Born in the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1906, Billy Wilder studied to be a lawyer, but shifted his career focus to newspaper reporter before finally settling as a screenwriter in early '30s Berlin. With the threat of Nazism looming, Wilder immigrated to the United States in 1933, and first made a name for himself by penning Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka. The critical and commercial success of Wilder's early scripts, most co-written with collaborator Charles Brackett, garnered him the lauding requisite to earn a studio's respect, and freedom.

This freedom materialized in the form of Wilder's directorial debut in 1942 with The Major and the Minor for Paramount. A moderate success, the film more importantly established Wilder as a capable Hollywood director, and after a middling war picture entitled Five Graves to Cairo, Wilder set his sights on the James M. Cain novel, Double Indemnity in Three of a Kind.

Darkly Cynical

Double Indemnity explores the theme which dominates the majority of subsequent Wilder films: man's constant struggle to honor his conscience despite an overwhelming urge to satiate his desires. In the case of Double Indemnity, this age-old conflict simmers on the screen, with helpless insurance agent Walter Neff (played with earnest believability by the normally straight-arrow Fred MacMurray) falling prey to Barbara Stanwyck's seductress Phyllis Dietrichson.

The model for all noir to follow, Wilder employed Mr. Hardboiled himself, Raymond Chandler, to work on the script, and the end result is an unrelentingly dark and cynical view of Americana that few other directors were able (or willing) to show. "Dark" and "cynical" are two words, more than any others, that critics, scholars and fans lobbed towards Wilder's general direction, but at a time of Capra-esque saccharine-till-it-hurts feel-good-ism, Wilder's films, and Double Indemnity in particular, were refreshingly corrupt.

Genre Hopping

The battle of conscience at the heart of Double Indemnity would find itself repeated time and time again by Wilder, in a varied assortment of genres from noir to comedy to drama. Perhaps more adroitly than any other filmmaker, Wilder shifted gears and transported his warfare of the soul to new settings with the same compelling results.

Indeed, Wilder's versatility was his greatest strength; his ability to effortlessly shift from drama to comedy back to drama was an attribute most directors lack. Whereas Alfred Hitchcock staked his claim with thrillers and macabre horrors, Wilder had no limitations. As such, Wilder's style - that is, his distinctive cinematic visual approach - is not easily discernible. You don't recognize a Wilder film from a particular shot or frame or grand visual design; rather, you recognize a Wilder film by the crackling wit of the dialogue, the taut pacing of the narrative and the acerbic mind behind the ideals.

Foreigner's Eye

Like Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, and other significant European-born directors who relocated to Hollywood, Wilder's perception of Americana was distant enough to be revealing but close enough to be incisive. The outsider suddenly thrust to the inside views his new surroundings with a hyperawareness and studious gaze which the insiders themselves, coddled and numbed, lack. In short, Wilder had almost a more perceptive view of us than we had of ourselves.

Wilder's eye-opening incisiveness was never more lucid than in Sunset Boulevard. Wilder's darkness would turn pitch-black with the story of a struggling screenwriter in Hollywood begrudgingly lured into the self-destructive wrath of a delusional former silent-film starlet. Sunset Boulevard is a love letter to Hollywood written in blood. Again, the Wilder protagonist, Joe Gillis (played convincingly by William Holden), is a man at odds with honoring his conscience; he's faced with the gut-wrenching dilemma of compromising his integrity for the promise of easy money. Gillis finds himself in an uneasy situation, essentially being the plaything of Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson in sheer cinematic perfection), and his nagging morality runs the risk of ruining the charade at any moment.

It's a Circus

The most pivotal film in the Wilder canon, and the turning point of his career, was his follow-up to Sunset Boulevard, The Big Carnival. Emboldened by the critical and commercial success of Sunset Boulevard, and building on the success of films such as A Foreign Affair, The Lost Weekend, and Double Indemnity, Wilder had the freedom to make any film he wanted, and he wanted to (gasp) go darker. In one of the bleakest screen visions of humanity, The Big Carnival picks up where Sunset Boulevard left off, and plunges deeper into the recess of man's soul.

Starring Kirk Douglas as wildly over-ambitious reporter Charles Tatum, The Big Carnival is, as New York Times' Bosley Crowther called it upon its release, "a sordid and cynical drama of a corrupt newspaper man, set against a grisly panorama of Mob mentality, delivered with all the stinging impact of an angry slap in the face." Basically, Tatum's character stumbles upon a man half-buried and trapped after a mine collapse, rigs it so that the man stays buried and trapped, then exploits his communication with the slowly dying miner, thereby ensuring himself the scoop while closing out his assembling peers and generating a massive crowd (they literally raise tents to sell food and souvenirs to the masses around the accident site) of thrill-seekers in the process.

As prophetic as any film before or after, The Big Carnival - some 40 years before Rodney King and OJ and every other media circus to pollute the media and the minds of millions - anticipates the degree and veracity that the media would take to exploit human misery and the public's unthinking impulse to want more. Paramount hated the film, critics were shocked by it, and audiences stayed away. The abject commercial failure of The Big Carnival caused a fundamental shift in Wilder's output. From this point on, almost without fail, Wilder would filter his same basic themes through the safety net of full-scale comedy.

Sweet, Sweet Lemmon

After redeeming his reputation with decidedly less misanthropic crowd-pleasers Sabrina, The Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot, Wilder teamed with the extremely likeable Jack Lemmon for the comedic but somber The Apartment. The second of seven collaborations with Lemmon, The Apartment shuffled Wilder's protagonist to The Big City, and his conflict being whether to elevate his career by letting his higher-ups - Fred MacMurray, effective again in a role against type - use his apartment to house their illicit affairs. Lemmon conveys the guilt and anguish of the Wilder protagonist trying to do good in a world that rewards wrongdoing flawlessly. Lemmon was born to be Wilder's everyman; Lemmon oozed humanity and warmth, and tempered the innate darkness of Wilder's vision.

Wilder's second film to garner Oscar gold for Best Picture, like The Lost Weekend before it, The Apartment had the social commentary which short-sighted Oscar loves to honor. Peddled as almost a reward for "playing nice" after the disaster of The Big Carnival, The Apartment essentially was Hollywood bestowing acknowledgment and acceptance upon Wilder for a stellar run. Nine films would follow The Apartment, but few matched the precision and skill which Wilder applied to his previous masterworks.

Final Analysis

Wilder was an icon-maker and image-crafter like few others. He gave us the indelible images of Marilyn Monroe's dress dancing in the wind in The Seven Year Itch, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in drag in Some Like It Hot and Gloria Swanson delivering the immortal closing line "I'm ready for my close-up" in Sunset Boulevard. But, in the end, like almost all of his protagonists, Billy Wilder himself was put in the unenviable place of compromising his vision simply to get it onto film screens. Fortunately for moviegoers, Wilder had the courage to persevere, and although he shrewdly reframed his work to be more easily digestible, his cinematic worldview never softened.

After a director - or any artist, for that matter - dies, there's a tendency to lionize and heap praise on that artist, regardless of whether the praise is worthy or not. For Billy Wilder, who died March 27th, the praise is not only justifiable, it is necessary. It is necessary because Wilder pushed the cinematic envelope, infused his work with unequaled care and wit, and cinema was better for it.
View other columns by Alex Hudson