On Billy Wilder

While on holiday (as our host, Maurice, phrased it) this week, I finished reading a book called "Nobody's Perfect" by Charlotte Chandler. Written in 2002, it is a biography of the great film director and screenwriter, Billy Wilder. A really good book if you are a movie lover. Lots of good behind-the-scenes stuff about the movies that Wilder made. And consider some of those movies. Here are just six of them:

Double Indemnity
The Lost Weekend
Sunset Boulevard
Stalag 17
Some Like It Hot
The Apartment

If those six movies were ball players, they would be first ballot Hall of Famers. If Wilder had never made another movie, those six would have assured him of Hollywood greatness. So to those six, add the following:

The Seven Year Itch
Witness for the Prosecution
Sabrina
Irma la Duce
The Fortune Cookie

There are others, but I think you get the idea. To be sure, when you make a lot of movies, they can't all be great, and Wilder had his clinkers, but as I said, the movies above make Wilder an All-Time Great.

Wilder had a most interesting life. Born in Vienna in 1906, lived in Berlin, where he got started in the movie business, between the wars, and fled Europe just before Hitler took power in Germany (his mother and grandmother died in Nazi concentration camps), he arrived in America with next to nothing. In addition to making movies, he began to buy and collect art, and his collection became one of the finest private collections in the world. He was the classic American Dream Success Story.

He directed his last movie, "Buddy, Buddy", one of the clinkers, in 1981, and lived to be 96, dying in 2002. He didn't want to end his career with a bad movie, and he kept coming up with script ideas until the very end, but, as Wilder might have he put it, they can forgive just about anything in Hollywood, except growing old.

The book has inspired me to re-watch some of these classic movies. Watched "The Apartment' last week, and "Some Like It Hot" tonight. Will probably pull out "Double Indemnity", "Sunset Boulevard", and "Sabrina" in the weeks ahead.

His movies always show up on TCM. Watch for them.