I wonder if, before he died in March, Billy Wilder's life flashed before his eyes like some Hollywood biopic? If so, did it occur to him that no one life could really contain so much, that perhaps the memory banks of some latter-day Zelig had accidentally shorted with his own?
He was named Billy after Buffalo Bill, on whom his mother had developed a crush. Aged ten, he saw Archduke Franz Josef's funeral; Otto Von Hapsburg was in the cort?ge. Decades later, Wilder would give the ageing Hapsburg a tour around Paramount studios.
In Vienna during the first world war, he stood in line for 20 hours for three potatoes. His sense of the unreality of Hollywood was sparked off by Douglas Fairbanks offering to buy Austria during the hyper-inflation. Unsurprisingly, he claimed that he was a cynic by the age of 12. A stint as a crime writer in early adulthood toughened him more.
It was only the beginning. He interviewed Ferenc Molnar, Sigmund Freud and Richard Strauss, wrote songs and sold one to his US jazz hero Paul Whiteman. He moved to Berlin, which at the time had 120 newspapers, 40 theatres and 360 movies houses, and became a gigolo. He advised Erich Maria Remarque not to write All Quiet on the Western Front and in the late 1920s wrote outlines for over 200 films, for which he received no credit. He was a 25-year-old hedonist with an apartment full of Mies van der Rohe furniture.
In 1933, as the Reichstag burned, he left Berlin with $100 in his hat band. He spent a year in Paris, cabled Columbia Studios with an idea and sailed to America in 1934. Five years later, by which time he was friends with James M Cain, Dorothy Parker and Dore Schary, he swore the oath of allegiance.
On the studio lot, the newly Americanised Wilder saw fading star Gloria Swanson and, years later, made Sunset Boulevard with her, the film that begat the musical which is still playing all over the world. At Paramount, Wilder learned the tricks of screwball comedy-outrageous coincidence and intricate construction. Tone was everything in this most Europeanised of studios, but here they quoted George Kaufman: "satire is what closes Saturday night."
At the end of the war, Wilder edited raw footage from the death camps where his mother had been murdered. In 1947, his hero, director Ernst Lubitsch, died. Wilder had a sign on his office wall: "How would Lubitsch do it?" The Lubitsch trick was to top a punchline with another, unexpected gag and hide your plot points.
In 1945, Wilder made The Lost Weekend, which Woody Allen says is the best film ever made. In 1951 he did Ace in the Hole, which Spike Lee paid tribute to in Malcolm X. His Sabrina of a few years later was recently remade. The Seven Year Itch didn't work, he said, because it needed a shot of one of Marilyn Monroe's hairpins in Tom Ewell's bed. 1959 brought Some Like it Hot. The 1960s ("I didn't even know they were the sixties," he cracked) heralded The Apartment, for which he won three Oscars, as writer, producer and director.
Wilder made fewer films in the 1970s. He used to say that Battleship Potemkin was his favourite movie, but that was before Schindler's List, which he himself wanted to direct. In 1993, the winner of the Oscar for best foreign film said "I don't believe in God, so I'd like to thank Billy Wilder."
He was a very great man, perhaps Hollywood's best narrative director. The Apartment is the film I've watched more than any other. So it is with reluctance that I offer the following opinion: Billy Wilder never made a masterpiece. Like many of my generation and the generation before (the so-called "movie brats" who started making films in the 1970s) I saw the great Wilders on television. There, they are masterpieces. The Apartment is balanced, beautiful and wise on the small screen. Some Like it Hot is an annual delight. Sunset Boulevard has for years made Saturday afternoons gothic. Families are rare in Wilder films but they are part of our domestic lives.
In order to write an introduction to the screenplay of The Apartment, published a few years ago, I watched Wilder films on the big screen. It was an extremely unsettling experience. I knew that The Apartment was made in widescreen Panavision, but the acres of space around Jack Lemmon's and Shirley MacLaine's heads robbed the film of clarity and intimacy. With more films, I noticed something worse. Wilder's movies are so beautifully structured and preconceived that there is nothing with them that is abstract: no pauses, no excess, nothing purely formal or expressive. It's all reducible to words; nothing is pure cinema.
I also saw films by Wilder's fellow 1950s Hollywood directors: Nicholas Ray, Vincente Minnelli and Douglas Sirk. On television, I thought they misfired, lacking Wilder's more evolved sense of shot and cut. In the cinema, the tables are turned. Ray's hysteria, Minnelli's choreography, Sirk's repressed desire were each more interesting than Wilder's Lubitsch-inspired storytelling. Wilder is indeed a god, but for a television generation of film lovers and the classicists. Truly great cinema does something else, something unscriptable that you can only catch projected across space and painted onto a huge canvas.
