Billy Wilder was never a one-man band; he preferred to play duets. In 1935, Paramount Pictures teamed him as a writer with Charles Brackett, and they scripted some of the most fondly remembered comedies of the 1930s. My favourites are Midnight and Ninotchka; and there were two pieces of deliciously romantic tosh: Arise, My Love and the hilariously titled Hold Back the Dawn. It was with the last named that the iron entered Wilder's soul.
Wilder, born in 1906, is Jewish, and in 1933 he fled from Europe to Mexico, where he waited for an entry visa to the US. The experience gave him a readymade subject for Hold Back the Dawn (1941), in which Charles Boyer is a gigolo trapped in a border town while waiting for his "papers". At one point, sprawled on a bed, he sees a cockroach climbing the wall of his sleazy hotel room. He engages the insect in conversation, sardonically demanding to know if its passport is in order. Boyer refused to play the scene; it was beneath his dignity, he said, to converse with a cockroach.
There was nothing Wilder could do but give in; in Hollywood, a writer was seen as a necessary evil, to be well-paid and well despised. An old joke tells of a starlet who was so stupid that she thought to further her career by sleeping with a writer. The Boyer incident was a watershed; thereafter, Wilder decided, he would direct movies, Charles Brackett would produce them, and they would collaborate on the scripts as before. The result was one brilliancy, The Lost Weekend, marred only by a teetotal ending, and one undisputed masterpiece, Sunset Boulevard, a savagely unsparing depiction of Hollywood and stardom. Only Wilder in full misanthropic spate could have opened his film with a close-up of the corpse of his hero-narrator floating face down in a swimming pool.
Another masterwork, written in stormy collaboration with Raymond Chandler, was Double Indemnity, the very essence of cinema noir. It was a hypnotic thriller which contained not a shred of pity or sentiment, except in the undeclared affection between a murderer (Fred MacMurray) and his nemesis (Edward G. Robinson). And there was Ace in the Hole, in which a reporter milks a news story by delaying the rescue of a worker trapped in a cave-in. As the man dies, excursion trains deliver rubber-neckers to the site in their hundreds - an alternative name of the film was The Big Carnival.
For some directors - Lubitsch, Hitchcock, Ford, Capra - pure film is the thing, and the camera becomes a kind of paint brush. One thinks of their respective trademarks: a Vienna, Paris or Budapest that never was, the dynamics of terror and suspense, the arid landscapes of the American southwest, the martyrdom and triumph of the Common Man. Wilder hardly ever used a camera angle that drew attention to itself - the beginning and end of Sunset Boulevard were exceptions. What made him exceptional was his unique response to his material. Whereas Ernst Lubitsch, perhaps the greatest director who ever worked in Hollywood, was the master of Viennese schmaltz and an unabashed romantic, his compatriot Wilder became tarred with the brush of cynicism.
When his partnership with Brackett came to an amicable end, he had his first box-office failure with Ace in the Hole, in which his loathing for the hucksters and exploiters seemed to embrace his audiences as well. His next collaborator was I.A.L. Diamond. They made a dud, Love in the Afternoon, in which Gary Cooper, aged 56 and cast opposite the still-waifish Audrey Hepburn, seemed like a child molester. The team more than made amends with Some Like It Hot, with Wilder beginning yet another collaboration: this time with an actor, Jack Lemmon.
In 1953, Lemmon arrived in Hollywood to make his first film, It Should Hap- pen to You, opposite Judy Holliday. On the first day's shooting, the director, George Cukor, kept asking Lemmon to give him "Less, less, less!" At last, the young actor could take no more. He shouted in frustration: "Don't you want me to act at all?" To which Cukor purred in reply: "Dear boy, you're beginning to understand".
By the time Lemmon and Wilder discovered each other, the star had made 11 pictures and had won a best-supporting Oscar for his worm-that-turned role in Mr Roberts - probably he won it solely for his, and the film's, final line, delivered to James Cagney: "Now what's this crud about no movie tonight?" He was a bland, technically perfect, young leading man who was in need of the weight of a few more years.
In Some Like It Hot he was a joy. It is, famously, the story of two jazz musicians on the run from gangsters; they have witnessed the St Valentine's Day Massacre and in desperation disguise themselves as members of an all-girl band. Lemmon, as "Josephine", is pursued by a randy millionaire named Osgood (Joe E. Brown). One will long cherish the scene in which, after a night's dancing with Osgood, he dreamily confides to his partner (Tony Curtis): "I'm engaged!" Cunningly, Lemmon used a pair of maracas to punctuate his speeches, so that laughter from the audience would not drown his lines. He is so perfect that the question is never posed: What made Wilder so certain that Lemmon would prove a natural for the part?
With their next film, The Apartment, Lemmon's screen persona was set for all time as an urban Everyman, flawed and hassled and caught in a rat race. And only Wilder would have taken as hero a person who was only one step up from a pimp. Lemmon is C.C. Baxter, a faceless clerk in a faceless corporation. He lends his apartment to three executives who use it for their extra-marital trysts; in return, they eulogise him in their reports to a senior vice-president, Mr Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray, brilliantly cast against type, as he was in Double Indemnity. Sheldrake promptly appropriates the apartment for his own affair with an elevator girl, Fran Kubelik, whom, as bad luck would have it, Baxter idealises from afar.
IN the end, Baxter dusts off his shopworn integrity, refuses to lend Sheldrake the apartment key and quits the job. When Fran learns of this and realises that he is a better man than her caddish lover, she ditches Sheldrake and, with her final line, "Shut up and deal!", demonstrates to Baxter that good guys always win. If that seems a mite tongue-in-cheek, it is because I have a problem with Wilder's ending. Fran, as played by Shirley MacLaine, is a nice girl and a credulous fool; and fools seldom acquire wisdom all in an instant. In real life, Fran would probably have married Sheldrake and turned into a drunk or a doormat or both. There is probably an irony in my wanting a little more healthy cynicism from Wilder of all people!
One could say that Lemmon has been playing C.C. Baxter ever since. By my count, he has made seven films for Wilder, and one might permissibly ask a chickenand-egg question: has Lemmon influenced Wilder's choice of subject as much as Wilder has shaped Lemmon's screen persona? Other directors have exploited the actor's image: Arthur Hiller in The Out of Towners and Melvin Frank in The Pris- oner of Second Avenue; both are dark comedies in which urban neurosis is deepened towards the point of madness.
Not all of the Wilder-Lemmon films have been successful. The Front Page, costarring the late Walter Matthau, is heartless enough to be ideal fodder for Wilder in his heyday, but is not a patch on either the 1931 version or the marvellous His Girl Friday. And Buddy Buddy, again with Matthau, was Wilder in decline.
My own favourite is Avanti! In this, Lemmon is a wealthy businessman, menopausal, uptight and anal-retentive, who goes to Ischia to take home the body of his father, dead in a car accident. To his horror, he discovers that the old man has been spending a month out of every year with his long-time mistress, who died with him. This mistress has a daughter (Juliet Mills), and of course history is going to repeat itself. The film descends, or rises perhaps, into farce when the two corpses are stolen by aggrieved locals; but Wilder and Lemmon keep a firm hold on the theme of a man blossoming into an autumnal awakening. The colour and Mediterranean sunlight help, of course, but only that director and that star could make the prospect of an adulterous future seem devoutly to be wished. We purr, probably because Wilder takes care never to let us see Lemmon's screen wife.
I saw Billy Wilder once. He was eating alone in the dining hall at Shepperton Studios, where he was making The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, and I was at the next table. The temptation was strong to go over and thank him for the years of pleasure, but I reasoned that if he was on his own it was because he wanted to be on his own. So I funked it and am sorry to this day. As for Jack Lemmon, I met him when he was handing out a Tony Award for best play, but that, as they say, is another story.
The Billy Wilder season runs until January 17th at the IFC. The reissued prints of Some Like It Hot and The Apartment are showing until December 28th