Billy Wilder's America

Throughout his film making career, Billy Wilder has displayed an unusual appreciation for the mannerisms and slang-filled language of American culture. As a native European, Wilder's foreigner status made it easier for him to perceive the unique, to him even exotic, nature of American customs and mores. His hasty approach to learning English through radio programs, baseball games,and tabloid newspapers allowed him to develop a strong sense of how the language was actually spoken by various Americans. His early experience with destitution when he first arrived in California (for a brief while, Wilder lived in a deserted ladies room in a hotel), as well as his later wealth and success, gave Wilder a sharp Knowledge of society's highs and lows.

As much as Wilder admired his adopted country, however, he never completely abandoned either his Viennese accent or his European-based perspective. This dichotomy between the two cultures directly and indirectly infuses his films with a sensibility that often reveals new angles on common sights, an outsider's more critical view on the very things that we take for granted.

This peculiar mix of America and Europe became evident early in Wilder's life. Born Samuel Wilder on June 22, 1906, he got the nickname Billy because of his mother's fondness for Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. Raised primarily in Vienna, Wilder spent his childhood witnessing the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the ensuing social and economic chaos that followed after World War One. He became a newspaper reporter in Berlin during its most extreme period of decadence and run-away inflation in the 1920s and occasionally worked as a dance instructor and gigolo just to survive financially. His great passions, however, were American movies and jazz.

Through a lucky, and rather bizarre coincidence, Wilder was able to gain entry into the Berlin film industry and, beginning with Menschen am Sonntag (Germany 1929), he was quickly established as a major new screenwriter. The rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party forced Wilder, who is Jewish, to flee to Paris. There he was able to find work as the co-director of the low-budget production of Mauvaise Graine (France 1933). Wilder's preference, however, was the role of screenwriter and it was this talent that first brought him to work at Paramount Pictures in 1935.

The German director Ernst Lubitsch was at this time not only Paramount's most successful filmmaker, but also one of the most influential people at the studios and he was able to secure jobs for many Central European emigres, especially in the screenwriting department. This unusual mix of accents among the writers once led to a sign being hung on the Writers Building's door: "You must work here. It is not enough to be Hungarian." Wilder was hired to lend a sense of authentic Viennese wit to a few minor productions and was otherwise so under-used that he spent many of his days reading the Help Wanted ads. It was not until he was teamed on a script with Charles Brackett that Wilder's own best qualities came forward, The extreme differences between the two men inspired their scripts as Wilder's liberalism and European worldliness squared off with Brackett's New England-bred conservatism and idealism.

It was, however, Wilder's transition from screenwriter to director that allowed his own themes and concerns to become overt. Initially, Wilder became a director in order to protect the integrity of his and Brackett's scripts. Increasingly though, he found his directorial vision at odds with his collaborator and finally, when Wilder's macabre sense of humor took control on Sunset Boulevard (USA 1950), their work relationship ended.

The similarities and differences between Wilder and Brackett's work can be traced through the dark and light qualities of The Lost Weekend (USA 1945). Brackett had a very personal interest in the film due to his wife's own alcoholism and, in certain ways, Jane Wyman's character is a stand-in for him as she attempts to comprehend the nature of the illness. Wyman's sense of ideals and feelings is indicative of Brackett's own combination of despair and a strong sense of self. However, the film's vivid sense of degradation and madness, especially the infamous bat/mouse nightmare, was gleaned from Wilder. The increasing destitution experienced by Ray Milland's character was familiar to Wilder from his own days of extreme poverty and the nightmare scene has been described by him as a conflict between two sides of his own subconscious, a conflict in which one side feels compelled to devour the other.

Brackett's concerns in The Lost Weekend were central to the script. His intentions in Sunset Boulevard were ignored. Brackett originally conceived the idea for Sunset Boulevard as a screwball comedy. As he and Wilder repeatedly rewrote the screenplay, the narrative evolved into a dark, gothic vision that was uniquely Wilder's. Brackett continued to provide his sense of craftsmanship to the script, but he realized that he was now involved in making someone else's film. Further, his own sensibilities were now submerged beneath the weight of Wilder's propensity toward megalomania, decadence, and black comedy.

It was not so much that Wilder had changed. Instead, Sunset Boulevard represented the complete emergence of the caustic, hard-edged vision already obvious in his earlier production of Double Indemnity (USA 1944). The novel's tale of adultery and murder played out against a Southern California milieu of bright sunlight and quiet stucco houses intrigued Wilder. The ambivalent psychology and poetic texture of Cain's book were less appealing to Wilder. With the help of Raymond Chandler, he fashioned the narrative into a flinty, flippant view of corruption and betrayal, all played out against the most banal of settings. In a way, the American author Cain wrote a very European novel and the European Wilder directed an extremely American film.

Further, while Brackett was an idealist, Wilder was often capable of being a sentimentalist. Despite the cynicism and seeming fatalism of Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard, Wilder often seems to be a pessimist with a romantic dreamer screaming to get out. That is especially evident in the contrary tendencies of Ace in the Hole a.k.a. The Big Carnival (USA 1951). The film offers a sarcastically devastating critique of American journalism and commerical exploi­tation. It also contains an abrupt sense of belated spiritual redemption through the power of emotional release. If a worldly spark of cynicism is Wilder's European heritage, then this latent streak of romanticism and sentimentality is, in part, what led him to America.