Wilder the Humanist: New Perspectives on a Hollywood Legend (Preview)
by Kevin Lally

Sunset Blvd. Double Indemnity. Some Like It Hot. The Apartment. Ace in the Hole. This partial list of enduring classics certifies Billy Wilder’s status as one of the most accomplished American filmmakers. But veteran film historian Joseph McBride, in his new critical study Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge, argues that Wilder remains underrated. Labels that were attached to him during the height of his career (too commercially conscious, shallowly cynical) still have staying power. As McBride notes, critics’ and directors’ polls consistently cite several of the titles mentioned above, but never in the upper echelon of classics such as Vertigo, Citizen Kane, and Tokyo Story.

Then there’s the unfortunate trajectory of Wilder’s career. After years of popular successes and of hoodwinking the censors with groundbreaking, nervy films including The Major and the Minor (1942), The Lost Weekend (1945), A Foreign Affair (1948), and Irma la Douce (1963), Wilder hit a wall with his 1964 adultery farce Kiss Me, Stupid, a demoralizing box-office flop condemned by the Catholic Church. Ironically, Wilder’s subsequent films were considered hopelessly old-fashioned as the 1960s and the end of the studio system brought a new boldness to Hollywood content. One of McBride’s central missions in writing his book was to make the case for Wilder’s late work, most especially The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) and Avanti! (1972), which McBride regards as the writer-director’s most heartfelt, romantic, and gentle films, works that truly capture the spirit of his mentor and idol, Ernst Lubitsch. McBride also champions less celebrated Wilder films such as A Foreign Affair and the notorious Kiss Me, Stupid, and finds much to celebrate in the director’s penultimate work, Fedora (1978), a film maudit. 

Like every other critic, McBride can find nothing good to say about Wilder’s last film, the strained, unfunny 1981 comedy Buddy Buddy, and speculates that the director “simply was too angry at his treatment by Hollywood to bother trying anymore.” Wilder lived another twenty-one years and continued to develop screenplay ideas that never came to fruition; the lifetime achievement awards piled up in those last two decades, but no financial backing. It’s a not-uncommon Hollywood story, but one that feels especially painful and poignant considering Wilder’s triumphs over adversity and his long run as a formidable artist who also enjoyed great commercial acceptance.

There have been half a dozen books about Billy Wilder in the past twenty-five years (including my own), but McBride’s still feels urgent and essential. The author of biographies of Frank Capra, John Ford, Orson Welles, and Steven Spielberg (plus a 2018 critical study of Lubitsch), he aims to dispel the misapprehensions about this filmmaker he considers his idol, and says he agrees with Spielberg’s assessment of Wilder as “the greatest writer-director who ever existed.”

Dancing on the Edge proceeds chronologically for its first half, with impressive, detailed analysis of Wilder’s youthful dispatches as a journalist in Vienna and Berlin and his dozen credits as a screenwriter in Germany. But once Wilder commences his career as a Hollywood film director with The Major and the Minor in 1942, the book takes a more free-flowing approach, abandoning chronology for a crisscrossing exploration of his preoccupations and the many themes that arise in his scripts.

The main argument that McBride makes is that Billy Wilder was decidedly not a cynic, but a humanist with a clear-eyed understanding of the frailties we all share. That attitude surely has roots in the traumas that Wilder suffered on his road to Hollywood. In 1933, at age twenty-six, he was a Jew with a thriving career as a screenwriter in Berlin, when he fled to France virtually overnight after Hitler’s rise to power. Wilder arrived in Hollywood in the spring of 1934 and scraped enough cash together from script assignments to visit his mother in Vienna. But he could not persuade her to leave Austria. Both Wilder’s mother and his stepfather would later be murdered in Nazi death camps…

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Cineaste, Vol. XLVII, No. 2