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Ruination and Redemption in Billy Wilder's Romantic Comedies

2023; Volume: 53; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/flm.2023.a903044

1548-9922

Janet McCracken,

Kierkegaardian Philosophy and Influence

Ruination and Redemption in Billy Wilder's Romantic Comedies Janet McCracken In his acceptance speech for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language film of 1992, Fernando Trueba stated, "I would like to believe in God in order to thank him. But I just believe in Billy Wilder…so thank you, Mr. Wilder." To directors, Billy Wilder, who would die in 2002, was alive and well in every sense. When French filmmaker Michel Hazanavicius accepted his Oscar for Best Picture for The Artist (2011), he thanked "Billy Wilder…Billy Wilder, and…Billy Wilder." Director Stephen Frears, no slouch himself, is currently in post-production of a film about the Hollywood icon, starring Christoph Waltz. Directors get books written about them, and the volumes written about Wilder are too numerous to review, but not often do directors get movies made about them. Wilder, however, was a rare sort: a director's director, the kind of artist who, long after death, keeps teaching the other directors, and the scholars keep talking. In this company, then, it's prudent for me to keep my claim modest, demonstrable, and useful. My claim bears some resemblance to what Andrew Sarris once wrote: that the "apparent cynicism" in Billy Wilder "was the only way he could make his raging romanticism palatable'" (McBride, 273). Conversely, Neil Sinyard and Adrian Turner "drew attention to Wilder's gentler, more romantic side…[challenging] the accusations of cynicism and bad taste" (Armstrong, 2). But that's the point: Wilder would never sacrifice comedic or romantic force in his films, but neither would he sacrifice tragic or agonistic elements that drove the otherwise happy endings toward existential choice. Born in Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which, after WWI, was considered a part of Poland (McBride, 11), Billy Wilder was raised amidst the disarray of European identity after the war. Nations and empires had dissolved and emerged. Like so many other Jewish Europeans, Wilder appreciated the gravity of existential choices in this increasingly hostile environment. He once remarked that "antisemitism is impossible to eradicate. It was impossible two thousand or four thousand years ago" (McBride 15). Although he and his family were relatively safe in their corner of Europe, Hitler's rise to power manifested the racial anxieties on all sides. Wilder fled Berlin, where he was working at the time, in 1933, arriving first in Paris. Then he had to flee again, to the United States, landing in Hollywood. Wilder's stepfather, grandmother, and mother were all killed by the Nazis, probably in the Kraków ghetto or the nearby Plaszów Labor camp, the facility depicted in Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993), which Wilder himself was eager to direct. This personal history—including his failure to bring his mother with him to the US—was never far in the background for Wilder (McBride 20-23), and, while this existential terror might be most evident in his 1945 documentary for the U.S. War Department, Death Mills, which documented Nazi atrocities, the tension driving it informs all his films. As indicated, Wilder is known for his biting satire and dark sense of humor. His Double Indemnity (1944) and Sunset Blvd. (1950) are noir classics, and Ace in the Hole (1951), which I'll discuss more, is widely regarded as one of the most cynical movies ever made (Hamrah). Against these stands the American Film Institute's "Funniest movie ever," Some Like it Hot (1959), and most of Wilder's other films are [End Page 4] comedies—indeed, romantic comedies. Wilder started in Hollywood as a screenwriter, and once he began directing his own movies, he became a dialogue-forward auteur, co-writing (most of his films were co-written with Charles Brackett or I.A.L. Diamond), directing, and often producing them. Yet, despite Wilder's lifelong emulation of Ernst Lubitsch, to whom he is sometimes compared (he had a sign on his office wall: "How would Lubitsch do it?" {McBride 8}), Wilder's style contained harder edges and greater ambivalence (McBride 9-10). Defining the romantic comedy, or indeed defining the bounds of any film or literary genre, poses difficulties, whereas the economics of moviemaking are more clear. Movies...