Walking on the Wilder side

Billy Wilder – The name rings a gong as in my early film critic days he and I.A.L.Diamond combined as scriptwriters to make some of the best Hollywood films like ‘Sunset Boulevard’, ‘Some Like It Hot’, ‘The Apartment’, ‘Irma la Douce’, ‘The Front Page’, ‘Out of Towners’ and ‘Avanti!’.

But Austrian-born Samuel “Billy” Wilder had already been in cinema for some decades. By the time he died at the ripe old age of 96 this realist filmmaker had won four Oscars and the Irving Thalberg Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Actually, Wilder is one of my favourite Hollywood directors in the same league as Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock, William Wyler, Stanley Kramer, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese and company, whose films went beyond the escapist genre. They were also biting social comments on the mores of society and came close to European cinema. He was an auteur.

So, what’s the provocation for writing about him, you may well ask, and rightly so. Well, just last week I saw ‘Witness for the Prosecution’ and found it as absorbing as ever only to realise at the end that it was as thrilling as ever, almost Hitchcockian. Yes, I saw it in my pre-film critic days as also ‘Stalag-17’ and hence the urge to go down Billy Wilder lane in a career, which began in the 1930s.

His favourite actors were Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, who together did more than half-a-dozen films and among the women was Shirley MacLaine, whose depiction of the call-girl Irma still stays etched in memory.

When released in the early 1960s the Censor Board in India banned it as they probably found prostitution too bold a subject. It took a decade for them to change their minds. Times were a-changing after the Sexy Sixties and if they could pass as daring a subject as an older woman seducing a man half her age well a topic like the oldest profession was Sunday school stuff.

As a journalist, the film ‘The Front Page’ also has a special place in my heart. The screenplay is scintillating, the humour hearty and the irony delicious. The dead-pan Matthau steals the show as he also does in ‘The Odd Couple’ but Lemon, who won a Best Actor Oscar in ‘Save the Tiger’, stood out in ‘The Apartment’ and ‘Irma La Douce’ both alongside the ebullient Shirley MacLaine.

Also ‘Some Like It Hot’, where along with Tony Curtis in drag and all-time sex siren Marilyn Monroe it was a screaming success. ‘Stalag-17’ was among his few serious films. His swansong was “Buddy, Buddy” in 1981 after five full decades.

The films I’ve not seen among the biggies are ‘The Lost Weekend’ and ‘Double Indemnity’ but with over a dozen of his films under my belt it was ample evidence of his amazing skill and limitless energy. Variety in the 1960s described “his humorous treatment of subjects of controversy and often biting indictment of hypocrisy in the American Left.”

It was not surprising even though it was much after the McCarthy era because Hollywood has always been and still is largely Jewish. One reason for this is that the Jews were always in the garment industry and could ascertain or even mould public tastes.

But to come back to starting point and ‘Witness for the Prosecution’ it was fun to spot the big names – Charles Laughton (Captain Bligh in ‘Bounty’), Marlene Dietrich (not as a blonde here) and most of all Tyrone Power who was quite unrecognisable. But the film only reiterated the extreme versatility of this great filmmaker.