The Billy Wilder Page

My favorite American movie-maker, the great writer-director Billy Wilder, made some of the most corrosive popular comedies and dramas in Hollywood history.

• Wilder, if not on top of the world, at least at the apex of his craft, during the making of his great, dark Hollywood satire Sunset Blvd. ['50]
• Ginger Rogers, the star of Wilder's directorial debut The Major and the Minor ['42], co-written with his then-regular collaborator Charles Brackett. As a failed career-girl trying to get home Ginger passes herself off as a 12-year old girl and finds herself gently trapped at a military academy. Here, Cinderella at the ball, she reacts to one of the randy young cadets takes a surreptituous liberty.
• The divine Marlene Dietrich in perhaps her best role, as the unrepentant Lorelei of A Foreign Affair, Wilder's '48 revenge on, and cock-eyed celebration of, post-war Germany. Brackett wasn't entirely happy with this dark, sexy comedy, but it made a mint.
• One of the most justifiably famous of all finales to an American movie: Gloria Swanson as the mad Norma Desmond, almost ready for her close-up, at the end of Wilder's last collaboration with Brackett, the still-relevant Sunset Blvd.
• Maurice Chevalier, as the marital detective of Wilder's initial collaboration with I.A.L. Diamond, Love in the Afternoon ['57] tries to shield his daughter Ariane (Audrey Hepburn) from the essential tawrdiness of his profession. When she objects that her mother knew about his work Chevalier responds, "Your mother was a married woman!" Says Audrey, with an ingenuous smile, "I'm so glad."
• Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in all their feminine glory, posing between takes of the greatest American movie comedy of them all, Some Like it Hot ['59]. Diamond provided the now-classic final line.
• Devoted East German Communist Horst Buccholtz discovers he's been (unwittingly) displaying American propaganda in One, Two, Three ['61], Wilder and Diamond's farcical follow-up to The Apartment. His comrades are not amused.
• The courageous, and adorable, Juliet Mills as Pamela Piggott in Avanti! ['71], Wilder and Diamond's most charmingly bitter-sweet comedy.  One of the most lovely (and underrrated) of all American movies of the '70s. Wilder made more movies after this one, but Avanti! is, essentially, his swan-song.
• Billy Wilder in a rare, smiling mood in '89. A lion who could still roar, he was then long past his ability to get his movies made. We are all the poorer for that.