Two Views of a Director—
Billy Wilder
Herbert G. Luft
Charles Brackett
Herbert G. Luft has been active in Hollywood since 1943 as a film editor, translator, and in studio research and production departments. He is an associate member of the Screen Writers Guild, drama editor and book reviewer for the Los Angeles B'nai B'rith Messenger, and West Coast correspondent for the National Jewish Post. Currently he is engaged in the production of television films.
Charles Brackett, formerly a novelist and drama critic of the New Yorker, has written and produced many notable films, often in association with Billy Wilder. Among their pictures were Ninotchka, Hold Back the Dawn, The Major and the Minor, The Lost Weekend, A Foreign Affair, and Sunset Boulevard. Mr. Brackett is president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
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The editors wish from time to time to publish appraisals of the work of important American film directors. They recognize, in printing Mr. Luft's article about Billy Wilder, that the author's viewpoint is not a wholly objective one but has been formed by his bitter personal experience. For this reason they asked Mr. Wilder's friend and one-time collaborator, Mr. Charles Brackett, for the comment which follows Mr. Luft's article. The two pieces certainly do not say the last word about Mr. Wilder's work, but they point up one distinction he shares with few of his contemporaries—he is one of the rare directors of this cautious day whose work may be called controversial.
I. A Matter of Decadence
Herbert G. Luft
Early in 1929, in berlin, just before the close of the silent era, a group of motion picture students discovered an outlet for their youthful enthusiasm —away from the theatrical setting of studio-made film. Nothing much happened in the little opus they called Menschen am Sonntag, a semidocumentary made for producer Moritz Seeler, but for the first time the camera looked upon real people.
Four middle-class citizens, worn from the week's drab routine, go out to spend a Sunday at Wannsee beach! This bit of simple, rather melancholy reportage became Robert Siodmak's initial chore as director, his assistants being Edgar Ulmer and Fred Zinnemann, with pioneer Eugene Schuftan handling the camera. The screen story was conceived by twenty-three-year-old Billy Wilder, a journalist from Vienna who had started as a copy boy, then graduated to sports writer before leaving for Berlin to become crime reporter on the Nachtausgabe.
Even today, People on Sunday still is regarded as one of the finest examples of screen art.
Wilder's career is one of the most fascinating success stories of the cinema. With the rise of Nazism, the young writer goes to Paris where he becomes a full-fledged film director (Mauvaiso graine). Thus, with an actual directing credit to his name, he arrives at the Hollywood scene in 1935. Today, he amuses himself by relating his earlier experience: "I dragged my carcass up and down Hollywood Boulevard, and starved around for a year and a half before I sold two original stories."
In 1938, Wilder collaborated for the first time with Charles Brackett on the screen play of Bluebeard's Eighth Wife. He kept on writing with an ever-increasing speed, turning out Rhythm on the River, Midnight, and What a Life!, the latter based on the Henry Aldrich character. In 1939, Wilder joined Ernst Lubitsch, working with Brackett and Walter Reisch on the screen play of the Greta Garbo picture Ninotchka, which became a sensational success. Then followed a series of craftsmanlike Brackett and Wilder scenarios such as Arise My Love (Ray Milland and Claudette Colbert), Hold Back the Dawn (Charles Boyer), and Ball of Fire (Barbara Stanwyck), all of them dated 1940 to 1941. As a director, Wilder came into his own with The Major and the Minor (1942), a mildly amusing comedy with Ginger Rogers.
Still collaborating with Brackett and now functioning as a triple producer-writer-director team, Wilder next presented Five Graves to Cairo (1943), a war yarn with Erich von Stroheim portraying Marshal Rommel. It was not until 1944 that Wilder, with Double Indemnity, his only co-authorship with Raymond Chandler, established himself as a truly unorthodox film maker.
Between film assignments, Wilder went to Berlin for six months as chief of the motion picture division for the American Information Control. In
After his initial prewar films, something changed Wilder's trend. Though he had watched the pulse of Hollywood and had learned the mechanics of successful motion picture making, seemingly without regret he turned from the media of his much hailed Academy Award winner to more and more controversial subjects such as A Foreign Affair and Sunset Boulevard. It was as if an impetus that could not be restrained was forcing him on and on.
Twenty-two years have passed since Wilder, having discovered the common man on the streets of Berlin, comes forward with another reportage, an item about a fellow newspaperman (which could have had an affinity with his own life?). Ace in the Hole
[1] After a few weeks of showing, Paramount renamed the film The Big Carnival.
unravels the tragedy of an unscrupulous reporter who has skidded to the bottom of the ladder into complete moral and physical disintegration. Given a slight chance to rise once more, this newshound frantically pursues a story to the point of killing a man buried in an underground cave-in. He deliberately delays rescue by bribing the authorities to use outmoded methods simply because it makes better copy and sells more papers while the victim suffers longer. To this end the reporter lies, cheats, and misleads the public, all to build up an unfortunate accident into the day's headline. Here Wilder has conceived a set of characters who appear totally repulsive and whose reactions are never normal. He has accentuated it all by adding a punch-drunk mob, the mere sight of which makes you hate the whole human race. He has lampooned yellow journalism, but has failed to attack the metropolitan scandal sheets who balloon murder cases and obscene bedroom yarns and actually have created an inexhaustible market for low, gutter reportage. The slant of the theme is worlds apart from the unpretentious approach of People on Sunday of 1929.In an interview, during the production of Ace in the Hole, in August, 1950, Wilder stated: "All I try to do is get myself a story, splash it on the screen and get it over with. And I try, for God's sake, to have news in every
There's no doubt about it, Wilder makes news in every picture, yet, paradoxically, employs the same technique of ruthless exploitation that he castigates so often on the screen, oversimplifying complex human emotions in order to bring out his utterly cynical viewpoint. One can also note his peculiar flair for a high-pitched, spectacular finish. The hero-villain of Ace in the Hole, dying, stabbed with a pair of scissors, pays his debt to society by assuming a self-righteous pose and angrily shouting his confession down from a mountaintop to a throng of thousands. Drama, yes! But an easy deathbed repentance for misdeeds mere confession cannot wipe out.
Another vital parallel is the pronounced kinship of Wilder's characters. The obsessed reporter shows a striking resemblance to Walter Neff, the insurance agent from Double Indemnity, who is also killed by his partner in crime, the wife of his victim.
Wilder lashes indifference, yet has displayed the same indifference to enliven his own films. Survivors of Nazi concentration camps whose bones were broken in the dungeons must have been just as deeply hurt by the happy-go-lucky treatment of postwar Germany in A Foreign Affair, as Papa Minosa is now in Ace in the Hole, discovering that his own son, doomed to suffocate in a mountain trap, has become the involuntary object of a noisily staged fairground merriment.
A Foreign Affair has deserved the distinction of presenting one of the most revolting episodes ever projected onto the screen, namely a love idyl, a rather harmless one on the surface, yet by implication more cruel than a picture showing the furnaces of an extermination center with human ashes still smoldering. The flendishly devised contrast, a "catch-and-get-me" game played against a room filled with archives of war-crime trials, makes the scene, to people with memories, loathsome. It is in even worse taste than if our screen lovers were to go into a final clinch over the still warm body of a slain rival, because the incident offends not only the sentiments of a few but mocks the torture of untold millions.
While the earlier Wilder in Arise My Love castigates the isolationism at
There are those who would scold us, saying that we shouldn't take motion pictures too seriously. They forget that films have become the universal language of our age, and that nowadays the screen is accepted as an image of life. I recall that in 1945 a friend (a woman who had just returned from a German concentration camp) wrote me about her most heart-breaking experience. She had wept for the first time in six years, wept when she saw her first movie, a superficial picture others devised while she had been undergoing unspeakable sufferings. To her, the callousness of the world at large seemed more cruel than the atrocities of the enemy.
There is a distinct pattern in the work of Billy Wilder that leads us to conclude that he undoubtedly is amused by the callousness of our time. In Ninotchka, the character Bulgaroff asks, "How are things in Moscow?" and Ninotchka answers, "Very good. The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer but better Russians."
The Lost Weekend, the odyssey of a drunk by Charles Jackson, attributes the hero's alcoholism to his sex frustration. Wilder, who, of course, couldn't touch upon the homosexual angle, seems to be rather amused by the plight of the alcoholic. He portrays him as a gentleman lush who sees himself in a third person and comments with a nasty sense of humor. The director inserts deliberate touches, such as the bat scene, for the mere shock effect. Here as in Ace in the Hole, he treats his characters with an obscene, obnoxious witticism, which to a lesser extent is apparent even in the harmless Emperor Waltz, a travesty on a bygone world of phony grandeur.
Wilder not only creates news in every picture, but also is on the look-out for off-the-beaten-track titles. Ace in the Hole happened to be the title of a novel by Jackson Gregory (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1941) which has no connection with his story. The title of Five Graves to Cairo is a hoax in itself. The picture opens by showing us a map revealing that the German Africa Corps in 1945 had five secret ammunition dumps throughout Egypt spelling out the five letters of "Egypt." Wilder, of course, knew that the equivalent German word would make eight letters or eight graves.
A Foreign Affair, an original, clearly mirrors the mark of his unhealthy boulevard witticism. The camera focus on a pile of rubble was not exactly a fitting place for wholesome comedy. There are the ruins of Berlin, but not one word to explain why the city had to be utterly destroyed before the spirit of oppression could be broken. The Nazis are seen as double-crossers, yet drawn with much charm and noblesse, living in an atmosphere of comparative ease, with a romantic façade covering up a decade of mass murders. Those praising the guts of the story didn't see the malefic travesty. Our occupation forces appear undisciplined and ill-behaved. It is not funny to see Berlin's citizenry tyrannized by the same clique of Nazis whom we have cursed so often, or to view frauleins complacently ruling the destiny of American officers, or to realize that a huge black-market exists under the very eye of the military government. Undoubtedly, the frivolous slant of the picture helped to increase animosity against America among those who have lived under the yoke of the Nazis.
Sunset Boulevard sets another bad example for this country. It presents a distorted Hollywood setting centering around a secluded mansion wherein it unravels the tragedy of a love-hungry actress who refuses to admit that she has grown old. The heroine is just as superficial as the congresswoman in A Foreign Affair, and just as exceptional. The story is that of the melodramatic cliché of silent movies, a paraphrase on the pathos of an era it went out to ridicule, except that Sunset Boulevard takes its own pathos seriously. Here, as in the flickers of the Pola Negri variety, the aging woman buys herself a lover. This time the gigolo comes in the disguise of a film writer. Only once in a blue moon, if ever, do we find such a scribe.
Wilder's "Hollywood" is ice-cold, calculated theater, far from the American way of thinking, and out of step with the real worries and ideals of the film industry which is still bubbling over with the growing pains and vitality of youth. The decadent atmosphere of Sunset Boulevard is only matched by the endless narration of a dead man floating in a swimming pool. The picture flays some of the finest creators of the silent screen, such as Erich von Stroheim, Buster Keaton, and H. B. Warner, who in their days showed a more intelligent approach in creating well-rounded characters than do some of today's top-notch boys. As in Ace in the Hole, Wilder, master of systematically developed sensationalism, again tops everything with his bombastic finish. The murderess of Sunset Boule-vard
All in all, Billy Wilder's later pictures are of a shockingly deteriorating nature. Other film makers have portrayed mass hysteria in Fury, Ox-Bow Incident, and The Well more honestly and more realistically, yet with a deeper belief in the innate decency of man. But Wilder has picked out exceptional characters with no redeeming features whatsoever and presents them to us as average Americans. His heroes have no integrity and expect none from anyone else. Like many Germans, Wilder depicts only the weaknesses and shortcomings of the American people, ridicules their habits, but never senses the strikingly salubrious strength of this vibrantly young republic. He says in an interview on the Ace in the Hole set: "We are a nation of hecklers, the most hard-boiled, undisciplined people in the world." Is he referring to his particular Hollywood?
Wilder, who has spent his years in America in a metropolitan atmosphere and, according to his own humorous account, sold his first two stories to a producer in Lucey's restroom, has evidently never been in touch with the "average" American, nor met those who create the physical and cultural wealth of this country. He hasn't seen Americans as they are, or as they should be, but as he—perhaps against his will—was indoctrinated to conceive the "Yankee" when he was still abroad. Subconsciously, he has accepted the cartoon characterization of the uncivilized, unconcerned weakling, the savage of the Wild West who loves only money and owes allegiance to none. To him, evidently, as with the philosophers of the Third Reich, Americans are a frightening array of ruthless, perverse, and criminal elements.
The America of Billy Wilder is not the America I found when I came to this country after having lived in Nazi Germany for six years. I had gone through the concentration camp of Dachau and through the earlier phase of World War II in England. For me—as for the vast majority of newcomers—America has meant a symbol of freedom, not a hoax. If these United States were as decadent and corrupt as Wilder would lead us to believe they are, this country never could have risen to such a position of strength and moral leadership in the world of today.
One can only conclude that Wilder's world is more continental than American. He portrays Americans as if they were demoralized Europeans
Somewhere, somehow, like so many other Hollywoodians, Wilder seems to have lost his human heart on the way to the top. Billy Wilder, a man of original ideas, has the makings of a great film writer and director, if he would lift his talents into a higher sphere of truthful interpretation and moral responsibility. But what he seems to want is sensationalism at any price. Perhaps he will give us a different answer with Stalag 17.
II. A Matter of Humor
Charles Brackett
I read Mr. Herbert G. Luft's article about Billy Wilder with a certain fascination. It is like reading an essay about Van Gogh by someone who is color blind. No, more than that—this appraiser of Van Gogh is made actively ill by the painter's favorite color.
Mr. Luft not only doesn't like a joke, he detests a joke. This is a limitation of nature to which one should be charitable. Certainly Mr. Luft's tragic experience in a concentration camp should cause one to overlook it. But in choosing Wilder for his subject, Mr. Luft has thrust his deficiency on the reader in a way that cannot be ignored.
Predominant among Billy Wilder's qualities is humor—a fantastically American sense of humor. It was the outstanding trait of the young man with whom I started to work some seventeen years ago. He was sassy and brash and often unwise, but he had a fine, salutary laugh. Also, he was in love with America as I have seen few people in love with it. I mention this because one of Mr. Luft's theses is a belief that Wilder fails to appreciate, and dislikes, America.
Now let us observe the conduct of Mr. Luft when he happens on a joke. He shudders first, then he begins to weigh it on sociological and ethical scales—and, alas, those scales aren't working very well. Take, for instance, the line from Ninotchka which he views with horror.
Ninotchka, reporting solemnly on her native land, says, "The mass trials have been a great success. In future there will be fewer but better Russians." This happens to be a line tossed into the script by Ernst Lubitsch, but I spring to its defense with ardor, as would Billy Wilder. Could a single
The indifference-to-America thesis runs into some difficulty when our essayist reviews Arise My Love and Hold Back the Dawn.
Arise My Love was a comedy with serious undertones and was decried by every America-Firster as warmongering and jingoistic. In it there were tender and adoring references to America—and I can testify that they were put in by Billy Wilder. In those simpler days I took my country's virtues very much for granted.
Hold Back the Dawn, which came a year or two later, was certainly a bouquet laid at the feet of America by two people who loved it dearly.
Mr. Luft brushes aside The Major and the Minor as inconsiderable (though I can assure him it filled countless theaters with the lovely and important sound of laughter), and comes to The Lost Weekend. Here, for Pete's sake, he finds Wilder at the peak of comicality—poking fun at the infirmities of a hopeless alcoholic! This interpretation defeats me. The very core of The Lost Weekend was its insistence that a drunk is not the comedy figure he had usually been on the screen, but a tragically sick man. Throughout the script, Don Birnam, the protagonist, was treated with the compassionate respect any sick man commands. Mr. Luft seems to think the bat-mouse hallucination was interjected by us, or rather by Wilder, as a prize boff. If he will glance at Charles Jackson's novel, he will find it exactly as it was played—a scene of utter terror. Incidentally, the Freudian significance of the scene is that the mouse (representing man himself) is being destroyed by the bat (the winged mouse—man with imagination; in Don Birnam's case, the frustrated writer).
Now we come to A Foreign Affair, which, according to Mr. Luft, "clearly mirrors the mark of Billy Wilder's unhealthy boulevard wit." That picture played in the great rubble pile of Berlin. It is a city which most of us in America had regarded with loathing, horror, and dread for the ten preceding years. The war is concluded, and now over its debris are swarming exuberant young Americans—young men whose desires and delights are strong in them, thank God. There's larceny in their hearts, and fun in them and health in them. Does Mr. Luft want a glimpse of the truth about those young men? No. It evokes that horrid sound of laughter. He wants an explanation of why the city had had to be utterly destroyed.
The Berlin woman, played by Marlene Dietrich, was such a complete heavy that some humanization of her character became necessary. Therefore she was given a scene which explained what made her tick. I suppose that is what makes Mr. Luft describe her as "drawn with much charm and noblesse." About the audience's reaction to her, I can only report that she ended by going to a labor camp, amid the delighted laughter of American audiences. Apparently to Mr. Luft it was a wistful and romantic exit.
In his criticism of Sunset Boulevard, Mr. Luft points out that the heroine was "exceptional." Really? Wasn't she just the average woman who once earned fifteen thousand dollars a week and had thirty million fans in love with her? Of course she was exceptional! She was also tragic. Perhaps we should have told about her with a more audible lump in our throats. We thought it effective to suppress the pitying sounds and let the audience find the pity for themselves.
Now in Mr. Luft's article comes a sentence which I have to quote and analyze. "Wilder's Hollywood is ice-cold, calculated theater, out of step with the real ideals of the film industry, which is still bubbling over with the growing pains of vitality and youth." Is that true? Even if you block that metaphor, is it true? The exact purpose of the young girl in the picture —the sympathetic character—was to embody the ideals of the town, the passion for truth on the screen, the passion for good pictures.
Again I quote: "The picture flays some of the finest creators of the silent screen—Erich von Stroheim, Buster Keaton, H. B. Warner …." Flays them? It merely records that time, which flays us all mercilessly, has not spared them. If they had not been great, that fact would have had no dramatic significance.
To answer another charge of Mr. Luft's, certainly there was sensationalism in the ending of the picture. People like Norma Desmond fade out with a bang, not a whimper.
I come to Ace in the Hole, a picture with which I had no connection. It told the story of a ruthless heel. No one was asked to like or admire him. The story of his using the victim of an accident to rebuild his shattered career was not a pretty one, nor was it presented as what any newspaper man would do under the circumstances, but it did point up certain cynical