From Sucha to Vienna
Samuel Wilder was born on 22 June 1906 into a Polish-Jewish family in Sucha, a small town in Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and today Sucha Beskidzka in Poland. Years later in Hollywood he liked to say it was half an hour from Vienna, by telegraph. His father, Max, ran a successful cake shop at the town’s railway station that grew into a chain of station cafés; his mother, Eugenia, had once lived briefly in New York and, enchanted by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, nicknamed her son “Billie”. He changed the spelling to Billy when he reached America.
Wilder spent his early years in Kraków, and around the time of the First World War the family settled in Vienna. Instead of attending the University of Vienna, he went into journalism, writing for Viennese papers. In 1926 he interviewed the American bandleader Paul Whiteman, who liked the brash young reporter enough to take him along to Berlin.
Berlin and People on Sunday
In Berlin Wilder wrote crime and sports stories as a freelance, worked for a tabloid, and for a time made money as a taxi dancer. He was drawn to the movies and began writing screenplays. In 1930 he collaborated with other young beginners, including Robert Siodmak and Fred Zinnemann, on People on Sunday, a semi-documentary about ordinary Berliners on a day off, shot with non-professional actors on the streets of the city. It became a landmark of the realist New Objectivity movement.
Between 1929 and 1933 he worked on about a dozen German films, including the hit adaptation of Erich Kästner’s children’s novel Emil and the Detectives (1931). Then Hitler came to power. The day after the Reichstag fire in February 1933, Wilder sold what he had and took a train to Paris, as he later put it, it seemed the wise thing for a Jew to do. In France he co-directed his first film, Mauvaise Graine (1934).
A refugee in Hollywood
Wilder reached Hollywood in 1934 speaking almost no English; he learned it, he said, by listening to the radio. His six-month visitor’s permit ran out, and he had to wait in Mexico for an immigration visa before he could re-enter the United States, an episode he later worked into the film Hold Back the Dawn (1941). He became an American citizen in 1939.
His breakthrough came through a partnership with the writer Charles Brackett, which lasted from 1938 to 1950. With Walter Reisch they wrote Ninotchka (1939) for the director Ernst Lubitsch, another Jewish émigré and Wilder’s idol; sold with the slogan “Garbo Laughs!”, it earned Wilder his first Academy Award nomination. Ball of Fire followed, and in 1942 Wilder directed his first Hollywood film, the comedy The Major and the Minor, with Ginger Rogers. Brackett later described their method with rueful humour: one would suggest an idea, have it torn apart and despised, and a few days later it would turn up again, slightly changed, as Wilder’s idea.
Darkness on screen and off
Double Indemnity (1944), written with Raymond Chandler from James M. Cain’s novel, told of an insurance salesman and a married woman who plot murder for money. Considered unfilmable under Hollywood’s strict censorship code, it became a defining film noir, with its shadowy venetian-blind lighting and confessional voice-over. The next year The Lost Weekend, a harrowing portrait of an alcoholic writer, won the Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay and received the top prize at the first Cannes Film Festival in 1946.
Wilder had tried and failed to persuade his relatives to leave Europe. In 1945 he returned to Germany as an officer with the US Army’s psychological warfare division, which produced the documentary Death Mills to confront Germans with the atrocities of the camps; Wilder supervised the English-language version. While there he learned that his mother, his stepfather and his grandmother had been killed in the Holocaust. For decades he believed they had died at Auschwitz; research by his Austrian biographer Andreas Hutter, published in 2011, found that his mother, Eugenia, was murdered in 1943 at the Płaszów camp near Kraków, his stepfather, Bernard Siedlisker, at Bełżec in 1942, and his grandmother in the Nowy Targ ghetto in 1943.
Sunset Boulevard and the golden decade
Sunset Boulevard (1950), the story of a forgotten silent star and the struggling screenwriter she ensnares, was Hollywood’s most savage portrait of itself, and it won Wilder and Brackett the Oscar for Best Story and Screenplay. It was their last film together. Ace in the Hole (1951), with Kirk Douglas as a reporter who prolongs a man’s entrapment in a cave to milk the story, was too cynical for audiences of its day but is now regarded as a masterpiece about the media.
A run of hits followed: Stalag 17 (1953), Sabrina (1954), The Seven Year Itch (1955) with its famous image of Marilyn Monroe over a subway grate, and, in 1957, The Spirit of St. Louis, Love in the Afternoon and Witness for the Prosecution. Love in the Afternoon began his long partnership with the writer I. A. L. Diamond. Their Some Like It Hot (1959), in which Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis disguise themselves as women to escape the Chicago mob, was released without the censors’ seal of approval and was later ranked first on the American Film Institute’s list of the funniest American films. It ends with one of cinema’s most famous lines: “Well, nobody’s perfect.”
The Apartment and after
In The Apartment (1960) Jack Lemmon plays a lonely insurance clerk who lends his flat to his bosses for their affairs until he falls for an elevator operator played by Shirley MacLaine. Bittersweet, funny and quietly angry about the corporate world, it won five Oscars, three of them, Best Picture, Director and Screenplay, for Wilder. He directed fourteen actors to Oscar-nominated performances during his career, and was the first director to pair Lemmon with Walter Matthau, in The Fortune Cookie (1966).
Wilder believed in the primacy of the script and avoided showy camerawork that would distract from the story. His later films, One, Two, Three, Irma la Douce, Kiss Me, Stupid, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, Avanti!, The Front Page, Fedora and Buddy Buddy (1981), were uneven, and after a string of failures the studios stopped hiring him. In his old age he had hoped to film Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark as a memorial to his mother, grandmother and stepfather; he praised Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List when it was made instead. To those who denied the Holocaust, he wrote in a German newspaper, he had one question: where was his mother?
Wilder delighted in casting against type. He turned Fred MacMurray, Hollywood’s amiable nice guy, into a murderer in Double Indemnity and a philandering boss in The Apartment, drew a warm, vulnerable performance from Humphrey Bogart in Sabrina, and coaxed the silent-era legends Gloria Swanson and Erich von Stroheim out of retirement for Sunset Boulevard. His twelve Academy Award nominations for screenwriting stood as a record until 1997. Roger Ebert asked whether any director of Hollywood’s golden age had made more films that remained as fresh and entertaining.
Politics, wit and private life
Wilder was a sceptic who mocked anyone who took politics too solemnly, but he opposed the House Un-American Activities Committee and helped found the Committee for the First Amendment to support those it targeted. When the Screen Directors Guild voted by show of hands on a loyalty oath, John Huston recalled that only he and Wilder raised their hands against it. His wit was legendary and often merciless; he mocked even his own lifetime-achievement honours.
He married Judith Coppicus in 1936; they had twins in 1939, a daughter, Victoria, and a son, Vincent, who died shortly after birth, and they divorced in 1946. In 1949 he married Audrey Young, whom he had met while filming The Lost Weekend and who remained with him for the rest of his life. He assembled one of the finest private art collections in Hollywood, Picassos, Impressionists, Calder mobiles, and late in life made playful artworks of his own, exhibited in Beverly Hills in 1993.
Nobody’s perfect
Honours arrived in his last decades: the American Film Institute Life Achievement Award in 1986, the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 1988, the Kennedy Center Honors in 1990 and the National Medal of Arts in 1993. Billy Wilder died of pneumonia at his home in Beverly Hills on 27 March 2002, aged 95. The French newspaper Le Monde headlined its front-page obituary “Billy Wilder is dead. Nobody is perfect.” His gravestone at Westwood Village Memorial Park reads: “I’m a writer but then nobody’s perfect.”
Seven of his films are preserved in the US National Film Registry, and critics’ polls regularly place Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot and The Apartment among the greatest films ever made. Filmmakers from Fernando Trueba to Michel Hazanavicius have thanked him from the Oscar stage. A Jewish refugee who escaped Berlin with a suitcase, and whose mother perished in the Holocaust, gave American cinema some of its funniest, darkest and most humane films, and taught Hollywood that a comedy could tell the truth.
Sources & further reading
Billy Wilder, Wikipedia · Entertainment icons Milton Berle and Billy Wilder die, J. The Jewish News of Northern California (2002) · Why Billy Wilder wanted to make Schindler’s List, Culture.pl · Billy Wilder, Wikiquote · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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