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The heroine of a FOREIGN AFFAIR reports sadly at one point that her Iowa hometown had the lowest crime rate in the country until a boy took a blowtorch to his grandmother and the rest of his family. In double indemnity the ruthless, scheming heroine shoots the hero once, and then drops her gun, for the first time in her life halted by a genuine pang of love. The equally corrupt hero of THE FORTUNE COOKIE blows the insurance fraud concocted by his brother-in-law when he cannot resist rising from his wheelchair to strike the racist detective who has been maligning his black friend.

After more than forty years working in the movies, Billy Wilder may finally be awarded the title of auteur. In Andrew Sarris' original Pantheon, he ranked very low- in that most despised category, "Less than Meets the Eye." Sarris and many of the other cultists seem to have warmed to Wilder recently. Among the auteur critics the reviews of the private life of Sherlock holmes were surprisingly enthusiastic. Or maybe not so surprising: Sarris and Company have a weakness for the films of old men. Wilder is 65 now, and SHERLOCK HOLMES is in a mellow, autumnal mood, unusual for Wilder, who has always been noted for his cynicism and astringency. Other aging, once-maligned directors, like Elia Kazan and David Lean, have been treated more respectfully in the last couple of years; the old-fashioned qualities of their recent films have been taken as signs of a new maturity.

The irony in the late "discovery" of Wilder is that he is one of the few American directors whose films consistently reveal a distinctive, highly personal point of view. For one thing, Wilder is a writer-director who has regularly been in control of his projects from the script stage on. Among the films produced during the assembly line years of Hollywood, Wilder's stand out because it is not necessary to perform conjuring tricks to identify his personality.

Some people, of course, find his personality all too obtrusive. Wilder's work, like the work of most of his contemporaries, is compromised; in his case, though, the compromises have been condemned with unusual severity. The common critical view of Wilder-much too simple a view, I believe-is that he is a cynic who repeatedly tempers the harshness of his vision in deference to the box office. According to Sarris, "Billy Wilder is too cynical to believe even his own cynicism."' John Simon elaborates: Put it this way. Mr. Wilder tells us we are all fools and rogues. That is cynical. He sugarcoats this with laughs and miraculous conversions in which he himself does not believe. That is more cynical yet . . . But whereas cynicism undisguised is a bitter pill that has curative value, cynicism cynically sugarcoated, and so thickly as to nullify the medication, has no therapeutic, moral, or artistic validity.2 Wilder himself has declared many times that he makes films with appeal for large audiences. He explained his dilemma: "The question is whether you have a right to get people into the theater, and they expect a cocktail and they get a shot of acid. People don't want to hear that they stink."3

Wilder's tendency to caricature is one way of diluting the acid. But even at its most frivolous, this caricature cannot help exposing Wilder's misanthropic temperament. In the seven year itch a comic strip psychiatrist arrives early for an appointment and explains impassively, "My 3:00 patient jumped out of the window during his session, and I've been 15 minutes ahead of schedule ever since." Only a cynic could toss off a joke like that with such casual good humor, but in this case the character is so broadly overplayed that we don't have to take the satire on psychoanalysis seriously. Here is a different kind of cynical joke: The heroine of a FOREIGN AFFAIR reports sadly at one point that her Iowa hometown had the lowest crime rate in the country until a boy took a blowtorch to his grandmother and the rest of his family. We may laugh at that line, but part of the laughter sticks in our throats. The cool, brutal attack on the deceptive cleanliness of the golden American farmlands incriminates the "folks" in the audience. In dealing with Wilder, it is important to distinguish between such abrasive, disturbing black satire and more comfortable sick jokes-gag lines that reveal a cynical frame of mind without effectively or intelligently satirizing anything.

Wilder's eleventh hour conversions are even more troublesome compromises. In double indemnity the ruthless, scheming heroine shoots the hero once, and then drops her gun, for the first time in her life halted by a genuine pang of love. In sunset BOULEVARD the weak, cynical, opportunistic scriptwriter Joe Gillis performs a last honorable gesture-he calls his girlfriend to Norma Desmond's mansion, tells her of his sordid liaison with the older woman, sends her back to her honest fiance, and walks out on Norma, taking only the clothes he came in. ACE IN THE HOLE'S megalomaniac newspaperman Tatum, after the death of the man in the cave, experiences a surprising revulsion from what he has done, a complete change of heart. The opportunist-schlemiel of THE APARTMENT suddenly decides that he can no longer contribute to office immorality; he turns in his key to the executive washroom and rushes home in time for a final clinch with the heroine. The equally corrupt hero of THE FORTUNE COOKIE blows the insurance fraud concocted by his brother-in-law when he cannot resist rising from his wheelchair to strike the racist detective who has been maligning his black friend.

Certainly such conversions are possible. But Wilder is rarely successful at dramatizing them. His commitment seems to be to the cynical attitude expressed through the first three-fourths of these films; the morally uplifting conclusions are played, almost invariably, without conviction. It may well be that the rigid Production Code imposed some of these compromises. But to agree with John Simon that because of these failures, Wilder must be labelled "a filmmaker with false or no morality," is to put the mattertoo simply. The more one considers Wilder's films, the more apparent it becomes that the confusions and contradictions in his work are not always simple compromises, and they are motivated by something more than a worship of the box office. Wilder's sensibility is far more complex than most people have been willing to grant. For a famous cynic he has surprisingly ambivalent feelings about innocence and corruption.

Born in 1906 in Vienna, Wilder first worked as a sports reporter there, them moved to Berlin and got a job as crime reporter for Nachtausgabe, one of the city's largest newspapers. It has been noted that his technique as a filmmaker resembles that of a crime reporter. He is drawn, with tabloid reporter's instinct, to expose- the dilemma of the alcoholic, the corruptions of postwar Berlin, the psychopathic reality behind Hollywood's glamorous facade, the callousness of the press, malpractices in big business and law. But Wilder's exposés are not composed with journalistic objectivity: as Douglas McVay has observed, Wilder's "key pictures evince a Germanic predilection for misery and misdeed, tinged by 'the fascination of the abomination.' It is this hint of fascination which separates him from the disinterested Mervyn LeRoy tradition of crusading Hollywood journalism, aimed simply to denounce and reform."4 And this is why Wilder's films are so much more lively-and morally ambiguous-than the portentous "social problem" film that has been Hollywood's curse over the years. THE LOST WEEKEND is Wilder's only film that fits into the Mervyn LeRoy tradition-a rather dated, academic dissection of a weighty problem; even here, though, Ray Milland's undeniable charm adds a measure of complexity to the moral tract. Wilder is not ordinarily committed to message moviemaking; he wants to reveal the rottenness hidden beneath the placid surface of contemporary society, but he is clearly tantalized by the rottenness if it is on a daring enough scale.

At the same time, Wilder's films are skeptical about the value of exposure even when the corruption to be exposed is truly deplorable. Wilder has something of the muckraker in him, but it may not be going too far to see a measure of self-irony in the harsh portrait of the investigator figures who populate his films. In a FOREIGN AFFAIR Wilder reserves more of his scorn for investigating Congresswoman Frost than for the corrupt American army in Berlin. Her priggishness is even less excusable than the army's decadence. In THE FORTUNE COOKIE the private detective hired by the insurance company to uncover Whiplash Willie's fraud is the most repulsive character in the film, far slimier than shyster Willie himself. It is the detective, with his bugging devices and hidden cameras, poking genially into the most intimate activities and conversations, who represents to Wilder the most frightful possibilities of our age.

Even when the investigators are, on the surface, more sympathetic characters, there is a disturbing undercurrent of criticism. Edward G. Robinson's Keyes in DOUBLE INDEMNITY would seem to be the very model of an investigator- completely honest, dedicated, intelligent, compassionate. Yet when he tells Walter Neff that he lost the one woman he loved because he could not help searching into her past and digging up some compromising experiences, we see that this man, for all of his integrity, or because of it, is doomed to complete isolation. All of Wilder's investigators-Charles Laughton's defense attorney in WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION, Maurice Chevalier's private detective in love in the afternoon- are solitary figures. And the main impulse behind THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES is to examine the mythical detective from a more skeptical and disillusioned point of view.

In his introduction to a retrospective of Wilder's films at the Museum of Modern Art in 1964, Curator Richard Griffith called Wilder "the most precise, indeed relentless, chronicler of the postwar American scene, in shade as well as light, the motion pictures have produced." In LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON Ariane tries to fathom the cool American playboy: "They're strange people, Americans. When they're very young they have their teeth straightened, their tonsils taken out, vitamins pumped into them. They're mechanized, dehumanized." Wilder himself has said, "We are a nation of hecklers, the most hard-boiled, undisciplined people in the world. First our heroes smack their girls' faces with grapefruit, then they kick mothers in wheelchairs downstairs and now they slap their lady loves with wet towels. How much farther can we go?"5 This perversion of feeling- is the most striking quality of his Americans. Double indemnity has some of the best dialogue in American movies; the wisecracks Walter Neff and Phyllis Dietrichson exchange are more than just clever lines- they capture the mechanical, hard-edged quality of mating rituals in America (this 25 years before CARNAL KNOWLEDGE). Love is indistinguishable from money, and wooing is a form of gamesmanship. In the script here is the way Walter describes the beginning of his relationship with Phyllis: "She liked me. I could feel that. The way you feel when the cards are falling right for you, with a nice little pile of blue and yellow chips in the middle of the table."

Wilder is especially pitiless in chronicling the cruelties of the American mob. In a bar the hero of THE LOST WEEKEND is caught trying to steal a girl's purse to get money for a drink; as he slinks outside, embarrassed and miserable, the people sing after him, "Somebody stole my purse, somebody stole my purse." At the end of SUNSET BOULEVARD reporters and photographers and bystanders- "the kind of crowd that turns out for the opening of one of those new supermarkets"- swarm over the scene of a tragedy, unconcerned about anything more than cheap sensations, unwilling to attempt compassion for Norma Desmond or what her baroque world represents. Hedda Hopper, playing herself with vile relish, and obviously quite unaware of how Wilder was using her, epitomizes the most ghastly qualities of the hard-boiled American.

The critique is extended even further in ACE IN THE HOLE. The reporter Chuck Tatum, another extreme representative of Wilder's hard-boiled American, deliberately delays the rescue of Leo Miñosa, prolongs his suffering- and eventually causes his death- in the effort to secure a better story. Yet even here Wilder reserves his most searing contempt for the crowd of sensation-seekers who gather round the cave. His images of the anonymous Americans who set up a ferris wheel in the disaster area, suck ice cream cones, buy mementoes, sing ditties, and take tours around the cave where a man is fighting for his life, visualize the unfeeling American mob at its most frightening. Because of his merciless attack on the audience, ACE IN THE HOLE was one of Wilder's biggest box office flops, and it discouraged him from anything so bitter or personal for many years. The reason Wilder hates the mob more than he hates Tatum is that the mob, completely torpid and stupid, merely feeds impassively, ravenously on disaster, while Tatum, monster that he is, creates the disaster. Wilder's distinction between genuine, aggressive evil and lethargy is one that has appealed to other modern artists; like them Wilder prefers a towering figure of evil to the docile, insect-like herd of average Americans. The demonic Tatum has, at least, energy, audacity, true madness.

To say that Wilder is an angry critic of American hecklers is only part of the truth. Wilder is always drawn to the hard-boiled, brash, vulgar quality of his Americans as long as they have the requisite energy and style. Hedda Hopper may be a hard-boiled heckler, but so is James Cagney's Coca Cola genius in one two three- and Cagney's exuberance overwhelms Wilder, as it overwhelms all the other characters in the film. Marilyn Monroe, in THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH and SOME LIKE IT HOT, represents American vulgarity carried to an extreme, yet Wilder finds her irresistible. The character she plays in THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH, an "actress" in toothpaste commercials, says earnestly to the hero, "Every time I show my teeth on television more people see me than ever saw Sarah Bernhardt. It's something to think about, isn't it?" It is indeed something to think about; that line crystallizes Wilder's disenchanted vision of today's world, dominated by Americans with "kissing sweet" toothpaste grins, who haven't the slightest shred of culture or refinement of elegance. But another director would be more bitter about that recognition. Wilder cannot suppress a sneaking sense of wonder at Monroe's blissful obliviousness to the possibility of a more graceful way of life. Monroe's best performances are in Wilder's films because he simultaneously mocks and adores her peculiarly American qualities of crude, wide-eyed, thoroughly innocent rambunctiousness and sexiness.

Jack Lemmon is her male counterpart-the shnook par excellence, pushy, gross, completely guileless and sincere-and he has been Wilder's favorite actor in recent years. The teaming of Lemmon and Monroe in SOME LIKE IT HOT-the two great big dumb innocents, throwing themselves at life with verve and abandon- produced Wilder's best comedy, and one of the best film comedies since the Second World War. If DOUBLE INDEMNITY and ACE IN THE HOLE are hate letters to America, SOME LIKE IT HOT is Wilder's tribute to American naivete. The details are frozen in a comic-mythical mosaic of nineteen-twenties high style- a world of gangsters and bathing beauties, girls who carry flasks of gin in their garters, yachtsmen who dance the tango with a flower between their teeth. Although the film is in black and white and modest in scope, it seems one of the fullest recreations of the twenties because it has such obvious affection for the American past. The sense of outrageous daring is what draws Wilder to the period; he understands how that quality of recklessness can be coarsened, but in SOME LIKE IT HOT he treats American vulgarity with sympathy and respect. He discovers the exuberance and innocence that underlie the brutality he despises in contemporary Americans.

Several of Wilder's films-NINOTCHKA, HOLD BACK THE DAWN, THE EMPEROR WALTZ, A FOREIGN AFFAIR, LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON, ONE TWO THREE- concern the confrontation between Americans and Europeans. Wilder has been interested in the American ambassador abroad- Bing Crosby's traveling victrola salesman in the court of Franz Joseph (THE EMPEROR WALTZ), Jean Arthur's fanatical reforming Congresswoman in postwar Berlin (A FOREIGN AFFAIR), Gary Cooper's Pepsi Cola playboy hiring gypsies for his amours at the Ritz (LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON), Cagney's Coca Cola magnate (ONE TWO THREE). All of them are hard, aggressive, smacking of egotism and self-righteousness, completely without tenderness, but driven by resilient, irrepressible energy.

The opening shot of THE EMPEROR WALTZ-otherwise a very silly movie-is unforgettable: Bing Crosby, flashily dressed, wearing earmuffs, crashes through a window and into the elegant Viennese ballroom where the nobility are waltzing. His brazen entry onto the dance floor, flaunting his bad manners gleefully, is a classic Wilderian image of the innocent American bursting in on cultivated aristocrats and appropriating all delicacy of feeling to his own hardsell approach. Wilder hates him and loves him. As the Emperor tells him later, "You Americans are simpler, you are stronger. Ultimately the world will be yours." And Crosby responds, without blinking an eyebrow, with ferocious vehemence, "You bet it will." The Emperor may have grace and gentility, but Crosby has an astounding vitality- like Cagney's in ONE TWO THREE- that Wilder cannot help but acknowledge.

The encounter of American and European in Wilder's films is only a specific version of the more general drama that obsesses him- the confrontation of innocence and experience. The nature of innocence is one of his most persistent subjects. NINOTCHKA, HOLD BACK THE DAWN, A FOREIGN AFFAIR, LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON, KISS ME STUPID, THE FORTUNE COOKIE, even ONE TWO THREE and IRMA LA DOUCE in their farcical way, are stories of disillusionment, loss of innocence. In the more serious films the innocents are doomed. Leo in ACE IN THE HOLE dies a victim of a monstrous hoax, believing to the end in the good faith of newspaperman Tatum. Norma Desmond, the silent film star isolated from the wisecracking new Hollywood factory, is carted off to the madhouse because she cannot reconcile herself to life in a world of pettiness and compromise.

Wilder does not believe that innocence can survive unscathed. He does not believe that faith and trust are a reasonable basis for human relationships. His films chronicle the corruption of innocents, the fall from purity. But considering Wilder's reputation as a cynic, we would expect more ruthless mockery of the innocents. Instead they are treated with affection, even admiration. Wilder's ambivalence toward innocence is particularly obvious in a FOREIGN AFFAIR, not one of his very best movies, but one of his most provocative and revealing, and I would like to discuss it in more detail. It contains, in microcosm, most of his important themes, and it suggests the complexity of his temperament more obviously than some of his better-known films.

The premise of a foreign affair is striking for a 1948 movie: A group of Congressmen, including a puritanical Clare Booth Luce-like Congresswoman from Iowa (Jean Arthur), arrive in postwar Berlin (the film includes real footage of the bombed-out city) to investigate the morale of American troops stationed there. The Congresswoman soon learns that the troops are indeed trading on the black market and "fraternizing" with German women, and she finds a former Nazi grande dame (Marlene Dietrich) now singing in a sleazy nightclub for the entertainment of the troops. Rumor has it that the singer is the mistress of an American officer. The Congresswoman becomes obsessed with discovering him; she wants to make an example of him, and use him to illustrate her charges of decadence within the Army. The Captain from Iowa (John Lund) whom she chooses to help her with her investigation turns out to be the very officer protecting the German woman.

The movie was attacked violently at the time of its release for its tastelessness in dealing with a serious subject- a charge that has often been levelled at Wilder's work. Herbert G. Luft, objecting to Wilder's denigration of America, looked back on A FOREIGN AFFAIR as one of his most corrupt films: 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 . . . The Nazis are seen as double-crossers, yet drawn with much charm and noblesse, living in an atmosphere of comparative ease, with a romantic facade covering up a decade of mass murders . . . Our occupation forces appear undisciplined and ill-behaved.6

Twenty years later these words sound like a recommendation; one of the most daring, refreshing, and commendable things about a foreign affair is that it complicates the clearcut moral distinctions of World War II movies and presents ex-Nazis as human beings and American soldiers as corrupt opportunists. The GIs we see are quite willing to capitalize on the desperation of the Germans; they trade cigarettes for stockings at the Brandenburg Gate, buy German girls with candy bars. Our hero Captain Pringle cynically sells the birthday cake that the Congresswoman has brought him from his sweetheart in Iowa to a hungry German woman, in return for a mattress for his mistress. The Berlin that Congresswoman Frost comes to investigate is destitute and completely disillusioned. It is defined brilliantly in Frederick Hollander's three nightclub songs for Dietrich, which imply the war-weary, disenchanted mood of a devastated Europe. As Dietrich sings in the superbly cynical "Black Market," the Germans pay the price of defeat: They barter with the Americans as they must, "K rations for compassion . . . chewing gum for kisses ... I'm selling out, take all I've got-ambitions, convictions ..."

Yet the film itself is not completely cynical about postwar Berlin. Given the desperation of the environment, a foreign affair records the endurance of emotion, of romance. When Pringle comes to visit Erika (Dietrich), cheerfully whistling "Isn't It Romantic?" as he approaches a ravaged ruin of a house, the disparity between the desolate setting and the soldier's buoyancy gives the scene an original flavor; the tart mixture of moods-savage irony and genuine romanticism-is arresting. And there are similar images later-another soldier carrying flowers to his lady love as he bounces along through the ruins, a German girl wheeling a baby carriage with two American flags defiantly announcing the nationality of the father.

By ignoring the realities of life in Berlin, it is Congresswoman Frost who seems anti-human. Wilder mocks her more than he mocks the fraternizing Americans or the world-weary Germans. For they are only trying to make the most of a bad situation. They may be cynical, corrupt, ruthless, but they have, at least, recognized the nature of their world, and they have no illusions (as Dietrich sings, her illusions, "slightly used, second hand," are for sale), no false assumptions of moral superiority. Congresswoman Frost has come to Berlin to "fumigate with all the insecticides we have at our disposal." She is a grotesque caricature of the crusading American abroad-in glasses and braids, at one moment singing "Iowa" with fists clenched-and she represents our ambassadors at their most sanctimonious. If the film goes so far as to make ex-Nazis sympathetic, that is to highlight-with stinging irony-the ugliness of the self-righteous American. The gradual erosion of the Congresswoman's rigorous, life-denying moral standards is the substance of the film.

When she expresses outrage that the mistress of former Nazi leaders is thriving in postwar Berlin, Captain Pringle asks coolly, "Should we shave her head?" And in the film's most eloquent scene Pringle attacks her for expecting him to "stand on what used to be a corner of what used to be a street, with an open sample case of assorted freedoms." During the war, he tells her angrily, the soldiers couldn't perform enough miracles to please the inexorable judges at home, but now that the war is over, the same judges want the soldiers whom they pushed into hysteria to turn completely abstinent. The film's criticism of American moralizing is bolder and more intelligent than in most films today.

It is at this point-about halfway through the film-that it begins to change direction and get into serious trouble. Pringle pretends to fall in love with the Congresswoman in order to take her mind off her investigation and hustle her quickly back to Washington so that he can return to his fraulein in peace. But inexplicably, as the game is being played quite cynically, he really begins to fall in love with her. The characterizations fall apart. After presenting Erika with great-if precarious-charm and eroticism, Wilder seems to adopt the Congresswoman's harsh moral judgment of her depravity. She is openly sympathetic in one scene, explaining with unusual honesty how the horror of war has made self-preservation her only instinct, but then evilly scheming in the next, lying to the Congresswoman that Pringle constantly mocked her homely Iowa looks. She is finally shipped off to a labor camp at the end of the film, but we are left in some doubt as to her future when she throws a seductive wink at the guards who are to see to her imprisonment. Wilder cannot quite abandon such a bewitching character to her fate without a hint of a possible reprieve.

What happens to Congresswoman Frost is even less convincing. As Pringle begins to fall in love with her, she begins to thaw a little. She buys a sexy evening dress on the black market, gets drunk at Erika's nightclub, is arrested during the police raid of the club and even lets Erika bribe a guard so that she will not have to face the newspapers. At this point Erika takes her home and tells her the truth about her relationship with Pringle. It is the final blow. The Congresswoman is no longer an iron-chested ambassador; she has become a heartbroken woman. As Erika says, pointedly, "Four hours ago you were in a position to have him court martialled and me sent to a labor camp. Now you're one of us." The Congresswoman gives up her investigation and is about to return to Washington when a happy reconciliation solves all problems.

We can understand and respect what Wilder is attempting here-an insistence that the Congresswoman take part in the corruption around her before she can become fully human-but he hasn't brought it off. The Congresswoman's transformation is too superficial. The examples of her corruption (buying the dress on the black market, or keeping her identity a secret when she is arrested) are such mild transgressions that we can't feel she has gained a very startling new insight into herself or the world of second-hand illusions. And although the last scene - in which she aggressively chases Pringle around the deserted nightclub, in an exact reversal of their roles earlier in the film-is a clever effort to make the happy ending less facile, it's not believable; it's an ingenious bit of mechanical comic business, but it has no dramatic or emotional validity. We haven't been convinced that anyone as puritanical as the Congresswoman could become quite so abandoned, quite so casual about chasing a man who has been living with a former Nazi. A less cynical director than Wilder would have rigged the ending somewhat differently-the emphasis would have been on Pringle repenting his dissolution and embracing American wholesomeness. Wilder puts his emphasis on the Congresswoman repenting her goodness and purity. He complicates the conventional happy ending by demanding that the virtuous American become more corrupt and wanton before she can win the hero. Perhaps Jean Arthur simply cannot bring off that kind of transformation. Or perhaps her caricature is too rigid to begin with; it's inconceivable that anyone could fall in love with her unless her change of heart were more like lobotomy.

Wilder is really torn both ways-committed to the relevance and even humanity of a cynical view of the world, and yet intrigued, charmed in spite of himself, by innocence as aggressive as the Congresswoman's. Wilder is rather like his hero Pringle, with the corrupt, disillusioned, attractively selfish and amoral Dietrich waiting in one bedroom, and the fiercely, self-righteously pure and artless Arthur waiting, with fists clenched, in the other. In this particular film there wouldn't seem to be much of a contest. But the fact that Wilder tries to manufacture one suggests that he finds the single-minded honesty of the innocent American irresistibly compelling. There is nothing human or appealing about her in a FOREIGN AFFAIR-and this is a major flaw, for it makes the love story outrageous and even slightly unpleasant- but Wilder's interest in the character sheds light on a recurring ambivalence in his work.

With Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina and LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON Wilder was able to present the appeal of innocence with more conviction. And even Olivia de Havilland in HOLD BACK THE DAWN creates a believable portrait of innocence. HOLD BACK THE DAWN, directed by Mitchell Leisen from a Wilder-Brackett script, has a very Wilderian situation: A Continental gigolo has left Europe at the outbreak of the war and has come to Mexico on his way to America. But he finds that the immigration quotas prevent him from entering the United States. The only solution is to marry an American woman, and he sets out to trap an innocent, gullible schoolteacher who has come to Mexico for a day. He marries her, declares his undying love, and ships her home to make the necessary arrangements, all the while planning to get a quick divorce as soon as he is in America. He spends his wedding night with an old girlfriend from Europe. Eventually, as in a FOREIGN AFFAIR, he does begin to fall sincerely in love with the schoolteacher when he takes her on a Mexican honeymoon; soon afterwards, she learns of his plot. At this moment she surprises us. She lies for him to the immigration official so that he will be able to enter the United States, and she admits ruefully that it was her own vanity that persuaded her a man she had only known a day might be in love with her. Wilder taunts the character for her naivete, but he also appreciates her strength and dignity in facing an ugly betrayal; in this case, under Leisen's sensitive direction, the familiar Wilder innocent really comes to life.

The clearest indication of Wilder's conflicting feelings about innocence is the nature of love in his films. There are never, in Wilder, two completely innocent lovers. Even when he deals with teenagers, in ONE TWO THREE, he is careful to establish that Scarlett has been engaged several times before she marries Otto. The most common romantic situation in a Wilder film is one character, usually virgin, attracted to another character who is anything but virgin; the prim encyclopedist and the nightclub singer in BALL OF FIRE; the gigolo and the school-teacher in HOLD BACK THE DAWN, the Congresswoman and the fraternizing American officer in A FOREIGN AFFAIR; Sabrina and the much-married David Larrabee; Ariane and one of the most notorious playboys of the Western world in LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON; the office patsy and the mistress of a married man in the apartment; the uncorrupted policeman and the prostitute in IRMA LA DOUCE.

Not many filmmakers would have imagined a comic conclusion to the bizarre situation in LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON-a teenage girl living happily ever after with a 50-year-old millionaire who has collected women for a generation. In fact, the happy ending is not convincing, and Wilder glosses much too quickly over the perversities that would have to exist in any such relationship. But he does believe strongly in the mutual attraction of innocent and roue. The innocents in Wilder's films are never attracted to other innocents, always to people who have been married or have had eventful sexual pasts; surely this is Wilder's comment on the impossibility of innocence's survival and the irresistible pull of corruption. But there is a pull in the other direction too-the most worldly characters hanker for the virgins. Wilder helplessly confesses that for all the weary cynics of his disillusioned world, the appeal of innocence (which may be partly an urge to corrupt that innocence) is indestructible.

There are some interesting psychological implications to Wilder's persistent pairing of innocents and roues. Freud's famous paper, "A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men," explained this sort of love relationship, the "love of a harlot" which always demands an "injured third party"-as an attempt to fulfill the oedipal fantasy, in which the innocent child wins the experienced, tainted mother from the father. When an innocent woman is attracted to an experienced man, the oedipal drama is from the daughter's perspective instead of the son's. And it is striking how often Wilder's films actually deal with a relationship of young man or woman and aged lover. Perhaps there is a simple autobiographical explanation: On first coming to Berlin from Vienna, Wilder reports, "I danced as a gigolo for awhile in the Eden Hotel, and at the Adlon I served as a teatime partner for lonely old ladies."7 The hero of HOLD BACK THE DAWN worked in an almost identical situation before the war forced him to leave Europe. The relationship of Joe Gillis and Norma Desmond in SUNSET BOULEVARD is Wilder's most famous study of the relationship of a young man and an older woman. But it has not been observed that in witness for the prosecution the relationship of the young fortune-hunter, Tyrone Power, to Mrs. French, the wealthy widow whom he eventually murders, is an almost identical, cut-rate version of the same parasitic oedipal relationship- again motivated by greed and pity, again taking place in a house filled with mementoes of another era (in WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION the "lovers" listen to Gilbert and Sullivan records together), again ending in violence.

Several other films examine the relationships of young women to older men. In THE MAJOR AND THE MINOR, a sort of antecedent of LOLITA, Ginger Rogers is only impersonating a twelve-year-old girl, but the intense relationship that develops between her and Ray Milland is a comically disguised version of a quite real and explosive psychological situation. Milland tells her at one point that when he was twelve he danced with his 40-year-old dancing teacher, kissed her on the lips, and fainted: "Seems I'm always off schedule 20 or 30 years." Phyllis Dietrichson in DOUBLE INDEMNITY is married to a man almost twice her age. Sabrina is in love with an older man, and eventually marries his brother, who is several years older yet; in 1954 a pairing of Humphrey Bogart and Audrey Hepburn could not help but seem a pairing of father and daughter. And this is true, too, of the relationship between Hepburn and Gary Cooper in LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON. I could even stretch my point by noting that it is only after the hero of IRMA LA DOUCE has disguised himself as the 50-year-old Lord X that he is able to impregnate Irma.

But even where the relationships are between two people of the same age, they are relationships between playboys, prostitutes, promiscuous (or married) men or women on the one hand, and characters who are relatively innocent or unattached; in Freudian terms, such a relationship is always a euphemism for an oedipal relationship. Since these relationships are taboo in Wilder's society, it is not suprising that many of them end in death, or, in the comic films, with some form of catastrophe that precedes the reconciliation. Ninotchka, Congresswoman Frost, Ariane in LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON endure a great deal of suffering before they win their men. The heroine of HOLD BACK THE DAWN even suffers a near-fatal automobile accident after learning that she has been married to a gigolo. Sabrina and the heroine of THE APARTMENT attempt suicide before they are eligible for marital bliss. (In all these films the naive, well-meaning woman is the one who suffers- the reflection of a rather misogynistic male fantasy that holds the woman responsible for the breaking of sexual taboos; somehow she is always guilty-even when she is innocent.)

It is impossible to ignore how often Wilder deals with secretly oedipal relationships, and it may not be surprising that homosexuality plays a furtive role in a number of his films. Psychoanalysis argues that when the only heterosexual relationship desired is incestuous, the whole idea of heterosexuality becomes threatening. There is a distrust of love, often of women in Wilder's films that leads to a withdrawal into idealized homoerotic experiences. The all-male barracks camaraderie of STALAG 17 would be an obvious example, the transvestitism of SOME LIKE IT HOT just as obvious in a somewhat different way. Wilder eliminated the explicit homosexuality that motivated Don Birnam's alcoholism in the novel of THE LOST WEEKEND, but some people have felt that in the film the close, tense relationship of Don and his brother Wick still has homoerotic overtones. The relationship of Neff and Keyes, the two insurance investigators in DOUBLE INDEMNITY, certainly has. Keyes has rejected women, and in the course of the film Neff too comes to see the treachery of women; at the end the flickerings of tenderness between them-as Keyes lights Neff's cigarette-are the only moments of warmth in the film. ("The guy you wanted was too close-right across the desk," Neff tells Keyes. "Closer than that," Keyes replies.) At the end of THE FORTUNE COOKIE the homosexual overtones seem quite blatant, though they were probably not intentional. Having recognized his wife fortheunsalvageable bitch that she is, the hero goes out to search for the wronged Negro football player at the empty Cleveland stadium. He finds him despondent but is able to cheer him up with a show of affection, and then the two of them begin playing touch football, two adolescent boys, safe from the destructiveness of women, manhandling each other with awkward love pats.

When Wilder announced that he was planning a film called THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, it sounded like an interesting vehicle to express some of his major obsessions. Wilder himself called Holmes a misogynist, and noted that there was something curious about the relationship of Holmes and Watson. The first third of SHERLOCK HOLMES toys with these questions; the narrator speculates about Holmes' attitude toward women, and in the episode with the Russian ballerina the possibility of homosexuality is explicitly raised. When Holmes "confesses" his homosexuality to the ballerina, it is presumably meant as a joke, but an uneasy, ambiguous joke that- for both Holmes and Watson- seems a little close for comfort. Unfortunately, the film then moves off in other directions; the bulk of it concerns just another one of Holmes' professional casesthough one that he failed to solve. The title is misleading; the film isn't really about Holmes' private life at all. Wilder is too fascinated with Holmes' famous powers of deduction to abandon the detective's public image. In any case he backs way from the more disturbing aspects of the story he had hoped to tell.

Wilder's characters are denied the standard Hollywood version of love. In his films other motives stir the characters with a force love cannot begin to match- alcoholism in THE LOST WEEKEND, greed in double indemnity and THE FORTUNE COOKIE, power in ACE IN THE HOLE, fame in SUNSET BOULEVARD, family reputation in SABRINA. These are the motives that stimulate people into action-and also, interestingly enough, to fall in love. In other movies love is the characters' ultimate goal, the end toward which all other efforts lead. In Wilder's disenchanted films love is the means to something else. There is almost always another incentive for beginning a "love" relationship.

In THE LOST WEEKEND Don meets Helen at an opera performance because she, by mistake, has picked up his coat check, and there is a bottle of liquor in the coat pocket. When they begin talking, she invites him to a party, and he goes with her, not because his heart is pounding mysteriously, but because it is a cocktail party and he has accidentally broken his last bottle. In a FOREIGN AFFAIR Captain Pringle pursues the Congresswoman in order to save his name, to insure that she will halt her search for the officer disgracing the army. The gigolo woos and marries the schoolteacher in HOLD BACK THE DAWN because he is living in a slum of a border town and is desperate for American citizenship. The elder brother Larrabee begins his courtship of Sabrina to divert her from marrying his younger brother and thus ruining the family name. Frau von Hoffmannstahl's dalliance with Sherlock Holmes is a necessary part of her espionage plot. In DOUBLE INDEMNITY AND THE FORTUNE COOKIE love has become indistinguishable from greed. Phyllis Dietrichson shrewdly feigns love for Walter Neff so that he will become the necessary partner in her scheme to murder her husband and inherit the insurance money; later she uses the same tactics on her stepdaughter's boyfriend Nino. In the FORTUNE COOKIE Whiplash Willie tries to persuade Hinckle to go along with the insurance fraud by arguing that the fortune is sure to bring his ex-wife back to him; Hinckle agrees, and apparently finds nothing unnatural in his brother-in-law's confusion of money and love.

Yet this feigned love almost always turns into real love-Captain Pringle really falls in love with the icy Congresswoman, gigolo falls in love with school-teacher. Even in DOUBLE INDEMNITY, Phyllis hesitates for a fatal instant before she can pull the trigger on her lover. Deception seems to be the only way fo real feeling; a Wilder character rarely arrives at love except by first pretending it. It is usually said of Wilder that the blossoming of make-believe into real love in his films is his concession to the box office. But more is involved. Wilder is declaring his faith: Only a recognition of your own vulnerability and the deceptions practiced by people around you is a reasonable foundation for affection or emotion. Deception is, in some twisted way, the one truthful, respectable act in the Wilder universe.

Perhaps this can help to explain why THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES seems uncharacteristically mellow and romantic. The attraction of Holmes and Frau von Hoffmannstahl is an unlikely one. Holmes, a cynic and a misogynist, is thoroughly suspicious of women. The German woman is only playing at romantic vulnerability for her own diabolical purposes. Yet the two develop a genuine, reticent affection for each other that is curiously touching. Once again, real feeling grows out of deception and distrust. Perhaps the fact that both lovers are so disenchanted gives Wilder an unusual sympathy for them; in any case this is one of his most successful-because most subtle-dramatizations of the transformation of an exploitative relationship into a romantic one.

The heroes of Wilder's films are the great deceivers. He is fascinated by a good performance. His best comedies-MIDNIGHT (in which Claudette Colbert, a down-and-out singer, impersonates a countess to help a man win back his wife), SOME LIKE IT HOT, ONE TWO THREE-are all concerned with outrageous impersonations. So are the MAJOR AND THE MINOR, FIVE GRAVES TO CAIRO, DOUBLE INDEMNITY, ACE IN THE HOLE, WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION, LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON, IRMA LA DOUCE, KISS ME STUPID, THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES. And the bolder the deception, the more Wilder likes it. He cannot help presenting the heel-heroes of ace in the hole and the fortune cookie more sympathetically than the people gulled by their schemes. Chuck Tatum's scheme is, after all, on a grand scale, and brilliantly executed; he turns a routine accident into a "human interest" suspense saga that draws publicity and crowds from all over the nation. Whiplash Willie in THE FORTUNE COOKIE is almost as audacious. Taking on a professional football team and the city of Cleveland and almost making his phony claim stick is a creative achievement of real substance. Another director would condemn the dishonesty and heartlessness of it all; Wilder pays tribute to the imagination behind the swindle.

ACE IN THE HOLE, though, goes further tha n the other films, because more than any of them, it does consider the limitations of deception even while admiring the ingenuity of Tatum's hoax. This is why it seems Wilder's angriest and most complex film. It is undeniably exciting to see someone concoct a brilliant plot and fool most of the world; part of us wants to see Tatum succeed. But when the scheme is at the expense of a man's life, we are caught up short; the exhilaration of the grand deception suddenly turns sour. Tatum's guilt feelings may not be entirely believable in the film, but our own mixed response-fascination at the game, yet horror at the player's casualness about the stakes involved-proves that Wilder has been successful in conducting his most effective critique of the only way of life he admires. The film implicates us.

Deception, of course, is only another word for art. It is the artfulness in the schemes of Tatum, Phyllis Dietrichson, Whiplash Willie that clearly arrests Wilder's attention. John Simon attacks the irresponsibility of Wilder's famous line in one two three, "Look at it this way, kid: any world that can produce the Taj Mahal, William Shakespeare, and striped toothpaste, can't be all bad," by arguing: "Now, it is all right to laugh at striped toothpaste, or us, or even Shakespeare, provided there is somewhere, at least by implication, something that one does not laugh at."8 I would suggest that there is something in Wilder's films-art, imagination, brilliant deception. Not the great humanist virtues, perhaps, but there are plenty of respectable precedents for Wilder's point of view.

In his consideration of art and the complex relationship of art to reality, Wilder was, as in so many other areas, ahead of his time. Recent films like PERSONA have astonished people by acknowledging the fact that they are movies. But Wilder's script for HOLD BACK THE DAWN made the same acknowledgment in 1941. At the start of the film the hero, Charles Boyer, enters Paramount studios, finds a director on the lot (who is played by Mitchell Leisen, the actual director of HOLD BACK THE DAWN) and proceeds to try to sell him the story, which he claims is true, that is then unfolded for us to see. Leisen buys the idea for $500, which Boyer needs to insure a happy ending to his "real" story-life redeemed by art and money. In the context of such a thoroughly traditional film, this device may not seem innovative, but it reveals Wilder's desire to play on the confusion between film and reality. In-jokes and in-references to other movies abound in Wilder's work. When the heroine of THE MAJOR AND THE MINOR is asked to say something in Swedish, she says, "I vant to be alone." Wilder can sometimes get good performances out of limited actors by persuading them to parody themselves; for example, Dean Martin's ferocious portrait of the lecherous, drunken nightclub singer in KISS ME STUPID intrigues us because it is so close to Martin's own image, THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH even contains direct visual parodies of other films-like FROM HERE TO ETERNITY AND VIVA ZAPATA-and was praised by the French for its cinematic self-consciousness.

It is SUNSET BOULEVARD, of course, where this playfulness becomes most elaborate, and most significant. The film is fiction, but with uncanny resemblances to reality. Gloria Swanson (herself a great silent star) plays Norma Desmond, a silent film queen fallen into oblivion, waiting to make her comeback. She lives in a decaying mansion stuffed with photographs of herself taken 20 or 30 years earlier; the pictures are pictures of Miss Swanson in her own heyday. When Norma shows an old film on her private projector, the film is QUEEN KELLY, which starred GloriaSwanson. Thedirectorof QUEEN KELLY was Erich von Stroheim, who, in sunset boulevard, plays Norma's butler, former husband and director, Max von Mayerling. This seemed a cruel joke- Stroheim's own directorial career had ended long before. Late in the film Norma pays a visit to Paramount to see Cecil B. DeMille, who plays himself at work on SAMSON AND DELILAH. It was DeMiIIe who directed Swanson in her first film. DeMiIIe tells Norma that Hollywood has changed; knowing what we do of SAMSON AND DELILAH, or indeed of any of DeMille's films, the remark takes on special irony. And it is ironic, too, that DeMiIIe, whose films have become the hallmark of New Hollywood vulgarity and meretriciousness, gives one of the most restrained and touching performances in sunset boulevard. The relationship between reality and fiction in the film is multi-layered and complex.

The old Hollywood, though demented, has a heroic quality. As James Agee wrote, "The lost people are given splendour, recklessness, an aura of awe; the contemporaries, by comparison, are small, smart, safe-playing, incapable of any kind of grandeur, good or bad."9 When Joe Gillis says, on recognizing her, "You're Norma Desmond. You were in pictures. You used to be very big," she answers defiantly, with what has become one of the most famous lines in movies, "I am big, it's the pictures that got small." Everything in Norma Desmond's world is on the grand scale, even if nightmarishly distorted. The details are Gothic- the leopard-skin automobile, the formal burial of a pet chimpanzee, the wind whistling through the pipes of the organ as the butler plays in his white kid gloves. Norma has silent stars, "the Waxworks," as Joe calls them, over for bridge- Buster Keaton, Anna Q. NiIIson, H. B. Warner, frozen, as it were, out of time, their faces revaged, deathlike masks, but bearing the purity and dignity of an art before it became an industry. Otherwise, the mansion is desolate now, Norma and Joe dance alone on the giant marble floor where Valentino danced once. The new Hollywood, composed of Hedda Hopper, second-rate scriptwriters, and what producer Fred Clark calls the Message Kids, has lost the imagination, the nobility, the flavor of the baroque. Norma is deranged, but she makes every moment count as part of a final, exquisite Grand Guignol performance. Even when she relaxes, she acts. To liven up one evening with Joe, she does imitations of a Sennett bathing beauty and of Chaplin, both charming and witty, testaments to her unvanquishable impulse to create.

Some people have objected of sunset boulevard that we do not understand Norma Desmond's great anguish from the inside. True, but that is because every particle of her energy is aimed at triumphing over that anguish, even as she falls into madnessclinging to a lifelong habit of stylizing, abstracting, chiseling emotion into art. sunset boulevard is Wilder's tribute to art and his study of its excesses. For Norma Desmond's posturing has become so exaggerated, so hysterical, so desperate a struggle against age and compromise that it has lost its contact with genuine emotion. Her non-stop performance is art utterly divorced from life, beautiful still In its way, but destructive now, obsessive, psychotic. It is too baroque, too brittle, and finally it crashes the whole world down on top of her: Having committed murder, with the news cameras and reporters waiting, she comes down her staircase doing a grotesque version of Salome's dance for what she thinks is DeMille's camera. The artist has not surrendered, but she has entered a no-man's-land where she can no longer touch or be touched by reality. Wilder bitterly observes her demise and honors her silently, eloquently, grimly.

If Norma Desmond carries her performance to an insane extreme, in most of Wilder's other films the performance breaks down at one moment or another. But when this happens, In double indemnity or ace in the hole, say, it is not fully convincing. Wilder may want to question the relevance of performance, but his celebration of performance is always stronger than his criticism. His belief in art, in performance, involves an implicit recognition of the valuelessness of experience, the irrelevance of faith in the ordinary abstractions- love, heroism, religion, social reform- that people depend on to survive. Wilder's faith is in dishonesty; he believes in the exuberance to be found in choosing your role and playing it to perfection. His heroes are his liars, his cheats, but he has a rueful, nostalgic affection for the foolish innocents who do not yet know the way of the world.

Visually Wilder's films are not dazzling. He considers himself primarily a writer, who became a director and then producer in order to protect his scripts. He has stated many times that he believes in simple, unadorned camera movements: "You will not find in my pictures any phony camera moves or fancy setups ... I like to believe that movement can be achieved eloquently, elegantly, economically and logically without shooting from a hole in the ground, without hanging the camera from the chandelier and without the camera dolly dancing a polka." He has also confessed tnat he cannot deal with large open spaces; he has never done a Western or a war movie, (five graves to cairo and stalag 17 both take place far from the front.) He pays great attention to authenticity in his interiors, and his art directors, Hans Dreier in his early films, Alexandre Trauner recently, are key contributors to his films. But he skimps on exteriors. Even the Parisian films, love in the afternoon and irma la douce, take little advantage of their setting. It would not be quite accurate, though, to call Wilder's style realistic. There is almost always a touch of flamboyance in the filmic details. Sunset boulevard is the most obviously baroque in style, and more convoluted than most of his films, but not unrepresentative. I have already referred to the shots in a foreign affair of soldiers with flowers jogging through the ruins of Berlin; only Wilder would flaunt decadence with so much wry humor and genuine elan. He has an eye for the startlingly vulgar: Marilyn Monroe with the cord of her fan wrapped around her hip and caught in the doorway of her apartment; a sexually frustrated Tom Ewell struggling with a bottle of milk between his legs (good dirty jokes both); a group of drunken, strolling gypsies playing for a millionnaire as he takes a steambath; Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, padded and wigged, swinging brazenly along a railroad platform on their way to join the ladies' band; a German sexpot dancing lasciviously on a tabietop to the delight of three tipsy Russian commissars. It is Wilder's delight in the outrageous that is the most distinguishing visual characteristic of his films. In spite of Wilder's cynicism, there is .a rather astonishing exuberance in the imagery of his films, an exuberance in the power of art that is films so often celebrate.

Wilder's chief gift to the American film is intelligence, and therefore a more coherent set of interests-and confusions- than can be found in the careers of most American directors, even those with greater visual imagination. He is responsible for at least four truly memorable American films- double indemnity, sunset boulevard, ace in the hole, some like it hot- and even his most routine projects are intermittently redeemed by flashes of his distinctive sour wit. Wilder's films are blemished by the compromises so common in the Hollywood movies of his period, but they contain a very uncommon understanding of some of the disturbing extremes of American ingenuity.

BILLY WILDER FILMOGRAPHY

Film Scripts in Germany

1929

MENSCHEN AM SONNTAG (people on Sunday). director Robert Siodmak; screenplay Wilder.

1930

SEITENSPRUNGE, director Stefan Szekely; screenplay Ludwig Biro, B. E. Luthge and Karl Noti from a story by Wilder.

1931

DER FALSCHE EHEMANN, director Johannes Guter; screenplay Wilder and Paul Franck. EMIL UND DIE DETEKTIVE (EMiL and the detectives). director Gerhard Lamprecht; screenplay Wilder. IHRE HOHEIT BEFIEHLT, director Hanns Schwarz; screenplay Wilder, Robert Liebmann and Paul Franck. DER MANN, DER SEINEN MORDER SUCHT, director Robert Siodmak; screenplay Wilder, Ludwig Hirschfeld and Kurt Siodmak.

1932

DAS BLAUE VON HIMMEL, director Viktor Janson; screenplay Wilder and Max Kolpe. EIN BLONDER TRAUM, director Paul Martin; screenplay Wilder and Walter Reisch. ES WAR EINMAL EIN WALTZER. director Viktor Janson; screenplay Wilder. SCAMPOLO, EIN KIND DER STRASSE, director Hans Steinhoff; screenplay Wilder and Max Kolpe.

1933

MADAME WÜNSCHT KEINE KINDER, director Hans Steinhoff; screenplay Wilder and Max Kolpe. WAS FRAUEN TRAUMEN, director Giza von Bolvary; screenplay Wilder and Franz Schulz.

Film Scripts in France

1933

ADORABLE, director William Dieterle; screenplay Wilder and Paul Franck.

Film Scripts In America

1934

ONE EXCITING ADVENTURE, director Ernst L. Frank; screenplay William H urlbut and Sam uelOrnitz from a story by Wilder and Franz Schulz. MUSIC IN THE AIR. director Joe May; screenplay Wilder and Howard I. Young.

1935

LOTTERY LOVER, director William Thiele; screenplay Wilder and Franz Schulz.

1937

CHAMPAGNE WALTZ, director A. Edward Sutherland; screenplay Don Hartman and Frank Butler from a story by Wilder and H. S. Kraft.

1938

BLUEBEARD'S EIGHTH WIFE, director Ernst Lubitsch; screenplay Wilder and Charles Brackett.

1939

MIDNIGHT, director Mitchell Leisen; screenplay Wilder and Brackett. WHAT A LIFE! director Jay Theodore Reed; screenplay Wilder and Brackett from Clifford Goldsmith's play about Henry Aldrich. NINOTCHKA. director Ernst Lubitsch; screenplay Wilder, Brackett and Walter Reisch.

1940

RHYTHM ON THE RIVER, director Victor Schertzinger; screenplay Dwight Taylor from a story by Wilder and Jacques Thery. ARISE MY LOVE, director Mitchell Leisen; screenplay Wilder and Brackett.

1941

BALL OF FIRE, director Howard Hawks; screenplay Wilder and Brackett from a story by Wilder and Thomas Monroe. HOLD BACK THE DAWN, director M itchell Leisen ,screenplay Wilder and Brackett from a story by Ketti Frings.

1948

A SONG IS BORN, director Howard Hawks; musical remake of ball of fire, with Wilder advising.

Films Directed in France

1933

MAUVAISE GRAINE (weeds), directors Wilder and Alexandre Esway; screenplay Wilder.

Films Directed in America

1942

THE MAJOR AND THE MINOR. Paramount; screenplay Wilder and Brackett; from a play by Edward Childs Carpenter and a story by Fannie Kilbourne; cinematography Leo Tover; cast Ginger Rogers, Ray Milland, Rita Johnson, Robert Benchley. Distributed in 16mm by United World.

1943

FIVE GRAVES TO CAIRO. Paramount; screenplay Wilder and Brackett; from a play by Lajos Biro; cinematography John Seitz; cast Franchot Tone, Anne Baxter, Akim Tamiroff, Erich von Stroheim.

Distributed in 16mm by United World.

1944

DOUBLE INDEMNITY. Paramount; screenplay Wilder and Raymond Chandler; from a novel by James M. Cain; cinematography John Seitz; cast Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson.

Distributed in 16mm by United World.

1945

THE LOST WEEKEND. Paramount; screenplay Wilder and Brackett; from a novel by Charles R. Jackson; cinematography John Seitz; cast Ray Milland, Jane Wyman, Howard da Silva.

Distributed in 16mm by Contemporary Films/ McGraw Hill and by United World.

1948

THE EMPEROR WALTZ. Paramount; screenplay Wilder and Brackett; cinematography George Barnes; cast Bing Crosby, Joan Fontaine, Roland Culver, Lucile Watson.

Distributed in 16mm by United World.

A FOREIGN AFFAIR. Paramount; screenplay Wilder, Brackett, Richard L. Breen; adaptation Robert Harari; original story David Shaw; cinematography Charles B. Lang Jr.; cast Jean Arthur, John Lund, Marlene Dietrich.

Distributed in 16mm by United World.

1950

SUNSET BOULEVARD. Paramount; screenplay Wilder, BrackettandD. M. Marshman Jr.; cinematography John F. Seitz; casf William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim, Nancy Olson.

Distributed in 16mm by Films, Inc.

1951

ACE IN THE HOLE (retitled the big carnival). Paramount; screenplay Wilder, Lesser Samuel and Walter Newman; cinematography Charles B. Lang; cast Kirk Douglas, Jan Sterling, Bob Arthur, Porter Hall.

Distributed in 16mm by Films, Inc.

1953

STALAG 17. Paramount; screenplay Wilder and Edwin Blum; from the play by Donald Bevan and Edmund Trschinski; cinematography Ernest Laszlo; casf William Holden, Don Taylor, Otto Preminger.

Distributed in 16mm by Films, Inc.

1954

SABRINA. Paramount; screenplay Wilder, Samuel Taylor and Ernest Lehman; from a play by Taylor, cinematography Charles Lang; cast Audrey Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, William Holden.

Distributed in 16mm by Films, Inc.

1955

THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH. Fox; screenplay Wilder and George Axelrod; from the play by Axelrod; cinematography Milton Krasner; casf Marilyn Monroe, Tom Ewell, Evelyn Keyes, Sonny Tufts.

Distributed in 16mm by Films, Inc.

1957

THE SPIRIT OF ST. LOUIS. Warner Brothers; screenplay Wilder and Wendell Mayes; adaptation Charles Lederer; from the book by Charles A. Lindbergh; cinematography Robert Burks and J. Peverell Morley; aerial photography Thomas Tutwiler; casf James Stewart, Murray Hamilton, Patricia Smith, Marc Connelly. LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON. Allied Artists; screenplay Wilderand I. A. L. Diamond; from a novel by Claude Anet; cinematography William Mellor; casf Gary Cooper, Audrey Hepburn, Maurice Chevalier, John McGiver.

WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION. United Artists; screenplay Wilder and Harry Kurnitz; adaptation Larry Marcus; from a play and novel by Agatha Christie; cinematography Russell Harlan; cast Charles Laughton, Tyrone Power, Marlene Dietrich, Elsa Lanchester.

Distributed in 16mm by United Artists 16.

1959

SOMELIKEITHOT. United Artists; screenplay Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond; from a story by R. Thoeren and M. Logan; cinematography Charles Lang; casf Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, Joe E. Brown, George Raft, Pat O'Brien.

Distributed in 16mm by United Artists 16.

1960

THE APARTMENT. United Artists; screenplay Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond; cinematography Joseph LaShelle; casf Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray, Ray Walston.

Distributed in 16mm by United Artists 16.

1961

ONE, TWO, THREE. United Artists; screenplay Wilder and Diamond; from a play by Ferenc Molnar; cinematography Daniel Fapp; cast James Cagney, Horst Buchholz, Pamela Tiffin, Arlene Francis, LiIo Pulver, Red Buttons.

Distributed in 16mm by United Artists 16.

1963

IRMA LA DOUCE. United Artists; screenplay Wilder and Diamond; from a play by Alexandre Breffort; cinematography Joseph LaShelle; casf Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Lou Jacobi, Hope Holiday.

Distributed in 16mm by United Artists 16.

1964

KISS ME, STUPID. United Artists; screenplay Wilder and Diamond; from a play by Anna Bonacci; cinematography Joseph LaShelle; casf Dean Martin, Kim Novak, Ray Walston, Felicia Farr.

Distributed in 16mm by United Artists 16.

1966

THE FORTUNE COOKIE. United Artists; screenplay Wilder and Diamond; cinematography Joseph LaShelle; Casf Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Ron Rich, Judi West.

Distributed in 16mm by United Artists 16.

1970

THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES. United Artists; screenplay Wilder and Diamond; based upon the characters created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: cinematography Christopher Challis; casf Robert Stephens, Colin Blakely, Genevieve Page, Stanley Holloway.