Introduction
I remember seeing Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard on television as a kid, being totally creeped out by the Gothic mansion and the weird behavior of the characters. It would never have occurred to my tender young sensibilities that this grotesque film could actually be funny. Such is the world Wilder created.
Billy Wilder brought a European sensibility to American subjects, whether interoffice sexual politics (The Apartment), corporate globalization (One Two Three) or the discarding of female movie stars past their prime (Sunset Boulevard). His gaze was unflinching, showing human frailty and venality in all of its ugliness, a trait that made him many critical enemies. Even so, one can also find compassion in his work, an empathy for human suffering that redeems his characters and films.
The occasion of Wilder’s death (I was originally going to use the word “passing,” but I suspect he would have been offended by this coy euphemism) gives us an opportunity to revisit his body of work. Although Some Like It Hot is, by far, his most popular work, I believe Sunset Boulevard and The Apartment are his most accomplished comedies (they are the ones I remember with the most fondness). What follows are some observations about these two remarkable films and the career of the remarkable writer/director who created them.
The Delicate Balance of Sunset Boulevard
The opening sequence of Sunset Boulevard was daring for its time (1950): Joe Gillis, the main character lies dead in a swimming pool, a vantage point from which he will narrate the months leading up to his death. As famous as this sequence is, Billy Wilder (and his main collaborator at the time, Charles Brackett) had originally conceived of something completely different.
As originally written, the film opens in a morgue with a dozen corpses lying on slabs, including one whose toe tag identifies him as Joe Gillis. The scene is full of mordant humor: when the corpse next to him asks if he would know who won a baseball game the night before, Gillis’ corpse replies, “No, I wouldn’t. I died before the morning paper came.” [1]
The scene was shot, and the film was tested with it. The audience hated this version of the movie, and Wilder, et al had to scramble for a new opening (the one we have come to know). In retrospect, it’s easy to see why the scene didn’t work: it promised a broad comedy, but Sunset Boulevard is a bleak character study. The audience was confused about what they were watching; some felt misled.
“Many of the scenes walked a narrow line between farce and tragedy…” one critic wrote of the film, “and it was very hard to be sure one was in balance.” [2] The original opening scene tilted too much towards farce, obscuring the tragedy that was to follow. It is to his credit as a director that Wilder recognized the problem and, killing the baby of a wonderful scene, found a creative solution for it.
Most of Wilder’s comedies relied on funny dialogue – banter – for their humor; think of the interplay between Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau in The Fortune Cookie, Lemon and Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot, or the non-stop gagging in One Two Three. Sunset Boulevard is an exception; in this film, the humor arises out of the bizarre behavior of the characters.
When it does appear, the comic dialogue in Sunset Boulevard is highly motivated. When Gillis, desperate for money, asks a producer friend at a studio to buy a screenplay for a baseball picture, he is not only turned down, but mocked: “Of course, we’re always looking for a Betty Hutton. Do you see it as a Betty Hutton? … If we made it a girls’ softball team, put in a few numbers. Might make a cute musical: It Happened in the Bull Pen – the Story of a Woman.” [3] The executive seems to be enjoying Gillis’ desperation, which makes it all the worse.
Later in the film, Gillis, being given a tour of Norma Desmond’s creaking old mansion, hears wind whistling through a pipe organ. When Desmond comments that she should get rid of the organ, Gillis flippantly replies “Or teach it a better tune.” [4] This remark encapsulates Gillis’ attitude towards Desmond for the first half of the film; as she becomes increasingly interested in him, first for his ability to revive her career by helping her rewrite a screenplay for her comeback, then as a lover, he uses humor to keep her at a distance. (This attitude changes when her suicide attempt forces him to take her seriously.)
The strong use humor against the weak, who then find somebody weaker to make fun of. This reminded me of the tramps in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, who take turns abusing each other, often to great comic effect. Interestingly, the banter between Gillis and Betty Shaefer towards the end of the film is evenly balanced, suggesting that theirs is a relationship of equals. Here, again, the humorous dialogue is used to delineate relationships as much as to get laughs.
Although ostensibly about Hollywood, Sunset Boulevard is primarily about the madness of its main female character, Norma Desmond. For example, the sequence in which she and the corpse in the pool, Joe Gillis, meet begins in comic confusion: she thinks he’s there to bury a dead body, which he mistakes for a child (although it is soon revealed that the body is that of a monkey); he’s there to get away from men who want to repossess his car.
What starts out brightly ends up astonishingly dark when, that night, Gillis watches the funeral march for and burial of the monkey. The scene is both laughably absurd in its gravity, yet deadly serious in the way it gives us our first glimpse into the twisted mind of Desmond.
Romance and Cynicism in The Apartment
Films often have a strange genesis. Take Wilder’s The Apartment. From the brutally unsentimental way it portrays marital infidelity, you would never guess that it developed out of the cinematic tradition of the romance.
“The origin of The Apartment,” Wilder once explained, “was my seeing the very fine picture by David Lean, Brief Encounter [1945]. It was the story of a man who is having an affair with a married woman and comes by train to London. They go to the apartment of a friend of his. I saw it and I said, ‘What about the guy who has to crawl into that warm bed…?’ That’s an interesting character.” [5]
Unlike most doomed romance films, comic or otherwise, The Apartment was vilified; Saturday Review, for example, called it “a dirty fairy tale.” [6] When one considers how very different Wilder’s film is from the typical romance film, it is easy to understand why the original reception for it would be so cool.
To begin with, the focus of the typical infidelity romance is on the couple having the affair; when the effect of the affair on the partners of the lovers is considered at all, it usually becomes a (poignant) obstacle to the romance. In The Apartment, by way of contrast, the focus is on a man who is not having an affair, but who suffers because he loves a woman who is.
The couples in the typical infidelity romance are noble characters who feel a deep emotional bond. A character like Sheldrake in The Apartment strings his lover along with the promise that he will leave his wife, even though he has no intention of doing so. For him, and the other adulterers in the film, it’s about the sex, not about the love. Even C. C. Baxter, whose apartment is used for the executive trysts, is not an especially noble character: until the ending, when he defies his boss and loses his job, he is either too weak to tell his superiors not to use his apartment, too blinded by the offer of a promotion they tempt him with, or both.
In most romances, infidelity is treated with a great deal of angst, an emotional gravitas that is missing from The Apartment. An illustration: when one of the executive’s mistresses asks him if he brings other women to the apartment, he flippantly responds: “Certainly not. I’m a happily married man.” [7] Cheating on one’s spouse, far from being an emotionally distressing event, is treated as a commonplace.
Finally, there is the matter of endings. If romances are designed to pull at an audience’s heartstrings, there is no grander emotional push than their conclusion, when the lovers are brought together (with many declarations of love and soaring string accompaniment) or torn apart (with many declarations of love and soaring string accompaniment). There is a declaration of love at the end of The Apartment, and we can reasonably expect that the two main characters, Baxter and elevator attendant Fran Kubelick, will become a couple, but the actual ending evades sentimentality with the mundane line, “Shut up and deal!” [8]
The appeal of films that deal with grand romances is that they offer a vision of love untainted by the realities of relationships: compromise, raising children, and so on. This also makes their relationship with the real world quite tenuous. By reversing many of the tropes of the genre, Wilder’s The Apartment portrays human relationships as we really experience them: messy, difficult and often as painful as they are joyful.
Conclusion: An Artist At Odds With His Time
Looking back on his film career, Wilder would tell Cameron Crowe that “…I don’t think that people behave very much differently in my pictures than they do in life.” [9] The often harsh reception his films received when they were released suggests that many people disagreed.
And we should acknowledge that Wilder’s critics had some reason. The monkey burial scene in Sunset Boulevard, for instance, was so grotesque that it was (and still is) hard to see it as a reflection of real human behaviour. This perception is further aggravated when we find out that the way Wilder conceived the scene was that “she had an affair with the monkey. I always told Swanson, ‘Remember that your lover is in the garden.'” [10]
Diving a little deeper, though, it becomes clear that there is a lot to Wilder’s contention that “You make pictures based on truth. You make pictures based on the way you feel.” [11] Norma Desmond’s doomed attempt to play Salome, a character half her age, can be seen as any actor’s desire to cling to the spotlight. More than that, though, Desmond’s desperation to cling to her past glories is an attempt to turn back time; her fear, one which we must all face at one time or another in our lives, is of growing old. “There’s nothing tragic about being fifty -” Joe Gillis tells her, “not unless you try to be twenty-five.” [12] To which Desmond replies soon after: “Stars are ageless, aren’t they?” [13]
Often overlooked by his critics is the deep well of pain that afflicts so many of the characters in his best comedies. Fran Kubelick’s suicide attempt in The Apartment is not pretty or dignified, as suicide is often portrayed in romances: we hear her stomach being pumped and watch her slowly gain her strength. Her misery (like Norma Desmond’s) is palpable and, I think, very sympathetically drawn.
From our current vantage point, it is much easier to see the truth in Wilder’s work. The casual acceptance of power used to gain sexual favors in The Apartment is not so shocking to a post-Clinton America. The self-interested reporter in Ace in the Hole is not a surprise to those who believe the profession of journalism is less honorable than that of sewer worker. Coca Cola helping unite Berlin? As Cameron Crowe has pointed out, “It’s all come to pass, exactly as [Wilder] predicted in the film.” [14]
Moreover, other filmmakers have taken up his themes and devices. Buddy Buddy, Wilder’s last film, is undoubtedly not his best. But, in the unsentimental way it portrays a hired killer, it does anticipate films such as Prizzi’s Honor and even Pulp Fiction. Would the portrayal of the ruthlessness of filmmaking in movies like The Player and Swimming with Sharks have been possible without the groundbreaking Sunset Boulevard? Sam Mendes has admitted that the device of the dead narrator used in American Beauty was inspired by Boulevard.
It would be tempting to suggest that Wilder was ahead of his time. I would suggest, however, that much of his work was influenced by his coming of age in Weimar Germany: the cross-dressing antics of Some Like it Hot; the acceptance of prostitution in Irma la Douce; the lack of judgment of marital infidelity in The Apartment. These and other aspects of Wilder’s films were clearly influenced by the freedom of the country in which he spent his youth.
Rather than arguing that he was ahead of his time, it would be more appropriate to say that Billy Wilder was at odds with or outside the time and place he did his best work. Unlike Weimar Germany or today’s America, the United States of the 1950s and 1960s was an unlikely place for a filmmaker who could expose an audience’s worst fears and basest animal instincts, and make them laugh at the vision.
All the more reason to be grateful, then, that such a talent could flourish and leave the amazing legacy that is the work of Billy Wilder.
Notes
1) Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, D. M. Marshman, Jr., Sunset Boulevard (July 18, 1949), 3.
2) Maurice Zolotow, Billy Wilder in Hollywood (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977), 166.
3) Brackett, Wilder, Marhsman, 1949, 12. Sounds a little like A League of Their Own, doesn’t it?
4) ibid, 24.
5) Cameron Crowe, Conversations with Wilder (New York: Random House, 1999), 136.
6) Tom Wood, The Brighter Side of Billy Wilder, Primarily (New York: Doubleday, 1970), 50.
7) Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond, The Apartment (undated), 6.
8) ibid, 142.
9) Crowe, 1999, 175.
10) ibid, 304.
11) ibid, 114.
12) Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, D. M. Marshman, Jr., Sunset Boulevard (March 21, 1949), 111.
13) ibid, 113)
14) Crowe, 1999, 165.