NEVER BE BORING: BILLY WILDER
Germany, 2017, 90 minutes, Colour and black-and-white.
Directed by Andre Schaefer, Jascha Hanover.
This very interesting documentary offers the opportunity for film students and, especially, those who have an admiration for writer-director, Billy Wilder, to have an overview of his life and career.
The film moves in chronological order, starting with Wilder’s birth in Vienna, growing up there, his family, his ambitions, work as a journalist. It also indicates his move into filmmaking in Germany, especially with the 1930s Berlin on Sunday, with many glimpses of that film and its technical style.
Wilder then went to the United States and from the mid-1930s was a screenwriter at Paramount Studios, in admiration of Ernst Lubitsch. Eventually, Paramount gave him the opportunity to direct and he made the comedy The Major and the Minor with Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland, which was a success. While making a number of films at Paramount, this documentary singles out his work with Double Indemnity and film noir, A Foreign Affair with Marlene Dietrich and Jean Arthur and his perspective on post-war Germany. The film also shows his presence in Germany at the end of the war, his military rank, his filming, especially significant in documenting the concentration camps and the Jewish dead.
He also won the Oscar for best film for Lost Weekend, 1945. He was also to win an Oscar for The Apartment, 1960, this documentary including a number of sequences from that film. However, he had significant success during the 1950s, especially with Sunset Boulevard and Gloria Swanson, with William Holden again in Stalag 17, with clips from both films, and with Sabrina and Love in the Afternoon with Audrey Hepburn.
There are quite a number of commentators in the film, one of the most significant being the German director, Volker Scholondorff, who made a documentary about Wilder in the 1990s. Another commentator is Paul Diamond, the son of I. A. L. Diamond, Wilder’s collaborator for 25 years or more. This began with Some Like it Hot, the documentary also showing scenes of this film, especially Marilyn Monroe (and, of course, a glimpse of the sidewalk scene in The Seven Year Itch). And Jack Lemmon is interviewed. Lemmon was to appear in so many of Wilder’s comedies from the 50s to the early 1980s.
The film also features One, Two, Three, made in Berlin and then in Munich, with Wilder reconstructing the Brandenburg Gate in Munich because at the time of the film’s production, the Berlin Wall was going up. One, Two, Three was not a box office success. Then there were production problems and the Legion of Decency with Kiss Me, Stupid (1964).
Between 1970 and 1981, Wilder made only five films. There is no mention of his excellent The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), passing reference to Avanti but quite a deal of attention given to the 1977, Fedora, filmed in Germany with William Holden – and quite an amount of interview material with the star, Marthe Keller, who clashed with Wilder and who is blamed by him for the failure of the film. His last film, with frequent stars Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, was a 1981 Buddy, Buddy, not successful at the box office.
There is a great deal of footage of Wilder himself speaking both in English and in German, material from over the decades and from documentaries made in the 70s to the 90s. They reveal, of course, a great deal of his personality and character, his attitude towards writing, towards filmmaking, towards his casts.
The tragedy for him was that he lived to the age of 92, not dying till 2002 – and the observations that, while he flourished in the era of the studios, he was not so successful in the aftermath and, by the 1980s, his style and style of filmmaking had been surpassed by those emerging directors of the 70s, Scorsese, De Palma, Francis Ford Coppola… He kept going to his office but was not productive for over two decades.
A very interesting picture of Hollywood in its golden age and then its aftermath and one of the significant directors of Hollywood in the 20th century.
