| The 10 Essential Billy Wilder Movies
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Al Weisel
CDNOW Senior Editor, Movies
"I just made pictures I would have liked to see," director Billy
Wilder once said with uncharacteristic modesty. But only a
handful of directors have made so many different kinds of
films that so many have liked to see over so many years. He
directed what the American Film Institute called the best
American comedy ever made, Some Like It Hot; one of the
greatest and most hard-bitten films noir, Double
Indemnity; one of the first and most realistic social
dramas about alcoholism, Lost Weekend; and the best
film about Hollywood ever made, Sunset Boulevard.
Though the films Wilder directed fell in many different
genres, they all have one thing in common -- his name is on
the screenplay, usually with one of his longtime collaborators
Charles Brackett or I.A.L. Diamond. Though he spoke no English
when he arrived in the United States after fleeing the Nazis
(his mother died in Auschwitz), Wilder wrote some of the
movies' wittiest dialogue. Before directing his first film,
The
Major and the Minor (which has the immortal line "Why
don't you get out of that wet coat and into a dry martini?"),
he wrote screenplays for some of Hollywood's best comedies,
including Ninotchka, Midnight, and Ball
of Fire.
But the imagery in his films is often as good as the
dialogue. Some of his finest moments were wordless -- the
revelatory scene in The Apartment when Jack Lemmon sees
Shirley MacLaine's broken compact mirror; the macabre funeral
for a monkey in Sunset Boulevard; and one of the most
iconic moments in cinema, Marilyn Monroe's dress billowing up
when she stands over a subway vent in Seven
Year Itch.
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| Sunset Boulevard 1950 |
 After studio mogul Louis B. Mayer saw Sunset
Boulevard, he angrily snapped that Wilder was "biting the
hand that feeds him." But no one gnawed on Hollywood better
than Wilder did in this film, which celebrates Tinseltown's
shopworn glamour as much as it ridicules its penchant for
chewing up and spitting out its faded stars. Gloria Swanson
plays Nora Desmond, a washed-up silent screen star (much like
herself) who hires a young gigolo (William Holden) to help
stage her comeback. Her butler is her former director, played
by Erich Von Stroheim (who actually did direct Swanson in
Queen
Kelly which Desmond screens in the
film).
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| Some Like It Hot 1959 |
 Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis play two musicians hiding
from the mob, who dress up as women and join an all-girl band
featuring Marilyn Monroe, in one of Wilder's most enjoyable
films. Despite Wilder's well-publicized problems with Monroe,
he got the greatest performance out of her she would ever
give. The film also has some of Wilder's most crackling
dialogue: "I'm engaged," says Lemmon. "Who's the lucky girl?"
asks Curtis. "I am." Or this exchange: "Why would a guy want
to marry a guy," Curtis asks Lemmon. "Security!" is the
instant response. And the film concludes with one of the
greatest (and funniest) closing lines in
history.
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| The Apartment 1960 |
 This cynical look at Middle Class America is also one
of Wilder's most romantic films. Jack Lemmon stars as a social
climber who lends his boss (Fred MacMurray) his apartment for
sexual trysts. Little does he know that the woman his boss is
having an affair with is the elevator girl (Shirley MacLaine)
he's fallen in love with. This comedy broke new boundaries for
what could be shown onscreen and won the Academy Award for
Best Picture, as well as Best Director and Best Screenplay,
making Wilder the first person to score a hat trick at the
Oscars for one film.
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| Double Indemnity 1944 |
 Though this film noir about insurance investigator
Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) who commits murder with a femme
fatale (Barbara Stanwyck) is bleak, it's saved from complete
despair by the unlikely romance of sorts at the film's center
-- between MacMurray and his boss, played by Edward G.
Robinson. Only Wilder could make a film about a cold-blooded
murder committed by two cynical lovers set in a bleak
black-and-white urban landscape and still manage to give it a
touching twist by finding humanity and love where you would
least expect it.
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| Ninotchka 1939 |
 Directed by Ernst Lubitsch, Ninotchka has the
best screenplay Wilder ever wrote (with Charles Brackett) for
another director. Starring Greta Garbo as a coldly efficient
Soviet bureaucrat who is finally unable to resist the romantic
allure of Paris (or her co-star Melvyn Douglas), it combines
biting satire about the battle between Communism and
capitalism, with one of the screen's great romances. Wilder's
screenplay made Garbo laugh and melted the heart of the most
frigid of Cold War warriors.
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| Midnight 1939 |
 One of the most underrated and least known screwball
comedies, Midnight is set, like Ninotchka, in
the City of Lights. Though Wilder said that what led him to
direct was the way director Mitchell Leisen changed his
script, this story of a gold digger (Claudette Colbert) who
cons Parisian High Society into thinking she's a baroness was
one of Wilder's and Brackett's funniest and most charming
confections. It is sophisticated, witty, and romantic and the
only reason it's not better known is that it came out in 1939,
often considered Hollywood's best year, and has gotten lost in
the shuffle.
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| Stalag 17 1953 |
 No
one would have dared to make fun of a Nazi prisoner of war
camp until Wilder came along. But this black comedy about an
American (William Holden) who is the victim of a witch hunt
when he is falsely suspected of being a German spy doesn't
just skewer an easy target like the Nazis. Released during the
height of the McCarthy era, it fires just as many barbs at
those who give up their values and principles and stoop to the
level of those they are fighting under the pretense of
battling evil. It's a message that is just as cogent today if
not more so.
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| Lost Weekend 1945 |
 Though best known for his comedies, Wilder also
brought his clear-eyed vision to some serious subjects. The
Lost Weekend won Wilder his first Oscar for Best Picture
and is still one of the most harrowing and candid portrayals
of alcoholism ever made in Hollywood. Wilder pulls no punches
in this stark look at one weekend in the life of an alcoholic
(Ray Milland), but never succumbs to preachiness. The film is
so honest that it was almost permanently shelved by the
studio, but despite the lack of candy coating it still manages
to be quite sympathetic. And it's better than most Hollywood
films made about addiction today.
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| Witness for the Prosecution
1957 |
 Based on a book by Agatha Christie this courtroom
drama starring Marlene Dietrich (who also worked with Wilder
in A Foreign Affair) and Charles Laughton has one
surprise after another leading up to its greatest twist of all
at the end. Though courtroom dramas with startling revelations
have become standard Hollywood fare, no one did it better than
Wilder does here. Wilder allows Laughton to ham it up, and
Dietrich gives a performance that is just one of the film's
most delightful surprises.
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| Sabrina 1954 |
 This light romance is one of two films the director
made in which Audrey Hepburn is wooed by a considerably older
man (the other being Love
in the Afternoon, co-starring Gary Cooper). Hepburn
plays the chauffeur's daughter who is swept off her feet by
the young playboy (William Holden) who lives at the house
where her father works until she is rescued by his nicer,
older brother (Humphrey Bogart). Hepburn was never more
glamorous than she is in this romantic comedy. Though Wilder
is not generally known as a "women's director," Hepburn is
just one of several actresses Wilder coached into doing some
of their best work.
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