September 17, 2013 (XXVII:4) Billy Wilder, DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944, 107 min)

J National Film Registry—1992 Directed by Billy Wilder Written by Raymond Chandler (screenplay) and based on the novel by James M. Cain Original Music by Miklós Rózsa Cinematography by John F. Seitz Costume Design by Edith Head Makeup by Wally Westmore Fred MacMurray...Walter Neff Barbara Stanwyck...Phyllis Dietrichson Edward G. Robinson...Barton Keyes Porter Hall...Mr. Jackson BILLY WILDER (b. Samuel Wilder, June 22, 1906, Sucha, Galicia, Austria-Hungary [now Sucha Beskidzka, Malopolskie, Poland]—d. March 27, 2002, West Los Angeles, California). Billy Wilder won the 1986 American Film Institute Life Achievement Award and 7 Academy Awards—the 1988 Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, 1961 Best Director for The Apartment (1960), 1961 Best Picture for The Apartment (1960), 1961 Best Writing, Story and Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen for The Apartment (1960), which he shared with I.A.L. Diamond, 1951 Best Writing, Story and Screenplay for Sunset Blvd (1950), which he shared with Charles Brackett and D.M. Marshman Jr., 1946 Best Director for The Lost Weekend (1945), and 1946 Best Writing, Screenplay for The Lost Weekend (1945), which he shared with Charles Brackett. Wilder was credited with writing 77 titles, including 1981 Buddy Buddy, 1978 Fedora, 1972 Avanti!, 1970 The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, 1967 Casino Royale, 1966 The Fortune Cookie, 1963 Irma la Douce, 1961 One, Two, Three, 1960 Ocean's Eleven, 1960 The Apartment, 1959 Some Like It Hot, 1957 Witness for the Prosecution, 1957 Love in the Afternoon, 1957 The Spirit of St. Louis, 1955 The Seven Year Itch, 1954 Sabrina, 1953 Stalag 17, 1951 Ace in the Hole, 1950 Sunset Blvd., 1948 A Song Is Born, 1948 A Foreign Affair, 1945 The Lost Weekend, 1944 Double Indemnity, 1943 Five Graves to Cairo, 1941 Hold Back the

Dawn, 1939 Ninotchka, 1938 That Certain Age, 1938 Bluebeard's Eighth Wife, 1933 Was Frauen träumen, 1933 No Children Wanted, 1932 A Blonde's Dream, 1931 The Wrong Husband, 1931 Her Grace Commands, 1930 Ein Burschenlied aus Heidelberg, 1930 Der Kampf mit dem Drachen oder: Die Tragödie des Untermieters (short), 1930 People on Sunday, and 1929 Hell of a Reporter. In Addition, Wilder directed 27 films, among them1981 Buddy Buddy, 1978 Fedora, 1974 The Front Page, 1972 Avanti!, 1970 The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, 1966 The Fortune Cookie, 1964 Kiss Me, Stupid, 1963 Irma la Douce, 1961 One, Two, Three, 1960 The Apartment, 1959 Some Like It Hot, 1957 Witness for the Prosecution, 1957 Love in the Afternoon, 1957 The Spirit of St. Louis, 1955 The Seven Year Itch, 1954 Sabrina, 1953 Stalag 17, 1951 Ace in the Hole, 1950 Sunset Blvd., 1948 A Foreign Affair, 1948 The Emperor Waltz, 1945 The Lost Weekend, 1945 Death Mills, 1944 Double Indemnity, 1943 Five Graves to Cairo, 1942 The Major and the Minor, and 1934 Mauvaise graine.

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RAYMOND CHANDLER (b. Raymond Thornton Chandler, July 23, 1888, Chicago, Illinois—d. March 26, 1959, La Jolla, California) earned 35 film and TV writing credits, including 1978 The Big Sleep (novel), 1975 Farewell, My Lovely (novel), 1973 “Double Indemnity” (TV movie), 1973 The Long Goodbye (novel), 1969 Marlowe (novel), 1959-1960 “Philip Marlowe” (26 episodes), 1951 Strangers on a Train (screenplay), 1947 Lady in the Lake (novel), 1946 The Big Sleep (novel), 1946 The Blue Dahlia, 1944 Murder, My Sweet (novel), and 1944 Double Indemnity (screenplay). He was best known as a novelist. JAMES M. CAIN (b. James Mallahan Cain, July 1, 1892 in Annapolis, Maryland—d. October 27, 1977, University Park, Maryland) earned 31 writing credits, including 2004 Swing My Swing High, My Darling (novel), 1995 Girl in the Cadillac (novel), 1982 Butterfly (novel), 1981 The Postman Always Rings Twice (novel), 1973 “Double Indemnity” (TV movie) (novel), 1968 Interlude (screenplay), 1949 Everybody Does It (story), 1947 Out of the Past, 1946 The Postman Always Rings Twice (novel), 1945 Mildred Pierce (novel), 1944 Gypsy Wildcat (screenplay), 1944 Double Indemnity (novel), 1943 Ossessione (novel), and 1939 Stand Up and Fight (screenplay). MIKLÓS RÓZSA (b. April 18, 1907 in Budapest, Austria-Hungary [now Hungary]—d. July 27, 1995, Los Angeles, California) received 3 Academy Awards—1946 Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture for Spellbound (1945), 1948 Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture for A Double Life (1947), and 1960 Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture for Ben-Hur (1959). He was a member of the music departments on 104 titles, among them 1977 The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, 1977 Providence, 1970 The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, 1959 Ben-Hur, 1957 Zombies of Mora Tau, 1956 Lust for Life, 1956 Bhowani Junction, 1955 Abbott and Costello Meet the Keystone Kops, 1954 Beau Brummell, 1954 Men of the Fighting Lady, 1953 El Alaméin, 1953 Mission Over Korea, 1947 Song of Scheherazade, 1945 A Song to Remember, 1944 Dark Waters, 1941 Major Barbara, 1941 The Saint's Vacation, 1940 The Thief of Bagdad, and 1938 Drums. In addition, Rózsa composed the music for 94 titles, including 1989 Gesucht: Monika Ertl (documentary), 1982 Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, 1981 Eye of the Needle, 1979 Time After Time, 1979 Last Embrace, 1978 Fedora, 1977 The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, 1977 Providence, 1973 The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, 1970 The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, 1968 The Green Berets, 1963 The V.I.P.s, 1962 Sodom and Gomorrah, 1961 El Cid, 1961 King of Kings, 1959 Ben-Hur, 1959 The World, the Flesh and the Devil, 1958 A Time to Love and a Time to Die, 1957 Tip on a Dead Jockey, 1957 Something of Value, 1956 Lust for Life, 1956 Bhowani Junction, 1956 Diane, 1954 Men of the Fighting Lady, 1953 Knights of the Round Table, 1953 Julius Caesar, 1951 Quo Vadis, 1950 The Asphalt Jungle, 1949 Adam's Rib, 1949 Madame Bovary, 1948 Command

Decision, 1948 The Naked City, 1947 A Double Life, 1947 Brute Force, 1947 The Macomber Affair, 1947 Song of Scheherazade, 1946 The Killers, 1946 The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, 1945 The Lost Weekend, 1945 Spellbound, 1945 Lady on a Train, 1944 Double Indemnity, 1943 So Proudly We Hail!, 1943 Sahara, 1943 Five Graves to Cairo, 1942 Jungle Book, 1940 The Thief of Bagdad, 1939 The Four Feathers, 1937 Knight Without Armor, 1937 Thunder in the City. JOHN F. SEITZ (b. John Francis Seitz, June 23, 1892 in Chicago,

Illinois—d. February 27, 1979, Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California) John F. Seitz was the cinematographer on 163 titles, including 1960 Guns of the Timberland, 1959 Island of Lost Women, 1958 The Badlanders, 1955 Hell on Frisco Bay, 1955 The McConnell Story, 1955 Many Rivers to Cross, 1954 Saskatchewan, 1953 Botany Bay, 1952 Thunder in the East, 1952 The San Francisco Story, 1951 Detective Story, 1951 When Worlds Collide, 1950 Sunset Blvd., 1950 Captain Carey, U.S.A., 1949 The Great Gatsby, 1948 Night Has a Thousand Eyes, 1948 Saigon, 1948 The Big Clock, 1945 The Lost Weekend, 1944 Casanova Brown, 1944 Hail the Conquering Hero, 1944 Going My Way, 1944 Double Indemnity, 1944 The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, 1943 Five Graves to Cairo, 1942 Star Spangled Rhythm, 1942 The Moon and Sixpence, 1942 This Gun for Hire, 1941 Sullivan's Travels, 1939 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1938 A Christmas Carol, 1938 Young Dr. Kildare, 1937 Madame X, 1937 Between Two Women, 1935 Redheads on Parade, 1933 Dangerously Yours, 1931 Misbehaving Ladies, 1930 Kismet, 1926 The Magician, 1923 Where the Pavement Ends, 1922

The Prisoner of Zenda, 1921 The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 1917 A Game of Wits, 1917 The Bride's Silence, 1917 Whose Wife?, 1916 The Ranger of Lonesome Gulch (short), and 1916 The Quagmire (short). EDITH HEAD (b. Edith Claire Posener, October 28, 1897, San Bernardino, California—d. October 24, 1981, Los Angeles, California) won 8 Academy Awards—1950 Best Costume Design, Black-and-White for The Heiress (1949), which she shared with Gile Steele, 1951 Best Costume Design, Black-and-White for All About Eve (1950), which she shared with Charles Le Maire, 1951 Best Costume Design, Color for Samson and Delilah (1949), which she shared with Dorothy Jeakins, Eloise Jensson, Gile Steele, and Gwen Wakeling, 1952 Best Costume Design, Black-and-White for A Place in the Sun (1951), 1954 Best Costume Design, Black-and-White for Roman Holiday (1953), 1955 Best Costume Design, Black-and-White for Sabrina (1954), 1961 Best Costume Design, Black-and-White for The Facts of Life (1960), which she shared with Edward Stevenson, and 1974 Best Costume Design for The Sting (1973). Head was the costume designer on 437 titles, including 1982 Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, 1927 Wings, and 1925 The Golden Bed. FRED MACMURRAY...Walter Neff (b. Fredrick Martin MacMurray, August 30, 1908, Kankakee, Illinois—d. November

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5, 1991, Santa Monica, California) was in 98 films and tv series, including 1978 The Swarm, 1973 Charley and the Angel, 1960-1972 “My Three Sons” (380 episodes), 1963 Son of Flubber, 1961 The Absent Minded Professor, 1960 The Apartment, 1959 Face of a Fugitive, 1956 There's Always Tomorrow, 1954 The Caine Mutiny, 1948 An Innocent Affair, 1948 The Miracle of the Bells, 1947 The Egg and I, 1946 Smoky, 1945 Murder, He Says, 1944 And the Angels Sing, 1944 Double Indemnity, 1944 Standing Room Only, 1941 Dive Bomber, 1941 One Night in Lisbon, 1941 Virginia, 1939 Cafe Society, 1938 Men with Wings, 1937 True Confession, 1936 The Texas Rangers, 1936 The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, 1935 The Gilded Lily, 1935 Grand Old Girl, 1929 Tiger Rose, 1929 Why Leave Home?.

BARBARA STANWYCK...Phyllis Dietrichson (b. Ruby Catherine Stevens, July 16, 1907, Brooklyn, New York City, New York—d. January 20, 1990, Santa Monica, California) received an American Film Institute Life Achievement Award in 1987 and an Honorary Academy Award for superlative creativity and unique contribution to the art of screen acting in 1982. She appeared in 106 films and tv series, including 1985-1986 “The Colbys” (24 episodes), 1985 “Dynasty” (TV series), 1983 “The Thorn Birds” (TV mini-series), 1965-1969 “The Big Valley” (112 episodes), 1964 The Night Walker, 1961-1964 “Wagon Train” (TV series), 1962 Walk on the Wild Side, 1962 “Rawhide” (TV series), 1958-1959 “Zane Grey Theater” (TV series), 1957 Forty Guns, 1956 There's Always Tomorrow, 1955 The Violent Men, 1954 Cattle Queen of Montana, 1954 Executive Suite, 1953 Titanic, 1952 Clash by Night, 1950 The File on Thelma Jordon, 1949 The Lady Gambles, 1948 Sorry, Wrong Number, 1947 The Two Mrs. Carrolls, 1946 The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, 1944 Hollywood Canteen, 1944 Double Indemnity, 1942 The Gay Sisters, 1942 The Great Man's Lady, 1941 Ball of Fire, 1941 You Belong to Me, 1941 Meet John Doe, 1941 The Lady Eve, 1939 Golden Boy, 1939 Union Pacific, 1937 Stella Dallas, 1936 The Plough and the Stars, 1936 His Brother's Wife, 1936 A Message to Garcia, 1935 Annie Oakley, 1935 The Woman in Red, 1933 Baby Face, 1933 The Bitter Tea of General Yen, 1932 So Big!,

1932 Forbidden, 1931 Ten Cents a Dance, 1931 Illicit, 1930 Ladies of Leisure, 1929 Mexicali Rose, 1929 The Locked Door, and 1927 Broadway Nights. EDWARD G. ROBINSON...Barton Keyes (b. Emmanuel Goldenberg, December 12, 1893 in Bucharest, Romania—d. January 26, 1973, Hollywood, Los Angeles, California) appeared in 114 films and tv series, among them 1973 Soylent Green, 1972 Neither by Day Nor by Night, 1971 “Rod Serling's Night Gallery” (TV series), 1970 Song of Norway, 1969 Mackenna's Gold, 1968 It's Your Move, 1967 Operazione San Pietro, 1965 The Cincinnati Kid, 1964 The Outrage, 1964 Cheyenne Autumn, 1964 Robin and the 7 Hoods, 1963 The Prize, 1962 Two Weeks in Another Town, 1960 Pepe, 1960 Seven Thieves, 1956 The Ten Commandments, 1955 Hell on Frisco Bay, 1955 Tight Spot, 1955 The Violent Men, 1949 House of Strangers, 1948 Night Has a Thousand Eyes, 1948 Key Largo, 1948 All My Sons, 1947 The Red House, 1946 The Stranger, 1945 Scarlet Street, 1945 Journey Together, 1945 Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, 1944 The Woman in the Window, 1944 Double Indemnity, 1944 Tampico, 1941 The Sea Wolf, 1940 Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet, 1938 The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse, 1937 Kid Galahad, 1936 Bullets or Ballots, 1935 Barbary Coast, 1933 I Loved a Woman, 1931 Five Star Final, 1931 Little Caesar, 1930 The Widow from Chicago, 1930 Outside the Law, 1930 Die Sehnsucht jeder Frau, 1930 A Lady to Love, 1930 Night Ride, 1929 The Hole in the Wall, 1923 The Bright Shawl, and 1916 Arms and the Woman. PORTER HALL...Mr. Jackson (b. Clifford Porter Hall, September 19, 1888, Cincinnati, Ohio—d. October 6, 1953, Los Angeles, California) appeared in 80 films, including 1954 Return to Treasure Island, 1953 Vice Squad, 1953 Pony Express, 1952 Carbine Williams, 1951 Ace in the Hole, 1949 Intruder in the Dust, 1949 The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend, 1947 Singapore, 1947 Miracle on 34th Street, 1945 Murder, He Says, 1945 Blood on the Sun, 1944 Going My Way, 1944 Double Indemnity, 1944 Standing Room Only, 1944 The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, 1943 The Woman of the Town, 1943 The Desperadoes, 1943 A Stranger in Town, 1941 Sullivan's Travels, 1940 Arizona, 1940 His Girl Friday, 1939 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 1938 Tom Sawyer, Detective, 1937 Wells Fargo, 1937 True Confession, 1937 Bulldog Drummond Escapes, 1936 The General Died at Dawn, 1936 Satan Met a Lady, 1936 Too Many Parents, 1936 The Story of Louis Pasteur, 1936 The Petrified Forest, and 1934 The Thin Man. BILLY WILDER (from World Film Directors V. I. Ed. John Wakeman. H.H. Wilson Co. 1987)

“Billy” (Samuel) Wilder was born in Vienna, Austria, the younger of two sons of Max Wilder, a hotelier and restaurateur and Eugenie Dittler. Sent to the Vienna realgymnasium and University of Vienna which he left after less than a year to work as a copy boy and then as a reporter for Die Stunde.

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In those years after the First World War, young writers working in the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian Empire gravitated naturally to the cultural ferment of Berlin, and Wilder made his way there at the age of twenty. For a time he worked as a crime reporter on Nachtausgabe (and/or as a film and drama critic; accounts vary). Many colorful stories are told (mostly by Wilder himself) about this part of his life: it is said that he fell in love with a dancer, neglected his work, lost his job, and became a dancing partner for “lonely ladies,” and a gigolo. He spent his time on the fringes of Berlin café society, met some young filmmakers and tried his hand as a scenarist. The first picture made from a Wilder script was Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday, 1929), directed by another young hopeful, Robert Siodmak..[Other collaborators included Edgar Ulmer, Fred Zinneman and Eugen Schüfftan] “It was about young people having a good time in Berlin, and it was talked about a lot,” Wilder says. “It represented a good way to make pictures: no unions, no bureaucracy, no studio, shot silent on cheap stock: we just ‘did it.’ As a result of its success, we all got jobs at UFA, the huge German studios. . . . .I’d write two, three, four pictures a month. I accumulated about a hundred silent picture assignments, and then, in 1929, when sound came in, I did scores more.” They included Gerhard Lamprecht’s version of Emil and the Detectives and vehicles for many of the German stars of the period. Wilder had his eye on Hollywood but left Germany faster than he had intended when Hitler came to power in 1933: “It seemed the wise thing for a Jew to do.” Stopping over for a time in Paris, Wilder (in collaboration with Alexander Esway) directed his first film, Mauvaise Graine (Bad Blood, 1933). A fast-paced movie about young auto thieves, it was made on a shoestring and featured Danielle Darrieux, then seventeen. Soon after, Wilder sold a story to Columbia and this paid his way, via Mexico, to California. Wilder arrived in Hollywood speaking almost no English and shared a room and “ a can of soup a day” with Peter Lorre. After two hard years, Wilder became a writer for Paramount. He had no great success, however, until in 1936 the producer Arthur Hornblow asked him to collaborate with Charles Brackett on a script, Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife for Ernst Lubitsch. Bracket was a novelist and a New Yorker drama critic, an urbane man from an old New England family. In spite of the radical differences between the two men, they formed a highly effective writing team, with Bracket selecting and polishing the most promising of Wilder’s “prodigious stream of ideas.” Among the excellent entertainments they wrote for Paramount directors in the late 1930s and early 1940s were Midnight and Hold Back the Dawn for Mitchell Leisen, Ball of Fire for Howard Hawks, and Lubitsch’s Ninotchka.

Wilder was infuriated by directorial misinterpretations of his scripts and frequently bounced onto the set to say so. Eventually Paramount gave him a chance to show how it should be done. His first American film as director was The Major and the Minor (1942), about a disenchanted career girl stranded in New York who masquerades as a twelve-year-old because she lacks the adult train fare back to Iowa. Ginger Rogers (then thirty) played the heroine, Ray Milland, the military-school officer she falls in love with, and the result was universally enjoyed as “an enchanting film farce.” Wilder followed this very

successful debut with Five Graves to Cairo (1943), a fairly ludicrous war thriller, which cast Erich von Stroheim as Field Marshal Rommel. Wilder, who was awed by the inventiveness of Stroheim’s performance, says, “he influenced me greatly as a director: I always think of my style as a curious cross between Lubitsch and Stroheim.” Raymond Chandler, not Brackett, was Wilder’s coauthor on Double Indemnity (1944), based on the novella by James Cain. This brilliant film noir

starred Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray as lovers who plan the “accidental” death of Stanwyck’s husband, and Edward G. Robinson as the cold-blooded insurance agent who investigates the claim. Double Indemnity (which the Hays Office condemned as “a blueprint for murder”) is a film of great originality, not least in Wilder’s decision to begin the film with MacMurray’s Dictaphone confession. Wilder has “always felt that surprise is not as effective as suspense. By identifying the criminals right off the bat–and identifying ourselves with them–we can concentrate on what follows–their efforts to escape, the net closing, closing.” Shooting the film on location in Los Angeles, Wilder, and his cameraman John F. Seiz worked for seedy realism rather than Hollywood chic–“I’d go in kind of dirty up the sets a little bit and make them look worn. I’d take the white out of everything….The whole film was deliberately underplayed, done very quietly; if you have something that’s full of violence and drama you can afford to take it easy.” Howard Barnes in his review called Double Indemnity a thriller that more than once reached “the level of high tragedy,” and the film is now widely regarded as a classic of the genre. Neil Sinyard suggests that it is also an indictment of American materialism and a study of the conflict between reason and passion, order and anarchy. The Lost Weekend (1945) captured four Oscars: one for best picture, one for Ray Milland as best actor, two for Wilder as best director and as coadaptor with Brackett of Charles Jackson’s novel. Set (and partly filmed) in New York, it observes an alcoholic writer as he struggles against his craving; then succumbs, then lies, cheats, and steals to buy drink. As in Double Indemnity, the audience is forced to share the growing desperation of an individual in a state of moral collapse….The film has touches of mordant humor and an unconvincing upbeat ending but is otherwise quite uncompromising; it was

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nevertheless a commercial as well as a critical success, confounding the studio bosses and movie columnists who had prophesied disaster. The Emperor Waltz (1948) took Wilder from Third Avenue to fin de siècle Vienna, where an American phonograph salesman (Bing Crosby) falls in love with an Austrian countess (Joan Fontaine). This mildly amusing romance was followed by a more acerbic study of the clash between American and European values in A Foreign Affair (1948), which has Congresswoman Jean Arthur visiting postwar Berlin to investigate the moral turpitude of occupying GIs. Like many subsequent Wilder films, this one derives excellent comedy from the spectacle of human depravity. Wilder, whose mother, grandmother, and stepfather had all been murdered by the Nazis, had first revisited Berlin in 1945 during a brief tour of duty as colonel in charge of the film section of the United States Army Psychological Warfare Division. A Foreign Affair, in its rigorous eschewal of national stereotypes and its cheerful insistence on the universality of human weakness, is in its ribald way an act of faith. It drew from Marlene Dietrich a wonderfully ironic, cooly defiant performance as a nightclub singer. A cruel and haunting picture, Sunset Boulevard (1950) was a controversial, world-wide success, regarded by many as the best film ever made about Hollywood and by others as a treacherous calumny…. Louis B. Mayer wanted Wilder horsewhipped, but it seemed to James Agee that the film allowed Norma Desmond and her contemporaries a barbarous intensity that had a “kind of grandeur” compared to the small, smart, safe-playing” Hollywood of the 1940s. Sunset Boulevard, which brought Wilder and Brackett Oscars for best story and best screenplay, was the last film they wrote together–“sometimes match and striking surface wear out,” Wilder explained. His next picture was one of the blackest ever to come out of a commercial studio, Ace in the Hole (1951), also known as The Big Carnival. An Albuquerque newsman down on his luck (Kirk Douglas) finds a man trapped in a mine cave-in and creates a journalistic scoop by postponing a rescue for six days. Vast crowds arrive to enjoy the tragedy, a carnival moves in to exploit the crowds, and in the end the man dies. The film was much admired in Europe, but in the United States it was a disaster, destroying at a stroke Wilder’s reputation as an infallible audience-pleaser who could make gold out of trash. Ace in the Hole was seen as an insult to the American people in general and to the Fourth Estate in particular. Its failure was regarded as clear evidence that Wilder had all along owed his success to Charles Brackett. (Since then the picture has been discussed with increasing admiration by critics who praise it as “a harsh allegory of the modern artist” and compare it, in its passion, anger, and courage to Stroheim’s Greed.)

Wilder’s next three films were all highly profitable adaptations of stage plays–the exuberant prison-camp comedy Stalag 17 (1953), the romantic satire Sabrina (1954; Wilder’s last film for Paramount), and The Seven Year Itch (1955), in

which the dreamy humor is sometimes overwhelmed by the prodigious presence of Marilyn Monroe. The Spirit of st. Louis (1957), Wilder’s account of Lindberg’s 1927 flight from New York to Paris, was an expensive failure. It was followed by another estimable play adaptation, Witness for the Prosecution (1958), with Charles Laughton hamming unforgettably as the barrister defending Tyrone Power against Marlene Dietrich. These five

movies were written by Wilder with an assortment of collaborators; the next film, however, marked the beginning of the second great writing partnership of his career, with I.A.L. Diamond. Love in the Afternoon (1957), about the regeneration of an aging American playboy (Gary Cooper) through his love for a Parisian innocent (Audrey Hepburn), has been called “Wilder’s most emphatic tribute to Lubitsch,” a romantic comedy of the greatest elegance and charm. In the roaring comedy of errors that followed, two broke, speakeasy musicians (Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis) happen to be in a Chicago garage on February 14, 1929, just in time to witness the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Choosing between death and dishonor, they dress up as women and join an all-girl band, which is on its way to Florida….Completed with great difficulty because of Marilyn Monroe’s increasing incapacity for work, Some Like It Hot (1959) is widely regarded as one of the cinema’s greatest comedies. Gerald Mast, indeed, thinks it’s Wilder’s best film, “a rich, multilayered confection of parodies and ironies,” calling subtly into question conventional notions of masculinity, femininity, sex, love, and violence. After the delirious pace of Some Like It Hot, Wilder achieved an almost equal success with The Apartment (1960), a quiet , sad, often bitter comedy about the perennial conflict between love and money….The film brought Wilder Oscars for best film, best director, and-with coauthor Diamond–best story and best screenplay None of Wilder’s subsequent movies has equaled the success and prestige of the best of the films he made between 1950 and 1960, though all have had their admirers and defenders…. Kiss Me, Stupid (1964), admired abroad for its “glorious” bad taste, its ruthless way of poking fun at American greed and hypocrisy, opened in the United States to a storm of abuse. It was called “sordid” and “slimy” and was condemned by the Legion of Decency for leaving adultery unpunished. Deeply hurt, Wilder retired for a time to Europe and, according to Maurice Zolotow, actually considered suicide. The improbably positive ending of the otherwise savage satire that followed, The Fortune Cookie (1966), was regarded by some critics as evidence that Wilder had lost his nerve.

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The most widely discussed of Wilder’s late films was Fedora (1978), a sadder and wiser variation on the theme of Sunset Boulevard. . . . Sunset Boulevard was made when Wilder was at the peak of his success, and it has a confidence and audacity lacking in the later films. Perhaps, as Adrian Turner and Neil Sinyard suggest, Fedora is “even richer because of that, the vision of a man who knows the system inside out but who. . . has been increasingly placed in the situation of an outsider looking in. Thus, the tone of the film is extraordinarily ambivalent, constantly pulling between sombreness and romance. . .this ambivalence is thematically of the utmost relevance and importance. . .the whole film is about ghosts, mirror images and doubles–about the pull between truth and illusion, youth and age.” Dutch Detweiler in Fedora complains that his Hollywood has gone: “The kids with the beards have taken over, with their zoom lenses and handheld cameras.” Wilder himself, though he has been generous in his praise of some of his juniors, is similarly contemptuous of that which he regards as stylistically pretentious and self-conscious in contemporary cinema. His own work is for the most part not visually distinctive, relying more on language than on images to convey his misanthropic vision. Coming of age in Berlin between the wars, it seemed to Wilder that (as one of his characters says) “People will do anything for money. Except some people. They will do almost anything for money.” That, as he acknowledges, is the theme of all his pictures, and in the best of them he has expressed it dramatically enough or wittily enough to make it palatable to millions. That he has been concerned to sweeten the bitter pills he hands his audiences displeases some of his recent critics: David Thomson, for example, has called him “a heartless exploiter of public taste who manipulates situation in the name of satire.” In fact, what has happened, as Neil Sinyard says, is that “a director previously identified with a cinema of acerbity and risk in a climate of tasteful timidity has come to represent a cinema of temperateness and geniality in a climate of sensationalism and shock.” He lived in a relatively modest apartment crammed with paintings by such artists as Picasso, Klee, Chagall, Dufy, and Rouault. He is a chain-smoker, and , according to Axel Madsen, his most striking physical trait is restlessness: Walter Reisch similarly says that “speed is absolutely of the essence to him. He cannot do anything slowly.” Wilder is a famous wit and sometimes a cruel one; he once remarked that “All that’s left on the cutting-room floor when I’m through are cigarette butts, chewing-gum wrappers and tears. A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant, and a bastard.”

from Conversations with Wilder. Cameron Crowe. Alfred A. Knopf, NY, 2000. BW: When I did Double Indemnity, I tried every leading man in town. I went about as low as George Raft, that’s pretty low. [Laughs.] He had somebody read the script for him, because he could not read. So somebody read the script, and then halfway through, he came over to the studio and said, “I’m halfway through that script, and where comes the lapel?” And I said, “The lapel?” “You know what I mean—where does it show that he’s an FBI man? The lapel!” [He demonstrates turning the lapel of a coat over, showing an FBI badge.] “There is no lapel,” I tell him. “I really am a murderer? I wouldn’t do that, I wouldn’t touch it, for God’s sake!” But Stanwyck knew that it was good stuff, and she grabbed it.

CC: Do you remember the direction you gave Barbara Stanwyckn on Double Indemnity? For that silent shot on her face when the murder is occurring in the backseat? BW: When he shoots the husband in the backseat. Yes. Sure, that was a highly intelligent actress, Miss Stanwyck. I questioned the wig, but it was proper, because it was a phony wig. It was an obviously phony wig. And the anklet—the equipment of a woman, you know,

that is married to this kind of man. They scream for murder. Yeah, naturally we rehearsed this thing. But I rehearsed it with her once or twice, that’s the maximum, and it was not that much different from the way she would have done it. She was just an extraordinary woman. She took the script, loved it, right from the word go, didn’t have the agent come and say, “Look, she’s to play a murderess, she must get more money, because she’s never going to work again.” With Stanwyck, I had absolutely no difficulties at all. And she knew the script, everybody’s lines. You could wake her up in the middle of the night and she’d know the scene. Never a fault, never a mistake—just a wonderful brain she had. CC: Did you write the part for Barbara Stanwyck? BW: Yeah, And then there was an actor by the name of Fred MacMurray at Paramount, and he played comedies. Small dramatic parts, big parts in comedies. I let him read it and he said, “I can’t do that.” And I said, “Why can’t you?” He said, “It requires acting!” [Laughs.] I said, “Look, you have now arrived in comedy, you’re at a certain point where you either have to stop, or you have to jump over the river and start something new.” He said, “Will you tell me when I’m no good?” [He nods.: a partnership is born.] And he was wonderful because it’s odd casting…. CC: I have a question about the look and art direction of your movies. Just below the surface of the scripts and the acting is a very rich layer of visual detail. When you head

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into a picture like The Apartment or Double Indemnity, do you have a painter in mind whose work has inspired you? What kind of specific vision do you give to your production designer? BW: [Warming instantly:] Not actually a painter, but sometimes houses. Like for instance, Double Indemnity. I had to find a house that is typical for a guy like the husband of Barbara Stanwyck. Two stories I wanted, because I wanted to photograph her coming down the steps with the anklet. The art director lived in a house like this, and what I wanted, what I was trying for with my cameramen John Seitz—he was a very old man. [Smiles.] Only fifty-one at the time and had done pictures with Valentino—was a very specific thing. I told him that whenever I come into a house like this, whenever I opened the door and the sun was coming in, there was always dust in the air. Because they never dusted it. And I asked him, “Could you get that effect?” And he could. CC: How did you arrive at the visual style of the movie? BW: We had to be realistic. You had to believe the situation and the characters, or all was lost. I insisted on black-and-white, of course, and in making operettas I’d learned that sometimes one technical shot destroyed a picture. You could say that Double Indemnity was based on the principal of M [Fritz Lang, 1931], the very good picture starring Peter Lorre. I had a feeling, something in my head, M was on my mind. I tried for a very realistic picture—a few little tricks, but not very tricky. M was the look of the picture. It was a picture that looked like a newsreel. You never realized it was staged. But like a newsreel, you look to grab a moment of truth, and exploit it. CC: But the lighting was sometimes very dramatic. Were you influenced by the German expressionist films? BW: No. There was some dramatic lighting, yes, but it was newsreel lighting. That was the ideal. I’m not saying that every shot was a masterpiece, but sometimes, even in a newsreel you get a masterpiece shot. That was the approach. No phone setups. I had a few shots between MacMurray and Edward G. Robinson, and they happened at the beginning and the end, when the two were together in that room. That was it. Everything was meant to support the realism of the story. I had worked with the cameraman before and I trusted him. We used a little mezzo light in the apartment when Stanwyck comes to see MacMurray in the apartment—this is when he makes up his mind to commit murder. That’s it. I always had a good friendship with my cameramen. Fritz Lang told me early in my career, “Look for the good shooters, there are some special ones.” He was right, and I was very lucky. They were good, very fun. They did what was

asked. Sometimes they wanted to do a little move…and held back. [Smiles.] . CC: Some still wonder about that door in the apartment hallway in Double Indemnity. In the great scene where Stanwyck comes to visit Neff (MacMurray). She hides behind the door as Keyes (Robinson) exits. Yet apartment doors always open in, and this one opens out. BW: Yeah, that was a mistake that we made and I did not want to correct it. We’d already shot it. It worked and I did not want to reshoot it. … I had made two grim pictures, Double Indemnity and Lost Weekend. Double Indemnity was so grim, by the way, that Brackett kind of ducked out. He says, “No, it’s too grim for me.” So that’s how I got [Raymond] Chandler. Mr. Raymond Chandler, from whom I learned in the very beginning, you know,

what real dialogue is. Because that’s all he could write. That, and descriptions. “Out of his ears grew hairs long enough to catch a moth”…or the other one I loved: “Nothing is as empty as an empty swimming pool.” But he could not construct. He was about sixty when we worked together. He was a dilettante. He did not like the structure of a screenplay, wasn’t used to it. He was a mess, but he could write a beautiful sentence. “There is nothing as empty as an empty swimming pool.” That is a great line, a great one. After a while, I

was able to write like Chandler….I would take what he wrote, and structure it, and we would work on it. He hated James Cain. I loved the story, but he did not care for Cain. I tried to get Cain, but he was busy making a movie. Chandler also didn’t care for Agatha Christie. But each had what the other lacked. Christie, she knew structure. Sometimes the plot was very high-schoolish. She had structure, but she lacked poetry. Very underrated, Christie, She is not discussed enough. CC: Over the years, it appears you’ve upgraded your estimations of [Mitchel Leisen and Chandler. BW: Sure, the anger gets washed, gets watery. You know, you forget about it. That’s a very good thing. That’s the only thing. Sure. I cannot forgive Mr. Hitler, but I certainly can forgive Mr. Leisen or Mr. Chandler. That’s a different story. [Pause.] But then…there was a lot of Hitler in Chandler. from Richard Schickel, Double Indemnity. Bfi, London, 1996 Wilder could acknowledge what movies until then hesitated to admit openly, the anti-romantic possibility that sexual attraction can easily turn into sexual obsession, and that once it does it has a terrible power to victimize and criminalize.

Wilder—DOUBLE INDEMNITY—8

In Cain’s story, we vaguely understand the demon claims investigator to be a sort of father figure to Walter. But he is a distant and somewhat menacing one. In the movie their relationship is much warmer, and it is set forth in much richer detail. ‘It’s the love story in the picture,’ as Wilder put it. There were executives at Paramount who did not believe that Wilder would ever ‘lick’ Double Indemnity. Indeed, they had in hand, before he and Chandler began work, a letter from the Breen office roundly disapproving Cain’s novella, and it speaks well of them—or perhaps of Wilder’s growing clout on the lot—that they permitted him to go to script on the project. Among other things, the Breen office missive condemned the piece for permitting Walter Neff to demonstrate redeeming qualities, and added: ‘The general low tone and sordid flavor makes it, in our judgment, thoroughly unacceptable for screen presentation.’ But really the bluntness and hardness of Stanwyck’s work was something essentially new, and the alacrity with which it was imitated in film after film of the 40s is one of the interesting, largely unexplored questions of our movie and social history. No other film Wilder made has had Double Indemnity’s influence on the history of American movies. It is equally certain that no film he ever made has a larger claim on our regard. Or on his own. Wilder once said it was his favorite film. Asked to explain himself he said simply: ‘ It has the fewest mistakes.’ And that, probably is as good a place as any to rest the case for this daring and masterful movie.

from Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, edited by Alain Silver & Elizabeth Ward With the Western, film noir shares the distinction of being an indigenous American form. Unlike Westerns, noir films have no precise antecedents either in terms of a well-defined literary genre or a period in American history. As a result, what might be termed the noir cycle has a singular position in the brief history of American motion pictures: a body of films that not only presents a cohesive vision of America but that does so in a manner transcending the influences of auteurism or genre. Film noir is grounded neither in personal creation nor in translation of another tradition into film terms. Rather it is a self-contained reflection of American cultural preoccupations in film form. In short, it is the unique example of a wholly American film style. That may seem a substantial claim to make for a group of films whose plots frequently turn on deadly violence or sexual obsession, whose catalogue of characters includes numbers of down-and-out private eyes, desperate women, and petty criminals. Nor does the visceral unease felt by a viewer who watches a shadowy form move across a lonely street or who hears the sound of car tires creeping over wet asphalt automatically translate into sociological assertions about paranoia or postwar guilt. At the same time, it is clear that the emergence of film noir coincides with these and other popular sentiments at large in America. “Film noir” is literally “black film,” not just in the sense of being full of physically dark images, nor of reflecting a dark mood in American society, but equally, almost empirically, as a black slate on which the culture could inscribe its ills and in the process produce a catharsis to help relieve them.

COMING UP IN THE FALL 2013 BUFFALO FILM SEMINARS XXVII:

September 24 Delmer Daves 3:10 to Yuma 1957 October 1 Kon Ichikawa Fires on the Plain 1959

October 8 Peter Bogdanovich The Last Picture Show 1971 October 15 Sidney Lumet Network 1976

October 22 Bruce Jackson & Diane Christian Death Row 1979 October 29 Jim Jarmusch Dead Man 1995

November 5 Pedro Almodóvar Talk to Her 2002 November 12 Charlie Kaufman Synecdoche, New York 2008

November 19 Wim Wenders Pina 2011 November 26 Baz Luhrmann The Great Gatsby 2013

The online PDF files of these handouts have color images

CONTACTS: ...email Diane Christian: engdc@buffalo.edu

…email Bruce Jackson bjackson@buffalo.edu ...for the series schedule, annotations, links and updates: http://buffalofilmseminars.com

...to subscribe to the weekly email informational notes, send an email to addto list@buffalofilmseminars.com ....for cast and crew info on any film: http://imdb.com/

The Buffalo Film Seminars are presented by the Market Arcade Film & Arts Center and State University of New York at Buffalo

with support from the Robert and Patricia Colby Foundation and the Buffalo News