Kicking off 2020 with a couple of titles from the legendary filmmaker.
Every New Years there are three films that I absolutely must watch around the holiday. The first is Ghostbusters 2 (a very credible NYE title), the second is New Years Eve (the Michelle Pfeiffer/Zac Efron storyline saves that movie) and of course, The Apartment. While it’s not ostensibly a New Years movie in the way that It’s a Wonderful Life is a Christmas one, spending only the last few minutes on the actual night itself, The Apartment has enough of the kind of real-life sentiment, commentary and relatability which tends to more potent towards the end of the year. The film, which tells the story of an insurance man (Jack Lemmon) who falls for an elevator operator (Shirley Maclaine) as he tries to rise up the ranks by loaning out his apartment to married executives for their various trysts, has become a perennial favorite for end-of-year viewing with Alamo Drafthouse screenings selling out quickly.
Co-written and directed by Billy Wilder, the multi-Oscar winner was a smash and wasted no time in attaining classic status with a reputation which only grows stronger as years go by. The Apartment would have been considered Wilder’s crowning achievement had the famed director not had a significant number of other classics in his filmography. Double Indemnity, Sunset Blvd., Ace in the Hole, Sabrina, Some Like it Hot, The Seven Year Itch, Witness for the Prosecution; just one these titles would have been enough to solidify any filmmaker’s reputation. But Wilder was never just any filmmaker, with his artistic hunger and drive taking him all the way into the 80s.
Following my annual viewing of The Apartment recently in celebration of the new year, I decided to revisit a pair of lesser-regarded Wilder titles, 1948’s A Foreign Affair and 1974’s The Front Page, to see how time and changes within the industry reshaped Wilder’s curiosity and storytelling sensibilities.
In the mid-40s, Wilder was at the place every aspiring director wishes to be. 1945’s future noir classic Double Indemnity was nominated for over half a dozen Oscars, including a pair for Wilder in the directing and screenplay categories. The director would go on to win both statues the following year for the dark drama The Lost Weekend, cementing his reputation as a bold filmmaker who knew to push boundaries while at the same time making Hollywood movies for mainstream audiences. There was such a raw honesty to the films Wilder made during this time. Each title was fraught with risks as the men and women wrestled with the greyness of life. The state of post-war America and the changing of outlooks throughout the country likewise gave the director freedom to explore who he was a visual storyteller. The intricacies and complexities of being human drove Wilder’s storytelling during this time more than any other motif as he couldn’t help but combine the sweet with the cynical in almost every movie he made.
Apart from Double Indemnity and The Lost Weekend, A Foreign Affair is perhaps the most quintessential Wilder movie of the post-war 40s. The story deals with a congresswoman from Iowa (Jean Arthur) who travels to Berlin with a group of fellow politicians to see how the city’s post-war rebuilding process is going. Upon arriving, she meets a handsome American Army Captain (John Lund) who is secretly romancing an ex-Nazi torch singer (Marlene Dietrich). Like most of Wilder’s films, A Foreign Affair is a hybrid of genres. On one side is a sort of farcical romantic comedy, with John (Lund) deciding he must woo Phoebe (Arthur) in order to protect Erika (Dietrich) from being exposed as his mistress. This of course results in a John struggling to maintain a hold on the two women as one becomes dryly defensive and the other hilariously lets down her guard. The scene featuring the three main characters in the nightclub Erika sings at sees a delightfully tipsy Phoebe acting giddy in front of a nonplussed Erika and an incredibly nervous John.
When the charade is dropped and the farce evolves into an actual love triangle with each side wrestling with their own feelings and agendas, A Foreign Affair enters a level of depth and honesty that manages to focus squarely on the personal in a way which goes beyond the surface of other 40s romances. But because Wilder seldom missed the chance of making an observation or two on the state of the world, there is a serious comment here on love and loyalty to country and the way a person balances that duty with what they want from their own life. Wilder manages to show this moral struggle in each of the main characters for what ends up being one of the most surprisingly telling films ever to come out of post-war Hollywood.
If Wilder’s popularity had dwindled by the time of The Front Page in 1974, the director still had enough goodwill from both the audience and the industry to get this period comedy made. The director’s previous few films had found varying degrees of success in terms of accolades and box office which caused him to be seen less in the vein of the brave director who took chances with his films and more of an established favorite who had enough clout to make any sort of film he wanted. He still took risks; some of which paid off. The moral questions in 1966’s The Fortune Cookie showed Wilder clearly in touch with social relations of the day, while the sexual overtones of 1963’s Irma la Douce were played for laughs so much, the whole film very nearly bordered on parody. Still, Wilder never got lazy. Even if his sensibilities weren’t always keeping up with the fashion of the day, the director’s movies always felt as if they were made by someone who remained curious and excited about the story he was bringing to the screen.
The Front Page was one of a handful of times that Wilder didn’t have his own material to work with. Based on a play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, the 1920s-set movie centers on top newspaperman Hildy (Lemmon) who has decided to leave the newspaper business to marry the beautiful Peggy (Susan Sarandon) much to the chagrin of his hot-headed editor Walter (Walter Matthau). Throwing a wrench into the happy couple’s plans is the escape of a prisoner on death row, which quickly turns into the scoop of the century. If there was a sort of cynicism to Wilder’s earlier work, there’s a definite “I don’t give a f***” mode here. Apart from Sarandon’s Peggy, there’s very little hope or brightness in The Front Page. It’s almost as if everyone here is not just waiting, but counting on the society around them to fall apart, allowing them to revel in vices such as booze and poker while laughing at anything genuine or sincere.
Wilder’s films have certainly had their share of somber moments, but there’s always been a gentleness to the tragedies his characters have to endure. In The Front Page, not only are the characters laughing at anything resembling any kind of human light, but it appears that Wilder is laughing even harder. The Front Page is a funny exercise. Lemmon and Matthau are in top form, the dialogue has the kind of zippyness everyone wants from a movie like this and the movie is filled with one familiar character actor after another giving their all. Wilder doesn’t always succeed in making The Front Page feel like its own piece of cinema rather than an adapted stage work, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have the necessary exuberance. The movie may have been made from an older, slightly more jaded director than before, but latter-day Wilder still couldn’t help but retain much of the electricity which made him one of the film world’s best.
If A Foreign Affair can be considered second-tier Wilder in terms of popularity and lifespan, then The Front Page certainly belongs in the director’s underrated pile. The film isn’t alone. Irma la Douce may only be notable today for the re-teaming of MacLaine and Lemmon following The Apartment, while The Fortune Cookie is notable for being the first pairing of Lemmon and Matthau (who took home an Oscar for his role). Others however, such as the utterly whimsical Avanti!, remain more or less skipped over in favor of some of Wilder’s aforementioned earlier titles. There’s always that notion that a director is almost never as good in later years as he/she was when they were first beginning. Wilder almost proves the exception to this rule. Look at any film from any era and you’ll find an assortment of men and women trying to navigate the carnival of life, wrestling with issues which firmly remain part of the human condition. Each Wilder movie contains charm filtered through pragmatism as well as sentiment mixed with realism. Throughout the years and with every movie he made, Wilder clung to his instincts as filmmaker, never once compromising or altering his approach to the craft he was so clearly a master at.
A Foreign Affair and The Front Page are available on Blu-Ray and DVD from Kino Lorber.
