Word: wilder
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...always wishes that Thornton Wilder were as intelligent as he is theatrically gifted. After his stagecraft enchants and grips you, you're left with the truisms and slightly awry profundity of his philosophy. He converts the theatre into a sympathetic, subtle medium and then ignores its potential to sermonize. But his humor is so warm, and his juggling of conventions so hypnotic, that you're a hundred steps out of the theatre before you realize you've been hoodwinked into sentimentality...
...FORTUNE COOKIE. Director Billy Wilder (The Apartment; Kiss Me, Stupid) tackles that great pastime, cheating the insurance company. His antihero is a leering, sneering shyster lawyer, played by Walter Matthau, who pulls the strings for the supposedly injured party, Jack Lemmon, and ends up stealing the show...
...Trenches. Sydney's welcome was even wilder-too wild, in fact. At the airport, the President enthused: "You've treated us like we really belong here." "You do, you do!" several men shouted in reply. Most Aussies plainly agreed. Cheering and waving, more than a million of them lined Johnson's eight-mile route into the city. But as his motorcade approached Hyde Park, several hundred demonstrators were waiting. They were well prepared. Australian intelligence reported that they had intercepted messages from Melbourne Communists advising sympathizers in Sydney on how to disrupt the President's visit...
...Fortune Cookie. Director Billy Wilder has taken the very rash risk in this film of spiking his big gun. In Cookie he keeps Jack Lemmon, a funnyman-in-motion who lacks the instincts of a sit-down comedian, sitting in a wheelchair that makes him seem foolish but never funny. With Lemmon immobilized, only a miracle could save the show from being as sedative as Wilder's last picture, Kiss Me, Stupid. Fortunately, something like a miracle is at hand: Walter Matthau. A magnificent comic actor too long misused as a minor cinemenace, Matthau last year played such...
...taboos are either eliminated or modified. Gone in the era of Billy Wilder is the statement that seduction is never "acceptable as a subject matter for comedy." Instead of "profanity is forbidden," the code specifies that "undue profanity should not be permitted." Where once the code banned nudity altogether, it now forbids "indecent or undue exposure." When a reporter asked Valenti if "bare breasts could be deemed indecent in one film and decent in another," Valenti emphatically replied...