Word: wilder
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...Billy Wilder's The Fortune Cookie has been widely hailed as some sort of beautiful moral statement from a reformed cynic. Don't believe it. Wilder's cynicism--really his acceptance of the truth--is very much in evidence in The Fortune Cookie; it makes his moralism palatable...
...Three, Irma La Douce, and Kiss Me, Stupid--the man's last three pictures--were characterized not so much by cynicism as by excess. In all things. Kiss Me, Stupid, unquestionably Wilder's worst, was so overplayed, overwritten and overdirected that it seemed fair to call it his Armageddon. But with the benefit of hindsight, one can see that beneath the roughage Wilder has been brewing a new style of comedy. And the brew has come to boil with The Fortune Cookie...
...This, Wilder's 20th movie, both climaxes and redeems a career that has produced such diverse films as The Lost Weekend and Some Like it Hot. It embodies all that is best in Wilder: the polish of Sabrina, the bite of Ace in the Hole, and the sentimentality of The Apartment. Plus it adds a new brick to Wilder's pile: understatement...
Because The Fortune Cookie is, (unlike just about every Wilder picture in the last fifteen years) modest, it is difficult to regard as a major work. Yet with the slick surface stripped away from Wilder, he turns from a destructive into a constructive cynic. You learn again that evil mercenary people dominate the world, and for the first time that relative goodness need not indicate a suspect I.Q. or similar character defect...
...worry. Wilder has the sense not to drown The Fortune Cookie in good will. If one or two of his and I.A.L. Diamond's screenplays have been funnier over-all, there has still been none in which as high a percentage of the jokes came off. This is largely due to the efforts of two veteran comics: Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon...