Word: wilderness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...henchman is a minor character in a fleeting scene in Some Like It Hot, but Billy Wilder couldn't resist giving him a line with a nifty reverse spin on it. That was Wilder all over. He gave Hollywood's top stars their finest, fullest roles: Greta Garbo (Ninotchka), Barbara Stanwyck (Double Indemnity), Gloria Swanson (Sunset Blvd.), Audrey Hepburn (Sabrina and Love in the Afternoon), Marilyn Monroe (Some Like It Hot), Jack Lemmon (The Apartment and six others). And what was in it for the viewer? Roiling dramatic dilemmas, complex adult characters and, memorably, some of the tastiest slices...
Being the cleverest fellow in movies had its perks: six Oscars (out of 21 nominations), for writing, producing and directing. It also earned Wilder, from the sterner critics, the label of cynic. They said his films were long on wit and short on compassion. Pick up a rock, and Wilder's view of the human condition would crawl out from under it. Nearly 40 years ago, critic Andrew Sarris wrote, "Billy Wilder is too cynical to believe even his own cynicism." Today we can see that Wilder was less a cynic than a premature realist. An Austrian Jew who left...
...acerbic joy--a shameless love for all the scoundrels who schemed to get rich, kill the cuckolded husband, exploit the misery of a man trapped in a cave, beat a murder rap, shin up the corporate ladder, bamboozle an insurance company or steal a nice guy's girl. For Wilder, mankind was divided not into the haves and have-nots but into the haves and let's-gets. He celebrated the ugly American: brash men on the make, women on the take. What knaves these mortals be! How smart they are, though not as smart as they think...
...Robinson spits out suicide rates with the fervor of a baseball-stats maven. In The Fortune Cookie shyster Walter Matthau says that insurance companies have too much money: "They've run out of storage space--they have to microfilm it... So don't give me with the scruples." Wilder never straddled the fence; he trampolined from one side to the other...
That is called drama--the conflict of two seductive types, like the romantic and the cynic. The cynic gets the best lines, but Wilder made sure that this battle of heart vs. mind was a fair fight. And often he gave the heart every reason to conquer--as in the climax of Some Like It Hot, when a despondent Monroe sings (tremulously, beautifully) I'm Through with Love and Tony Curtis waddles in on high heels to plant the most eerily passionate kiss in film history...