The death of Billy Wilder last week was not the end of an era. Scan the titles of masterpieces most often recited in the obits -- Double Indemnity (1944), Sunset Boulevard (1950), Sabrina (1954), Some Like It Hot (1959), The Apartment (1960) -- and you immediately recognize that the era Wilder was so instrumental in helping define was over long, long before he made his last film, Buddy Buddy, in 1981. It was an era in which, as historian Otto Friedrich once wrote, "the leading moviemakers of Hollywood could with some justification regard themselves as conquering heroes." And many of them, like Wilder, had come from Europe, which is what makes European reaction to the news of Wilder's death so intriguing.
In Austria, where Wilder spent the first 19 years of his life, the public television channels threw their schedules to the wind to show a string of six Wilder classics. Der Standard, the most respected paper in a country that's taken so many punches in the last couple of years for the cultural policies of its governing coalition of conservatives and right-wingers (remember Jörg Haider, the Europhobe who once praised Hitler's policies?), ran a bulging package of articles and recollections by Austrian actors, producers, art directors and so on who worked with -- or just happened to once meet -- Billy Wilder. You can't help but sense a jolt of national pride in the paper's waving around Wilder's scorecard: 7 Oscars, 21 nominations, 5 Golden Globes.
And the cheaper and more popular papers reacted accordingly. The Kurier harrumphed that, with the death of Wilder, "the 20th century has officially come to its end." Wilder had landed in the US to show those Americans "how their own unique art form really worked." The Neue Kronen-Zeitung was a bit less pompous, settling simply (and quite reasonably) on calling Wilder "one of the best directors of all time."
In Germany and Switzerland, there was evidently less of a need to beat the national breast. A space was cleared in the late night TV schedules for whatever Wilder gem was at hand and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung even made the case that what made Wilder great was the universality of his "cinema universe." The German papers, and in particular, die taz, based in Berlin, paid special note to his Berlin years, before and after WWII... but let's back up.
Samuel Wilder was born in 1906 in a corner of Austria so remote it's now part of Poland. He spent his youth watching the Austro-Hungarian empire collapse and, like fellow Austrian Fritz Lang, soaking up American pop culture. Neither of them was probably aware of it at the time, but, as chronicled in Neal Gabler's An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Created Hollywood, waves of Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution in Mitteleuropa were busily building the new capital of that culture, the world's "dream factory" -- and their future home. But like Lang before him, Wilder, 16 years younger, was taken with a more immediately available ambassador of American mythology, the touring Buffalo Bill Wild West Show. Because of his enthusiasm for it, his family started calling Wilder "Billie" and it stuck.
Their biographies and personalities, styles, obsessions and careers differ radically, yet it seems inevitable that both the monocled artist (Lang) and the scruffy reporter (Wilder) would leave Vienna for the Berlin of the 1920s, that great vortex of European intellectual and artistic, industrial and criminal activity. But while Lang was reigning over (and bankrupting) the Ufa Studios with monumental epics like Die Niebelungen (1924) and Metropolis (1926), Wilder was hiring himself out as a gigolo and writing about it in the Berlin papers.
Along with a front-page story, lengthy Page 3 essay and a dozen or so photos taken from Wilder's career (oh, look, there's Marilyn, Lemmon and Matthau, Shirley MacLaine, Cagney, Audrey Hepburn) running throughout the Feuilleton section, the Süddeutsche Zeitung ran one of these pieces that originally appeared in a long gone Berlin daily in 1929. And it sparkles. Decades before Tom Wolfe would celebrate a "New Journalism," Wilder was making his first-person narratives dance with a sure-footed timing that would mark his best work in Hollywood and, evidently, in those all-night clubs in Berlin. The young man already had an eye, too, for how closely poverty and wealth were crammed together in the city and for the loneliness and hunger of those trapped in either of the two.
These were the pieces that landed him his first screenwriting job, and within a year, he was at Ufa. He and the guys he was hanging with -- brothers Robert and Curt Siodmak, Fred Zinnemann, Edgar Ulmer and cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan, the only one of the bunch with any real professional experience -- put together an odd mix of documentary and fictional narrative they called People on Sunday; even odder, it was a hit, and Wilder's career was set. He pumped out nearly a dozen screenplays before Hitler came to power in 1933.
Wilder, a Jew, knew the game was up. It took Lang, who was not, a bit longer. Via France, and a bit of work there, then New York, where he had a brother, then Mexico, where he went to straighten out his status as an immigrant once his visitor's visa ran out, Wilder eventually made it to California where, still teaching himself English, he rebuilt his life from the ground up. By comparison, Lang was greeted in Hollywood like royalty. And they were only two of the roughly 1500 Hitler unwittingly flushed out of the German film industry and right over to Hollywood.
One night, Hungarian director István Szabó went to dinner at George Cukor's place. Wilder was there. In fact, "at this table," Szabó later wrote, "I got the feeling that Hollywood was nothing other than one of Mitteleuropa's great discoveries. All these people who came without speaking the language of the land invented another one they all knew."
After the war, the US sent Wilder back to Berlin to help de-Nazify the German film industry. He wasn't happy about it, but he did end up making two more movies there, one right away, one a bit later. In their own ways, both are about the Americanization of Europe: A Foreign Affair (1948), with the outspoken anti-fascist Marlene Dietrich in the touchy role of the ex-lover of a Nazi war criminal, and One, Two, Three (1961), with James Cagney pushing Coca-Cola in a city about to be sliced through the middle by the Wall.
Wilder was always glad to return to America. When he first arrived, he knew that this was where he wanted to die. He didn't mill around with the other German-speakers who plotted their eventual returns. All he really cared about was honing his craft and learning from the technical and dramaturgical "mistakes" he made fewer and fewer of from movie to movie.
Probably the best of the tributes to Wilder in the German papers was written by Verena Lueken in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Her last paragraph is worth translating in full:
At some point in the last thirty years, popular cinema began to separate itself from [Wilder's] kind of filmmaking. The visual moved into the foreground. Today some of the most successful directors have learned their craft in advertising and video, that is, in forms in which stories have to be told in thirty seconds, or two and a half minutes at the most. Stretched out to one and a half hours, most of it doesn't look that good. That's why Billy Wilder's films, when they're revived in repertory theaters in cities like New York, experience an almost unbelievable renaissance. They can't be copied these days. Billy Wilder was the last to bear witness to the great epoch of the American narrative movie, whose roots were to be found in Europe. With his death, it has become irretrievably historical.
It's a fine paragraph, but let's start it again. At some point in the last thirty years, maybe earlier, Europe lost its direct hotline to inner sanctum of international pop culture. The immigrants who used to run the studios, man the cameras and call the shots had kids, and those kids were American born and raised, and their memories were short.
Sure, Europe would have its moments of influence. Italian Neo-realism right after the war; the French New Wave in the 60s; New German Cinema in the 80s. But this was an around-several-corners sort of influence, the kind that makes an occasional impression among many on the few actually making big movies in the post-studio system Hollywood. With the rise of independent cinema in the mid-80s, American audiences saw fewer European films as movie houses in college towns opted for a fresh Spike Lee or Jim Jarmusch over an aging Jean-Luc Godard or Eric Rohmer.
By the mid-90s, a generation that could get its hands on any video in the world discovered that Asia was ingesting some of Hollywood's most exhilarating bits and transforming them into something even faster and furiouser. What Paris had been for Scorsese, Hong Kong was now for Tarantino. If, in the 60s and 70s, kids snuck into unrated European films for a glimpse of flesh or blood they couldn't find anywhere else, by the time everything went "cyber," their 90s counterparts were trading pirated anime.
Europe is feeling rather small these days, politically, economically, culturally. As for what little weight it has left to throw around in the world of film, the death of Billy Wilder didn't signal one more connection to its center cut. It reminded Europeans just how long it's been since it had one in the first place.
|
Your cart
© 2006 All Media Guide, LLC. Portions of content provided by All Movie Guide®,
a trademark of All Media Guide, LLC.