Ace in the POLL!! BILLY WILDER DIRECTS

ah shit my beautiful poll

Indemnity or Apartment. hmm.. Apartment.

http://www.musicman.com/00pic/3764.jpg

Ima sucker for Wm Holden and Gloria Swanson, with Erich von Stroheim action figure for more nutty goodness.

Haven't we done this? Not to be a dick, etc.

shut up and deal

well played

One of my alltime favourite writer-directors. Can't choose between either of the two Fred MacMurray offerings yet.

im in the "wildly overrated" camp...but Double Indemnity is pretty slick.

The "wildly overrated" designation, but with Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, The Seven Year itch, Some Like It Hot and The Apartment in his filmography: I suspect Wilder could probably live with that.

most criminally underseen: A Foreign Affair

is that the one with the filing cabinet scene?

I don't remember one... It has Jean Arthur singing the Iowa state song, and Dietrich vamping Hitler.

you'd remember it if you saw it.

imbd suggests it is

Phoebe Frost: We'll go there right now!
Captain John Pringle: Where?
Phoebe Frost: To the files!
Captain John Pringle: In the middle of the night? Shouldn't we get permission?
Phoebe Frost: Did we get permission to land in Normandie? Let's go!

i voted for fran kubelik.

A Foreign Affair isn't even out on DVD!

I'd like a poll on Wilder's screenwriting credits.

you'd remember it if you saw it.

I can remember very little before this morning's breakfast.

Sunset Blvd.

Foreign Affair's out on DVD in the US, has been for a while. Hard to pick, but I think it's my favourite Wilder movie. He's not much of a plot person, but I seem to remember it having a really great setup and story.

It's not listed on Netflix!

if it's not listed on Netflix, the movie was never made.

have "only" seen:
1944 Double Indemnity
1945 The Lost Weekend
1950 Sunset Boulevard
1951 Ace in the Hole
1953 Stalag 17
1957 Love in the Afternoon
1957 Witness for the Prosecution
1959 Some Like It Hot
1960 The Apartment
1974 The Front Page

and it's undoubtely The Apartment. Hurray for Gin Rummy.

Favorite things in A Foreign Affair:
Dietrich singing "Black Market" with accompaniment by the composer Frederick Hollaender.
Millard Mitchell telling the GIs to tone it down at the beginning- "Some of you PX millionaires have found out you can parlay a pack of cigarettes into something more than twenty smokes."

But probably gonna vote for the other Berlin movie, One, Two, Three.

It's not going to get much love in this poll, but Irma La Douce is a pretty great little movie.

I'm just waiting for Morbs to return so he can rap my knuckles about my calling Wilder "vulgar" a few years ago.

I think it's fair to say we're all waiting for that.

You're gonna be Jean Arthur to Morb's Marlene, Alfred.

Morbs is not sultry.

in season, I am.

The Apartment is going to win this, but it shouldn't

I'm tempted to rent Fedora and Buddy Buddy to find out if there're as awful as they look.

Fedora is an interesting variation on Sunset Blvd., Holden and all.

"Buddy Buddy" is a version of that French film with Jacques Brel in it?

Irma la Douce's view on prostitution is kinda odd, even for a comedy made in 1963, but it's also quite charming in an old-fashioned way, and very funny too, so I think I'm gonna vote for that.

Though I guess in the Hollywood of 1963 the mere idea of making a comedy about prostitution was still outrageous, no matter what the actual movie was like.

Irma is nowhere in the ballpark of his previous Lemmon comedies, or even One Two Three.

Lots of terrible things on this list, as I wrote on another Wilder thread: The Major and the Minor, Love in the Afternoon, Kiss Me Stupid, Witness for the Prosecution, to name a few. Sure, Hawks, Cukor, Ford, Hitchcock, etc, made lots of duds too, but when Wilder, very much a member of the point-and-shoot school of directing, is off his game, he comes up with something akin to Bowie's Never Let Me Down.

watching Sunset Boulevard the other night, a film I like, I was struck by how much damn voice-over is on the thing.

Yeah that is weird, considering how big wilder was on "Show! Don't Tell!"

OK Alfred, none of those are terrible, even if Gary Cooper is a stiff in LitA.

have you seen the uncensored version of Kiss Me Stupid?

TMATM = coy; has rotten pacing
LITA = unpleasantness of Gary Cooper (he looks like he reeks of BO and Automats), Hepburn's hair, forced Lubitsch 'sophistication.'
KMS = just stupid. Some of the worst one-liners I've ever heard from a purported genius writer of clever banter. Wilder is rarely as funny as he thinks.
WFTP = My God. The movie stops for Laughton fat jokes, like the handrail lift. Marlene Dietrich and Tyrone Power "acting" (she's particularly terrible in the last ten minutes).

Ace in the Hole is really overrated.

feel like I haven't seen enough of these to really vote... hard to choose.

I think the only ones I haven't seen are Mauvaise Graine and Death Mills

iF ONLY aPATOW COULD EQUAL Kiss Me Stupid!

seeing as how Apatow's only directed 2 movies compared to Wilder's two dozen we maybe shouldn't be encouraging that TS poll just yet

that Lindbergh/Stewart movie's gotta be a bore, right?

voted ace in the hole. it not only sustains the unbeleivability of douglas's comically oversized character but actually just keeps building on it, asking you to suspend rational thinking by degrees. and it's message remains intact but never detracts from wilder's primary goal of *entertaining*.

I still think Douglas' attack of conscience weakens it substantially, tho it's one of BW's best non-comedies.

i'm shocked s1ocki hasn't shown up yet to condemn "love in the afternoon"

I could go on, if you like.

i voted for "the apartment" because it's really the only one i care about, tho some of the others are funny.

I wonder what Alfred thinks of Joe E Brown in Some Like It Hot? or in anything else?

ZOWIE!

http://www.movieactors.com/photos/slihot89.jpeg

I wonder what Alfred thinks of Joe E Brown in Some Like It Hot? or in anything else

Nobody's perfect.

iF ONLY aPATOW COULD EQUAL Kiss Me Stupid!

― Dr Morbius, Tuesday, December 9, 2008 1:41 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

suggset banlevard

I love Ginger Rogers so I have a weird affection for The Major and the Minor even though it is creepy. I didn't vote for it, though.

i cant believe the witness for the prosecution hate on this thread

Lots of unpleasant performances in Wilder films. Besides Power and Dietrich, there's Nancy Olsen, Cooper, Ray Milland, Richard Gaines...

Carol Burnett, of all people, in The Front Page

i saw buddy, buddy when it came out
pretty dire despite presence of klaus kinski

is avanti! any good?

I saw Ace In The Hole only the other night, and while it wasn't bad, I fail to see why it's considered a classic. I vote Double Indemnity.

I remember liking Avanti! long ago. Juliet Mills, oo la la.

i'd rank the ones i've seen like this, best to worst:

1944 Double Indemnity
1950 Sunset Boulevard
1959 Some Like It Hot
1961 One, Two, Three
1964 Kiss Me, Stupid
1960 The Apartment
1945 The Lost Weekend
1953 Stalag 17
1951 Ace in the Hole
1974 The Front Page

the only stinker is the last one.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

So

Alfred : Wilder :: Me : screwball

but I can watch Wilder!

Double Indemnity vs. Sunset Blvd vs. Ace in the Hole

Eric watches screwball, don't believe the hype.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

is avanti! any good?

― negotiable, Wednesday, December 10, 2008 7:32 AM (6 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i threw it the one pity vote it got, not great but pretty entertaining, definitely worth a look.

I voted The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Perhaps not a Wilder classic but he puts an interesting spin on proceedings.

Um, I actually voted for Avanti!. As usual, I go for an auteur's later works and this is his masterpiece followed by The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. I'd even take the cleansed vision of Buddy Buddy over the two winners here.

You'll need to explain the Sherlock Holmes love, KJB. Nice and slow.

(Naturally you sound like me defending "Empire Burlesque")

weird, i swear i voted for Avanti too, maybe i just shrugged and went for the Apartment after all

Forgot a lot of the great lines in A Foreign Affair! Congresswoman Jean Arthur on a crime spike in Iowa: "A little boy in Des Moines took a blowtorch to his grandmother..."

tried to watch Avanti! a few wks ago and got about as far as the kitch-y coroner w/ the color-coded italian forms and turned it off. none of it was funny or charming and there was no reason to think it'd get better imo. there was a line where jack lemmon outright refers to juliette mills' character as fat that seemed really mean-spirited and would probably draw protesters today

After 1964 the guy totally lost it.

i cant believe the witness for the prosecution hate on this thread

― Ron Polarik, PhD (and what), Tuesday, December 9, 2008 11:48 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark

but the correct answer is SABRINA, what the hell is wrong with you communists

nobody threw a bone to Five Graves to Cairo? shame on yall

I saw Jonathan Rosenbaum introduce Double Indemnity in Toronto last night (followed by Q&A afterwards). One of my dozen favourite films. Never read the novel, but he was describing the original ending, and does it ever sound preposterous. Apparently the Dietrichson house still stands in California. And the Pacific All Risk office where Norton makes a fool out of himself trying to intimidate Phyllis was designed like the Paramount offices--which made me wonder if Norton was modelled on a studio head whom Wilder thought a buffoon. (Which in turn made Fred MacMurray wonder if I wonder.)

Probably Sunset Blvd, at this point. Maybe that would change with re-viewings.
I actually enjoy Witness for the Prosecution.

you can buy A Foreign Affair from TCM now

yes!

Black market,
Cuckoo clocks and bangles

Seem to have read today that BW was considering using Marilyn Monroe for another project after Some Like It Hot but can't remember what that might have been.

Kiss Me, Stupid I guess

Irma la douce. Liz Taylor was also considered.

Oh yeah, look at that, thanks.

I think it's amusing that a pre-"Faster Pussycat" Tura Satana is in Ild.

It's gotta be Foreign Affair. Or the Lost Weekend. Or the first 20 mins of Sabrina. Love in the Afternoon is genuinely awful though.

i was pretty disappointed in 'ace in the hole' when i finally saw it. haven't watched any of these in a long time but 'the apartment' still stands out to me as the best one.

I couldn't get through One, Two, Three. Two votes for that ahead of Sunset Blvd. or Double Indemnity is some outstanding contrarianism.

xp def agree on both

Voted One, Two, Three for incredible fast-paced funny and believable performance of Cagney as a hectic executive and its images of post-war, pre-wall Berlin. Almost voted A Foreign Affair for reasons stated above. Not conscious contrarianism, just think these New World meets Old Europe scenarios stress his strengths and help him steer clear of schmaltz.

Recently remarked that Tony Curtis wrote a book about the making of Some Like It Hot, but a perfunctory perusal seemed to indicate that it mainly consisted of him making stuff up, mostly about Marilyn.

^^I think I read an excerpt from that in VF when it came out. Apparently he was rocking a serious irl boner during the boat seduction shoot.

Would have killed an ordinary man.

cmon, A Foreign Affair can't be the BEST: John Lund.

Curtis & MM had allegedly had a thing years before SLIH.

Anything is possible. But are you sure he wasn't confusing her with someone else, like Yvonne De Carlo?

cmon, A Foreign Affair can't be the BEST: John Lund.

Not a single film that Crowe didnt defend in that hagiography.

i appreciate 123's energy and setting, but the humor is really stale to me.

I've never looked at the Crowe book. He annoys me.

Much as he obviously wanted it to be, that Crowe Wilder book is no Hitchcock/Truffaut. No Objects of Desire either.

It's more interesting for the anecdotes and observations he pulls out of a still-sharp Wilder, but even my contrarianism stops at the gates of Fedora and the remake of The Front Page.

Wazzabout Buddy Buddy?

I saw The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes in a beautiful 35mm print last night. Have to rate it an honorable miss (I think it might 'play shorter' if we had the full 5-episode 165-minute version, if we had it). Robert Stephens' excessive makeup took some getting used to, and while I like dopey sidekicks Colin Blakely's Watson began to grate after the first 30 mins. Good non-fanged Christopher Lee; nice brief work from Clive Revill as the ballet impresario (nothing like a protracted 1970 gay-ppanic sketch) and the old broad who played Queen Victoria.

despise that movie, but i'm v protective of watson. hardly the only movie to violate him but at least the guys directing nigel bruce towards banana peels didn't think they were so goddam clever.

Superb long feature on the Brackett-Wilder partnership: http://thedissolve.com/features/movie-of-the-week/635-charles-brackett-billy-wilder-and-the-rise-and-fal/

Just took a look and read the beginning. Wow, thanks for posting. Always wanted to know about that, looking forward to the publication of those Brackett memoirs.

http://image2.findagrave.com/photos250/photos/2004/292/6295551_109825082512.jpg

The guru has laid another egg.

Lemmon and Matthau planted close by, Marilyn about 50 yards away.

Nobody's perfect.

Joe E Brown's in Glendale

Double Indemnity... kind of a fake film noir, really? Sort of what High Noon is to non-watchers of westerns.

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/double-indemnity

I'm sympathetic to claims that it's drab and uninteresting and once you get it the first time it doesn't keep resonating (and Kael was right about the other supporting actors, so bad they're unbelievable); but in the novel Phyllis and Walter aren't much crazy about each other either.

not my favorite noir. it's good but there is something perfunctory about it.

I think it's pretty damned good but a definite step below a lot of other classics (and even a bunch of films not considered to be classics.)

Stanwyck playing not-as-smart-as-he-thinks-he-is MacMurray holds my interest more than the Robinson scenes ... they're both repellent characters, but that doesn't make the proceedings any less noir

part of the problem is probably Raymond Chandler, who couldn't quite write a screenplay

it's certainly one of Wilder's best films.

Double Indemnity > High Noon

jeez Gary Cooper is a pretty cowgirl than Grace Kelly.

is High Noon really liked by non-fans of Westerns? i didn't know this! i thought the default Westerns for non-Westerns fans were the Spaghettis.

Confused here too, High Noon seems like a pretty hardcore Western to me

It's the kind picked as the favorite by people (eg Bill Clinton, ugh) who don't know from Budd Boetticher, Peckinpah, Anthony Mann et al.

morbs otm. shane's kinda like that also.

iirc Farber hates on High Noon for similar reasons

I don't hate the movie anymore than I hate DI, but if you stack them up against say My Darling Clementine and Out of the Past, respectively, you see what's what.

every time Brandon de Wilde said "SHAAAAAAAAANNE" I hoped he'd get stung by hornets.

Noel Murray reviews the new Blurays of Witness for the Prosecution and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes

http://thedissolve.com/reviews/938-witness-for-the-prosecution-the-private-life-of-sh/

Saw Fedora for the second time -- a really sincerely bitter funeral for Old Hollywood, side AA of Sunset Blvd. It'd have been claimed as a gay classic if he'd succeeded in casting Dunaway and Dietrich in the Keller and Knef roles.

Holden is so vital to making any of it work; Jose Ferrer very funny as the mice-and-monkey-fiddling cosmetic butcher.

Weirdest of all, Mario Adorf and Gottfried John showing up as a comic hustler hotelier and a strong-arm chauffeur. You can hear the German producers telling him, "Hey, hip to Fassbinder? Use these guys."

isn't Kevin Bozelka a fan?

he would be!

Did you dine at the Fedora restaurant afterwards, Morbius?

dont know it

OK, this was very good, maybe great, both a love letter to and exposé of Classic Hollywood, which he had to go to Germany to make because "the boys with the beards" had taken over. Recommended even if you are not a Friend of Fox.

i'm fine with Detweiler's rant bcz hey, he's talking about DePalma.

Detweiler? You mean "Dutch"?

btw Olive Films releases a Fedora BD on Oct 28.

Read about it.

Did you read about the dubbing of the actresses voices on Wikipedia?

*potential spoiler*

yes! halfway through I wondered "why does Knef sound like Keller? who's dubbing who?"

there is a great Lost Weekend gag in the Bugs Bunny cartoon Slick Hare.

review of the Brackett diaries, he didn't like many people

http://blog.vincekeenan.com/2015/01/book-ready-when-you-are-cb-charles.html

NYers can see both The Apartment and 1,2,3 in 35mm on Friday, which would be exhausting

http://www.bam.org/film/2015/black-and-white-scope

Fedora available on DVD.

like, for five months?

Kiss Me, Stupid Bluray out. The vile, smutty thing!

Hah. I think I'll get that as a birthday gift for a friend who loves it.

does he like "ACTION," like Dino?

Not really; it just makes his love for the film all that more baffling. But what can I say, it's a "charmer".

I have great affection for its prurient, curdled heart. (the uncut Euro version, obviously)

This maybe something that belongs in the "Post a Controversial Opinion" thread, but here goes: the narration in Double Indemnity bothers me way more than the much maligned voiceover in the original cut of Blade Runner. Kael gets at part of why when she calls it "so gaudy and terse that it seems an emblem of 40s hardboiled attitudes," but for me it is as much a problem of the film telegraphing its punches in an unnecessary way. I guess it could be argued that the narration helps focus on MacMurray's friendship with Robinson, but the final scene conveys already this much more succinctly and poignantly. Honestly, I really cannot think of any way that the narration/flashback structure enhances the film at all.

not a very good movie, but there should be a book-length study of representations of evil in cinema called closer than that with jack nicholson on the cover peering through his fingers at the viewer/bartender

I didn't include what Morbs called "the honorable miss" The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes .

https://humanizingthevacuum.wordpress.com/2017/07/23/shut-up-and-deal-the-best-of-billy-wilder/

Dietrich is great sizing up Congresswoman Jean Arthur in A Foreign Affair:

"I see you do not believe in lipstick. And what a curious way to do your hair, or rather not to do it."

Man, those early shots of John Lund driving his jeep to Dietrich's place through the ruins of Berlin... while "Isn't It Romantic?" plays on the soundtrack.

Dont know this one, put it on my watch list

It's one of BW's most enjoyable movies and it's a shame it's not more well-known. Even John Lund is good.

it has real emotional depth, i think due to Wilder and Dietrich's biographies.

The Fortune Cookie, which i hadn't seen in at least 20 years, is obv second-tier but better than i remembered. Matthau is positively Fieldsian.

I don't think the NFL would cooperate with this script today.

Some of Whiplash Willie's best line are throwaways ("Unwed mothers... I'm for that").

Kino Lorber Studio Classics drops A Foreign Affair on Blu August 6th!

tried to watch Avanti! a few wks ago and got about as far as the kitch-y coroner w/ the color-coded italian forms and turned it off. none of it was funny or charming and there was no reason to think it'd get better imo. there was a line where jack lemmon outright refers to juliette mills' character as fat that seemed really mean-spirited and would probably draw protesters today
― johnny crunch, Sunday, February 14, 2010 2:05 PM

After 1964 the guy totally lost it.
― Inculcate a spirit of serfdom in children (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, February 14, 2010

wrong and wrong!

Rewatched Avanti! last night and it's pretty good. Lemmon and the screenplay make no attempt to present him as much more than a blinkered louse for the first half of the movie. Clearly the female lead should've been cast with a plus-sized actress, but they only got character roles then. Also Wilder wanted to rescue Juliet Mills from her "Nanny" sitcom, and she comes through charmingly. Clive Revill is a great poised fixer/hotelier. And the last line of the film has Lemmon recanting his fat-shaming. (Also, the coroner scene is not "kitschy" but marvelous.)

In the "lost it" late period I also like the Holmes movie and Fedora.

also i rewatched Some Like It Hot last night and the skeptics can go to hell, or Spats Colombo's place.

Much of the Lemmon and Curtis interviews on the CC are to do with their costuming.

Are there really a lot of Some Like it Hot skeptics out there?

apparently, Woody Allen!

I also saw a Letterboxd comment that it's now "problematic." [redacted]

I watched Avanti! on Amazon last month: leaden and way too long.

A little too long, othwise disagree.

I do think one layer of Some Like It Hot now lost on almost everyone under 50 is its feeding off the pop culture, particularly the movies, of 1929-33 or earlier films about the period (Raft, Pat O'Brien, George E Stone, Rudy Vallee refs etc).

admit a lot of those references do go over my head, still a fun movie tho

I mean I know George Raft and Rudy Vallee but I don't doubt there's stuff I miss

Joe E Brown was kinda the Jim Varney of early '30s comedy.

ok, Fedora isn't bad. definitely his best post-Irma movie. Avanti is good but way too long, and Fedora slows to a crawl once the interminable flashbacks begin. But there's pleasure in any Wilder because he never shot any coverage and every shot means something. and the bits of business he gives everywhere, like Antonia with the gloves (looking like Mario 64). really lush colors in this music, elegiac, again not bad for his second to last movie (I think), and yes, it is very nice to see Fassbinder actors in a Wilder movie. Gottfried John grabbing William Holden from behind? there are moments here

Showed Double Indemnity tonight for the small-town film club/society/whatever I've been trying to launch. (Fourth monthly screening. Total attendance to date, including me: 18.) Someone noticed that Walter Neff wears a wedding ring the whole way through. Which is...an oversight, a mystery, evidence that Fred McMurray was one devoted husband.

Sabrina is nearly flawless filmmaking, I’m stunned to come here and see zero votes. Any NYers catching the Film Forum retrospective?

Haven’t made it over there yet

Saw Sabrina there tonight and sensed the astonishment in the audience. It got applauded.

I remember enjoying the first hour a lot, but then drifting as the romance takes precedence over the comedy

^^^ same.

Fedora is the real sleeper.

I can't with the late Wilder: he loses any semblance of rhythm, tonality, humor.

Yeah, Fedora just seemed like an especially dull giallo, though it was nice to see Gottfried John outside of RWFworld.

UCLA’s new restorations of The Major & the Minor and A Foreign Affair look absolutely gorgeous

Love love love Foreign Affair.

Now I've finally watched some Lubitsch on Criterion, it's tarnished Wilder for me very slightly -- it's easier to see what he was aiming for but (sometimes) missing.

Unrelatedly: when I was younger I never understood The Apartment, but I just hadn't been disaapointed by life yet.

Foreign Affair is pretty good, but I mostly feel bad for Jean Arthur in that.

Kiss Me, Stupid tonight. I was really with it for the first 40 minutes or so when it felt like a pretty funny, kinda sharp satire (on mid century American society blah blah blah). Then the sex farce mechanics kick in and the film loses much of its weight. Kim Novak, though physically right for the role, is not good here. Ray Walston was fine but original casting choice Peter Sellers would’ve been much better in his role. I was expecting some kind of dark twist at the end but it ends quite conservatively. Btw why is this film in black & wihite, it screams out for color.

There was an overloud laugher at my screening, it felt like having a constant intrusive laugh track.