Billy Wilder wrote or co-wrote everything he directed, which is why the dialogue is the reason to watch. He fled Berlin in 1933, worked his way into Hollywood without English, and became one of its sharpest writers within a decade. The scripts move at speed and the jokes carry information.
The range is unusual. Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard are corrosive noir, Some Like It Hot and The Apartment are comedies that keep turning cruel, and Stalag 17 and Ace in the Hole are studies in how people behave badly under observation. The Apartment won Best Picture, Director and Screenplay in the same year.
His writing partnerships, first with Charles Brackett and later with I A L Diamond, produced the bulk of the work. Wilder maintained that the third act was the only thing that mattered, and his are unusually hard to see coming.
Billy WilderAn ambitious insurance clerk lends his apartment to executives for their affairs, until he falls for the boss's mistress at Christmas. The Apartment is Billy Wilder's 1960 American comedy-drama about an ambitious insurance company clerk who lends his Manhattan apartment…
Billy Wilder
Billy Wilder1957 Billy Wilder courtroom drama from Agatha Christie. Charles Laughton as defense barrister, Marlene Dietrich as the wife.
Billy WilderWilder's 1959 cross-dressing comedy. Lemmon and Curtis on the run, Monroe in her last great performance.
Billy WilderChandler co-wrote with Wilder. Double Indemnity is the Billy Wilder-directed Paramount Pictures noir that became the canonical template for the genre's mature middle period.
Billy WilderWilder's 1950 Hollywood gothic. Sunset Boulevard is the Billy Wilder film noir that became Hollywood's most lacerating film about itself.
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