Billy Wilder (Pocket Essentials. Film) - gebrauchtes Buch

Charm is a useful byword for the career of Billy Wilder. His films often explore the charm of innocence and the charm of corruption, or to put it more precisely, the charm of corruption for the innocent and the charm of innocence for the corrupt. The director does not regard cloistered virtue as being very photogenic, but tainted virtue is another thing entirely. In his most serious dramas, characters who have compromised and corrupted themselves in tragic ways—like Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard and Chuck Tatum in Ace In The Hole—undertake too late to reclaim their integrity. In his comedies, characters whose desires are represented by the corruptions of worldly compromise and easy comfort—like Bud Baxter in The Apartment, Harry Hinkle in The Fortune Cookie, John Pringle in A Foreign Affair—relinquish their spoils and return gladly, if a bit stained, to the integrity they previously had no use for. Virtue becomes its own, more appreciated reward and vice its own punishment. Since the 1930s, Wilder’s cinematic charm has been making audiences accept some unconventional truths and root for some unlikely heroes. Perhaps Fred MacMurray also sensed that Wilder is one of Hollywood’s anti-Disneys. A Wilder project, redeemed though it was by the charm of its writing and direction, nonetheless often addressed a subject in a way that offended the keepers of the status quo. This, of course, may simply be another way of saying that Wilder puts his directorial charms and exploration of innocence and corruption to the service of a realist’s vision while Disney prefers the eye of fantasy. The realist is usually the one whose work elicits the sharp intake of breath from the audience when they sense that things may not be the way they appear on the surface. As Wilder’s character Barry Detweiler, a Hollywood producer, says in Fedora: “Sugar and spice, and underneath that—cement and stainless steel.” It’s a bracing recipe, one that usually allows Wilder to adhere to his cardinal rule of filmmaking: “Don’t bore people, which is a very, very difficult thing... If you have anything worthwhile saying better be very sure it is wrapped in chocolate so they will swallow it.” If in some ways Billy Wilder is an anti-Disney, what would a trip be like to Wilderland, that imaginative theme park based on the spirit of his films? It would, at least superficially, be eclectic. Wilder made films in every genre of his day except the western. He made the pioneering film noir in 1944, Double Indemnity, which also starred Fred MacMurray (playing a killer, the role that first made him fret about the safety of his career). What came to be the staples of that genre—hard-bitten voice-over narration, a dangerous femme fatale, urban landscapes shrouded in darkness both photographically and morally—are all on display in this landmark movie. Wilder made the first film that took a realistic look at alcoholism (The Lost Weekend), one of the first POW films (Stalag 17), and a handful of films in various shades o