cover image Wilder Times: The Life of Billy Wilder

Wilder Times: The Life of Billy Wilder

Kevin Lally. Henry Holt & Company, $30 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-8050-3119-5

Sunset Boulevard, Stalag 17, Double Indemnity, Sabrina, Some Like It Hot, The Lost Weekend--the list of masterful hit films directed by Billy Wilder goes on and on. In this insightful though not scintillating work, Lally, managing editor of the Film Journal, offers a comprehensive examination of Wilder's life in films, and a perceptive exploration of how the filmmaker's personality molded his art. Born in 1906 to Austrian Jewish parents in Poland, Wilder's hard-boiled take on the human condition, Lally contends, was formed by his early work as a journalist in Vienna and as a screenwriter and dance-hall gigolo in Berlin, but above all by the loss of much of his family in the Holocaust. The future filmmaker arrived in Hollywood in 1933, penniless but loaded with talent and experience. His sardonic sensibility marked his cinematic voice from the beginning and was, Lally says, ahead of its time: the prostitutes, masqueraders and antiheroes that permeate Wilder's best-known work presaged the shift in consciousness that swept America decades later. Lally scrutinizes each of Wilder's films, offers vivid sketches of the stars he worked with--Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon, Marlene Dietrich and Gloria Swanson among them--and delves into his perfectionist sense of craft, seriousness of purpose, acid wit, comedic sense and long partnership with screenwriter I.A.L. Diamond. It has been 15 years since Wilder made his last film (Buddy, Buddy), but this penetrating bio, despite pedestrian prose, makes his work seem as fresh and up-to-date as if the curtain were rising on it just today. (May)