Billy Wilder was one of the most celebrated and successful Hollywood directors of his generation, responsible for classics like Double Indemnity (1944), The Lost Weekend (1945), Sunset Boulevard (1950), Some Like It Hot (1959), and The Apartment (1960). Like his directing contemporaries Fred Zinneman, Robert Siodmak, and Joseph Mankiewicz, Wilder was a Jewish emigre from Eastern Europe who fled the continent for the United States during World War II. Wilder worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood for six years between 1933 and 1939 before earning his first major credit as a co-writer for Ernst Lubitsch's romantic comedy Ninotchka (1939) starring Greta Garbo.
Double Indemnity was Wilder's third film as a Hollywood director, and his first runaway hit. Film scholars often cite the film as one of the earliest major examples of film noir—a genre of crime drama that featured urban social realism, torrid romance, and morally corrupt protagonists. From the start of his career, Wilder often challenged the censorship standards of the Production Code, making films that pushed the boundaries of conventional mores. Double Indemnity featured two morally corrupt murderers as protagonists, a plot element that challenged the prevailing conventions of Hollywood narrative and tested the limits of the censorship codes of the time. The Apartment, Sunset Boulevard, The Lost Weekend, and Some Like It Hot explored a host of controversial themes for their day, such as cross-dressing, homosexuality, adultery, rape, alcoholism, and suicide. Indeed, many cite the success of Some Like it Hot as the tipping point for the abandonment of the puritanical Hays Code.
Unlike Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock, Wilder tended to emphasize story and narrative over cinematography and visual panache as a director. He still holds an outsized influence over contemporary directors around the world, such as French filmmaker Michael Hazanavicius, who in his acceptance speech for the 2012 Best Picture Oscar, received for his film The Artist, remarked, "I would like to thank the following three people. I would like to thank Billy Wilder, I would like to thank Billy Wilder, and I would like to thank Billy Wilder." Garnering twelve Academy Award nominations for Best Director over his career, Wilder is the second most nominated director behind Woody Allen.
Billy Wilder's The Apartment is one of the most iconic Hollywood comedies of all-time. Released in 1960, it came only a year after the huge success of Wilder's Some Like it Hot. Because Some Like It Hot had done so well with critics and audiences,...
Many critics and film historians point to April 24, 1944 as the birth date of film noir, for it was on that date that Double Indemnity premiered. As is the case with so many other things to come out of Hollywood, film noir may be shaving a year or...
Some Like It Hot is a 1959 comedy film directed by Billy Wilder and starring Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis. The film is based on the French movie Fanfares Of Love, a film with a nearly identical plot. Fanfares of Love, like Some Like...
Sunset Boulevard is a 1950 film noir, melodrama, and dark comedy directed by visionary filmmaker Billy Wilder, who also co-wrote the screenplay with one of his longtime collaborators, Charles Brackett. The duo initially conceived the film as a...
