Billy Wilder and his collaborators

 Brackett and Wilder

1. Bluebeard’s Eighth wife
2. Midnight
3. Ninotchka
4. Hold back the dawn
5. Arise My love
6. Ball of fire
7. Major and the Minor
8. Five Graves to Cairo
9. Lost Weekend
10. Emperor Waltz
11. Sunset Boulevard
12. Foreign Affair
13. What a Life

Brackett and Diamond

1. Love in the Afternoon
2. Some Like It Hot
3. The Apartment
4. One Two Three
5. Irma la Douce
6. Kiss Me Stupid
7. Fortune Cookie
8. Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
9. Avanti!
10. Front Page
11. Fedora
12. Buddy Buddy

Wilder and Others
1. Double Indemnity (Raymond Chandler)
2. Ace in the Hole (Walter Newman)
3. Stalag 17 (Edwin Blum)
4. Spirit of St Louis (Wendell Mayes)
5. Sabrina (Ernest Lehman)
6. Seven Year Itch (George Axelrod)
7. Witness for the Prosecution (Harry Kurnitz)

Brackett without Wilder (as producer mostly)

1. The Uninvited (1944)
2. To Each His Own (1946)
3. Miss Tatlock’s Millions (1948)
4. The Mating Season (1951)*
5. The Model and the Marriage Broker (1951)*
6. Niagara (1953)*
7. Titanic (1953)*
8. Woman’s World (1954)
9. Garden of Evil (1954)
10. The Virgin Queen (1955)
11. The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (1955)*
12. Teenage Rebel (1956)*
13. The King and I (1956)
14. D-Day the Sixth of June (1956)
15. The Wayward Bus (1957)
16. The Gift of Love (1958)
17. Ten North Frederick (1958)
18. The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker (1959) *
19. Blue Denim (1959)
20. Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959)*
21. High Time (1960)
22. State Fair (1962)

(* means with Walter Reisch)

Movie review - "The Emperor Waltz" (1948) **1/2

 Brackett and Wilder earned a lot of kudos with The Lost Weekend which they blew on this expensive flop. It must've seemed like a sure thing - colour, romance, Bing Crosby, Wilder making an "entertainment" as opposed to something gritty, but it didn't work out that way. I'm not sure audiences were as interested in Hollywood versions of puffy Austrian romances as Austrian expats in Hollywood were in making them. (Though when they were Americanised it was a different story).

Bing is a gramophone salesman in old time Vienna, 1901 who falls for aristocrat Joan Fontaine. The Emperor Franz Josef gets involved.

The colour is lovely, the sets slightly over the top (this seemed to be a post war thing in a few Hollywood films). 

Some of this is really fun - the stuff with the dogs, Freud analysing a dog, Fontaine's shifty dad. Needed more of that. You could get a whole film out of Freud.

Neither Crosby or Fontaine seem entirely at home. It's not bad. Just clearly cost too much money. Didn't need to.

Movie review - "Love in the Afternoon" (1957) **

 Having struck gold with a really old actor a few years away from smoking related death playing a millionaire romancing Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina, Billy Wilder repeats that here only with Gary Cooper instead of Humphrey Bogart. Cooper is filmed through gauze with careful lighting. Hepburn is fine. Maurice Chevalier offers some pep as a private investigator, Hepburn's father.

The film's Paris locations really needed colour and the story needed an extra twist. It's not much of a tale though the meet cute is fine: one of Chevalier's clients, John McGiver, wants to shoot Cooper, who is a lover of McGiver's wife. Hepburn goes to warn Cooper and winds up rooting him. A year later he returns to Paris and they start up again. She lies about having experience so he hires dad to investigate her. Dad reveals truth and asks Coop to leave. He's about to but feels sorry for her at the end end and takes her on the train.

And that's romantic because...? She's inexperienced and he's a lechy sleeze who is controlling and they're going to have a horrible life. And dad doesn't seem to happy at the end.

Maybe this works if you love Hepburn and Cooper. Hepburn is fine, just so naive it's uncomfortable. And Cooper I know in real life was a sophisticated lady killer but in this is just this decaying old lech who is going to hire a private investigator on Hepburn. At the end I kept saying "don't get on the train don't get on the train".

Some funny bits - Cooper is constantly accompanied by an orchestra and nice tunes but just yuck.

Movie review - "Avanti" (1972) **

 William Goldman tore into Sam Taylor's Broadway comedy in The Season but Billy Wilder liked it well enough to turn it into a film. Apparently it was changed slightly - the lead adjusted to make a role for Jack Lemmon. 

It's an example of low concept high concept - Jack Lemmon is a man who goes to Italy to pick up his father's corpse, dad having died in an accident. He discovered that his father had a mistress and then starts having an affair with the mistress' daughter, Juliet Mills - who has to endure comments about her weight.

Wilder thought the film would've had more kick if the dead father had been having it off with a guy. Maybe. I don't think that's the problem. The issue is more is takes two hours, when the film is almost over, for Lemmon and Mills to hook up - and we never see his wife to complicate things. Maybe if they'd brought in his wife, or her partner, or made their parents secretly alive.

 Instead we have all these shenanigans among Italians - vineyard owners, maids, stolen bodies. I didn't care for Lemmon's obnoxious American, whingeing about Italians, bossing them around. He didn't get a satisfying comeuppance or seem to genuinely fall for Mills. We didn't see him get liberated. I mean, maybe if he was henpecked or something. Mills is lovely. Maybe if the film had been from her point of view.

Nice shots of Italy. The nudity livens things up - Mills bares her breasts and Lemmon his backside. Edward Andrews is funny as the ambassador. 

But what's at stake? Lemmon's marriage? Who cares? The fate of his father's corpse? Who cares? The new relationship? Who cares? Maybe Mills' chance at happiness...?

The film has its fans.

Movie review - "The Front Page" (1974) **

 This had been remade brilliantly as His Girl Friday so why go back to the original and do it again? Well, I guess they had colour and the team of Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau - and Billy Wilder needed a hit. I think it was. Well, ish.

It's nice that Wilder had such affection for the play and his writing but his love of its dialogue slows the pace... we hear every line when overlapping would've given it more pace. I mean, the play is good, not the Holy writ.

It's slow. Homophobic (the f word, David Wayne's prissy reporter), doesn't feel real - Walter Matthau yes Jack Lemmon no. Carol Burnett overacts, Susan Sarandon seems too young for Lemmon,. Austin Pendleton is good as Earl.

Howard Hawks said there was no point to making this. I should add though that the set and costumes are first rate. Universal movies often look ugly but not this one.

You know what might've worked? Setting this in Weimar era Germany - a period Wilder knew. That would've had a reason to exist.

Movie review - "Fedora" (1978) *1/2

 Billy Wilder's penultimate movie is an interesting bookend to Sunset Boulevard. It doesn't quite work - like later Hitchcocks it feels as though it needed to be shot on a proper soundstage in the 1950s but is done on a crappy soundstage with uninteresting 70s photography. William Holden is old and barks but at least is William Holden. Jose Ferrer adds some spice as a creepy plastic surgeon.

The film needed a movie star to play Fedora - Wilder wanted Dietrich but had to settle for Marthe Keller, originally meant to be in a double role then Hildergarde Knef stepped in.

Every scene with Keller feels wrong with overdubbed music. Her flouncing around in the mansion talking to Holden and Kneff, when the chauffeur puts her away.

Stephen Collins plays Holden in flashback. Keller plays Keller - she goes topless, and it's a shock to see that in a Wilder film, as it is too when she asks Collins/Holden if he's a f*g because he yawned... but at least it has energy and feels believable. A film about a bitchy producer trying to get a bitchy old star back on screen and bitching about Hollywood - that would've had some life, if mean spirited. This is just silly.

The mansion on Corfu should be creepy and atmospheric but it's shot blandly like a telemovie - this is a film lacking atmosphere (cf the mansion in Boulevard).  Also the central conceit is just silly - sorry but it's not believable that Kneff would look gorgeous in the 40s and then as gorgeous in the 70s, that's just unrealistic, even Cary Grant aged. I think you can get away with this conceit in a novel or on stage, but film is so naturalistic. Maybe it could've worked in the 60s in baroque black and white.

Also the importance paid to Michael York in the film is just silly - why not have him play someone fictitious?

Why so much bad dubbing? I mean, the little kid....

I went with this for a bit but the second half was ridiculous.

Movie review - "Farewell to the King" (1989) **1/2

John Milius doing his Milius-y thing... war, honour, romanticism, gunfire. It doesn't quite work and the whole way through I was wondering why. There is much to admire - the stunning photography, sweeping music, location work in Borneo. Nick Nolte is ideally cast as the American deserter who becomes king. Maybe it's the direction - Milius was/is a better writer than director. But could Coppola have made it work?

The concept was an issue. I remember when this came out thinking it was late in the day to make a tale about a white man who becomes king over the natives. Milius came to fame in the 1970s jazzing up old fashioned concepts with a modern twist: Dirty Harry, Jeremiah Johnson, Apocalypse Now, Judge Roy Bean, Wind and Lion and so on all took stock ideas (man in wilderness, man on mission in war, woman kidnapped by Shiekh, vigilante cop) and added this satirical flourish. That's missing here - it's all done too straight.  I think in the 70s Milius would have done this better - he takes it too seriously. Maybe the lead needed to be more of a con man, a sly tpe.

The film lacks a character like Teddy Roosevelt in Lion or Kilgore in Apocalypse Now a true eccentric. There is General MacArthur who looks like he's going to be wacky and memorable but he's not - he has genuine praise for the King; ditto James Fox as a British soldier.

It also struggles to convey its relationships. Milius kills off the lead's wife, as he did in Judge Roy Bean and Jeremiah Johnson, but it doesn't mean as much here because Nolte never seems that interested in his wife, more in a bromance with Nigel Havers. Havers just sort of observes, and never seems to go on any sort of journey - maybe that's the actor's fault. Shouldn't Havers be really affected by what he sees? Havers has a wife - played by Milius' wife - and I get the sense the part is put in there to keep Mrs Milius happy, though I might be mistaken.

The story lacks the simplicity of Wind and the Lion which was a kidnap and rescue story. This one is more over the shop - arrive, help take on Japanese, that gets hard, Japanese kill wife, goes crazy, then Nolte gives self up...It's a bit more all over the place.  Maybe it needed Nolte just to do the one specific task i.e. help attack bridge. I know that's less historically accurate but Kwai wasn't accurate.

Other observations:

- this has Aussies as baddies, in a way, kicking around Nolte in the end - but at least it references Aussies in Borneo which is more than the Oz film industry has ever done.

- Frank McRae plays a soldier in the Kings African Rifles which is cool - there's also a South African and an Australian in amongst the Allied soldiers who help Nolte and "go native".

-Gerry Lopez is very effective as Nolte's 2IC - Elena Oberon (Mrs Milius) less so as Havers' random woman.

- I think Havers is meant to be Jack Hawkins in Bridge on the River Kwai  - doesn't quite work. Who is Havers' character? What's he meant to be? He's so blank.