Though he has his gentle side - Love in the Afternoon, Sabrina Fair, his scripts for such comedy classics as Hawks' Ball of Fire and Lubitsch's Ninotchka, and in a large part, Some Like It Hot - still, if ever there were an American director whose work combined acidity with irreverence, it is Billy Wilder. Our choice of films this weekend doesn't represent the “lighter” side of Wilder, but the funny (or, in Ace in the Hole, the incisive) side of pessimism as only Billy Wilder can show it.
