Ready for His Close-Up: The Films of Billy Wilder

1/15/15 to 2/28/15

The superlative American director Billy Wilder, who wrote and directed over two dozen films, worked the fine, serrated edge between-between dark noirs and ribald comedies, between blithe romance and sorrowful drama. Our series showcases his pithy storylines, breakneck banter, and award-winning casts, and includes Sunset Blvd., Double Indemnity, Sabrina, The Lost Weekend, Some Like It Hot, and more.

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Past Films

The Seven Year Itch
Sunday, April 7
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Sunset Blvd.
Thursday, January 15 7:30
Billy Wilder (US, 1950). 4K Digital Restoration. Fledgling screenwriter William Holden stumbles into the mansion of faded silent-film superstar Gloria Swanson in Billy Wilder's poison pen to Hollywood, its dreamers, its failures, and its allure. Winner of three Academy Awards. (115 mins)
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[no title]
Saturday, January 17 8:30PM
Billy Wilder (US, 1944). Stanwyck's toxic peroxide blonde is the archetype of the noir femme fatale in Billy Wilder's gleefully cynical tale of murder and insurance fraud, costarring Fred MacMurray and Edward G. Robinson. (106 mins)
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Double Indemnity
Saturday, January 17
Stanwyck's toxic peroxide blonde is the archetype of the noir femme fatale in Billy Wilder's gleefully cynical tale of murder and insurance fraud, costarring Fred MacMurray and Edward G. Robinson.
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[no title]
Sunday, January 18 7pm
Billy Wilder (US, 1955). Buttoned-down middle-aged adman Tom Ewell is ready for some extramarital fun in his seventh year of marriage, and new upstairs tenant Marilyn Monroe provides the perfect mirage for his dreams in Wilder's caustic comedy. Monroe's billowing skirt above a subway grate provides one of American cinema's most iconic images. (105 mins)
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[no title]
Friday, January 23 8:30PM
Billy Wilder (US, 1951). Kirk Douglas stars as a cynical newspaperman covering the story of a man trapped in a remote New Mexico cave; here, the story isn't the truth, but the lies and rot within journalism itself. "Here is, half a century out of the past, a movie so acidly au courant it stings” (Village Voice). (111 mins)
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[no title]
Sunday, January 25 4:00PM
Billy Wilder (US, 1954). Audrey Hepburn is the simple daughter of a family chauffeur who is transformed into a delectable sophisticate, and must choose between ne'er do well playboy William Holden and sober workaholic Humphrey Bogart, in Wilder's classic romance. One of Audrey's most iconic roles. (113 mins)
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[no title]
Friday, January 30 8:45PM
Billy Wilder (US, 1945). A failed writer (Ray Milland) turns to alcohol over one long, lost weekend in Wilder's powerful tale of the wrong, trembling end of the American dream. Jane Wyman costars. Winner of four Academy Awards. (101 mins)
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[no title]
Friday, February 6 8:45PM
Billy Wilder (US, 1961). American businessman Jimmy Cagney has the cure for Occupied Berlin's ills (Coca Cola!) in Wilder's manic Cold War slapstick comedy, filmed in Berlin as the Wall went up. “Celebrates as it satirizes American cultural imperialism” (J. Hoberman). (108 mins)
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[no title]
Saturday, February 7 6:30PM
Billy Wilder (US, 1943). Archival Print! Franchot Tone, Anne Baxter, Akim Tamiroff, and a preening Erich Von Stroheim (as General Rommel!) star in Wilder's taut, fast-moving war film, set in the deserts of the North African front. “A crispy spy thriller” (Dave Kehr). (96 mins)
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[no title]
Sunday, February 8 6:30PM
Billy Wilder (US, 1964). Dean Martin stars as “Dino,” a lascivious lounge singer adrift on a sea of booze who falls for the “wife” of a fellow songwriter. Kim Novak costars in this deliriously vulgar sex comedy, played as embittered film noir. (124 mins)
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[no title]
Saturday, February 14 6:30PM
Ernst Lubitsch (US, 1939). This comedy develops from cynicism into about as warm a Cold War film as ever there was, as severe Soviet commissar Greta Garbo has her head turned by dashing capitalist Melvyn Douglas. The ads proclaimed, “Garbo laughs!” And so will you. (110 mins)
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[no title]
Saturday, February 14 8:40PM
Billy Wilder (US, 1959). Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon star in Wilder's outrageous cross-dressing comedy, selected by the American Film Institute as the funniest movie ever made. (120 mins)
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[no title]
Sunday, February 15 7:00PM
Billy Wilder (US, 1960). Jack Lemmon, Fred MacMurray, and Shirley MacLaine in a riotously acidic tale of sex and corporate success. Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Editing, Best Art Direction. “An American classic” (NY Times).
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[no title]
Saturday, February 28 8:40PM
Billy Wilder (US/UK, 1970). Sherlock Holmes navigates between twenty-four canaries, eight Trappist monks, six midgets, his Machiavellian brother Mycroft, and the queen of all Victorian heroines, Victoria herself, in Wilder's update of the mystery man. “The best Holmes movie ever made” (Kim Newman, Empire Magazine). (125 mins)
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Ready for His Close-Up: The Films of Billy Wilder

1/15/15 to 2/28/15

There are two sides to every coin. The superlative American director Billy Wilder worked the fine, serrated edge between-between dark noirs and ribald comedies, between blithe romance and sorrowful drama. Maybe he was just a realist who saw our lofty aspirations compromised, time and again, by our glaring limitations: somewhere in between is the joke and the crying shame. Wilder's early triumphs, Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Sunset Blvd., were as unexpectedly bleak as his later successes, The Seven Year Itch, Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, were comically sharp. Or were they just equally sardonic?

Born in Austria, Wilder moved to Berlin where in his mid-twenties he was prolifically penning screenplays. When things got dicey for a Jew in Germany, he moved first to Paris, then, by 1934, to Hollywood, where he assimilated rapidly. His mother had long dreamed of emigrating to the United States. and had filled the young Billy, really Samuel, with stories of Coney Island and Buffalo Bill. For a European-bred artist, Wilder had an uncanny grasp of the rhythms of American lingo and viewed social settings with an estranged but charmed distance. He saw himself foremost as a writer and put the pictures in the service of pithy storylines and breakneck banter.

Often working with collaborators, Charles Brackett and I.A.L. Diamond being two important figures, Wilder launched his Hollywood career with a screwball script for Ernest Lubitsch's Ninotchka, the brisk Greta Garbo vehicle. Then there was no stopping him: beginning with The Major and the Minor (not included in this series) in 1942, Wilder would write and direct over two dozen films, from the pointed pasting of the press in Ace in the Hole to the highly chic Sabrina, from the capitalist escapades of One, Two, Three to the needling truth of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.

Considered a supple but strategic director of actors, Wilder did swell things with such starry lights as William Holden, Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, Audrey Hepburn, Jack Lemmon, Ray Milland, Kirk Douglas, and Barbara Stanwyck. His casts, alone, garnered seventeen Academy Award nominations for their often uncharacteristic and comedic roles. Well, let's push them aside for now and give Mr. Wilder his close-up.

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Special thanks to Todd Weiner at the UCLA Film and Television Archive for the loan of their rare print of Five Graves to Cairo. Thanks as well to Chris Chouinard (Park Circus), Paul Ginsburg (Universal), Katie Dintelman (Criterion), Stefanie Larson (Paramount), and Kristie Nakamura (Warner Bros.).