Underrated Gem: Billy Wilder's "Fedora"

The year is 1976. The place, Hollywood USA. Billy Wilder, one of Hollywood's greatest writer-directors is at loose ends. His last film, a remake of The Front Page, starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau in their first film together since 1968's hit comedy, The Odd Couple, had "underperformed," Tinseltown-speak for failed. For his next project, the six-time Oscar winner came across a book called Crowned Heads by Thomas Tryon, a former actor whose most notable role was the title character in Otto Preminger's 1963 film, The Cardinal. Crowned Heads told four different stories of Hollywood: of Lorna, a movie sex goddess who travels to a remote part of Mexico to find herself; of Bobbitt, an aging child star whose films have been forgotten; of Willie, a gay silent film star who encounters a Manson-like hustler and pays the price (much like Ramon Navarro, the model for the character); and of Fedora, an enigmatic old school movie queen ala Garbo and Dietrich whose beautiful face has been untouched by time. 

The not-so-great poster: the art work showcasing Marthe Keller's title character is great, but Holden's superimposed photo knocks it down a peg or two.

Plans to film Fedora had originated at Universal Pictures around 1976, shortly after the novel's publication, but due to that studio's poor track record with films about old Hollywood (Gable & Lombard, W.C. Fields & Me both released in 1976), the recent wave of nostalgia had dissipated, resulting in Wilder's film going into turnaround (i.e., "Good luck, Billy, you can take this piece of shit script elsewhere."). With two options - to press on, looking for interest from other studios or to give up and search for another worthwhile project - Wilder decided to press on. No one has ever explained exactly why he held onto Fedora so tenaciously. It would prove to be one of the most difficult for him to get on screen.

Back in 1951, Wilder got thoroughly roasted by critics and audiences alike (crowds, as they say, stayed away in droves) when his film Ace in the Hole, a brilliant though unrelentingly bleak view of the human condition, was released. Since the failure of that movie, Wilder had hightailed it to more proven commodities, like stage hits Stalag 17, Sabrina, The Seven Year Itch, and Witness for the Prosecution. The couple of times Wilder did step outside the box of these proven winners he tripped up with The Spirit of St. Louis and Love in the Afternoon. These movies - with the exception of Spirit of St. Louis - were comedies, or at least lighter takes on serious subjects as with Prosecution and Stalag 17. Wilder would continue in this comic vein for the rest of the 1950s and into the 60s. It wasn't until Fedora that Wilder would be completely serious again.

The film that sent Billy Wilder running for comedic cover, 1951.

I read somewhere (having read so much about Wilder and his films, I'm not sure where, but obviously it has stayed with me) that Wilder has claimed that when he was depressed he made comedies and when happy he made dramas. If that's true Wilder was depressed for the better part of 20 years. From 1953 to 1974, Wilder made only two dramas - 1957's The Spirit of St. Louis  and 1970's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. The rest could all be classified as lighter films, if not outright comedies.

With Fedora, Wilder had something to say - something he had been holding onto for at least a decade and probably more: Hollywood and its movies were going to the dogs. Told in flashback, the accent of Fedora is on youth, the mystical allure of movie queens, and how to remain forever young and desirable whatever the cost. Wilder gets his jabs in on the New Hollywood of the 1970s via William Holden's character Barry Detweiler (the film's story is narrated by Detweiler; its events seen via Detweiler's POV), a down-on-his-luck producer trying to pitch his Anna Karenina adaptation - retitled The Snows of Yesteryear - to Fedora.

Detweiler, we learn, is not only trying to sell Fedora on his script; he is also on a kind of sentimental journey of lost love and past regrets. He has a history with her. Flashing back to 1947, Detweiler, called Dutch at the time, is an assistant director on a movie called Leda and the Swan, starring none other than Fedora. During the shooting of a seduction scene in an artificial pond, Dutch is summoned to place water lilies strategically on Fedora's exposed breasts, so the scene will pass the censors' review. Dutch does so, yet makes the ultimate faux pas of yawning while covering her breasts, an action which offends Fedora (apparently no one had ever yawned while she was nude). Fedora is so incensed that she and Dutch end up spending the night together as she proves to him what a great lover she can be.

Fedora before the water lilies.

In the present, Detweiler is kept from Fedora by her strange entourage - the Countess Sobryanski, Dr. Vando, and Miss Balfour - and finally pitches his script to them. They tell Detweiler that his script is typical Hollywood trash. The Countess tells Detweiler that no woman would leap to her death under a moving train, leaving herself completely disfigured. A woman, she claims, would always wants to look her best, even at her own funeral. Fedora, however, who has been eavesdropping on Detweiler's pitch to her entourage, emerges, claiming, "I love that ending.... It is so inevitable." She approaches Detweiler, wanting to know who her leading man will be. Detweiler tells her that she can have any male star since they are all dying to work with her. She suggests Michael York, whom she had worked with in the last picture before her "retirement" and with whom she had developed an intense obsession. The story goes cleverly on from there with a twist or two that should be saved for a viewing of the film. 


Fedora is Billy Wilder's swan song of Classic Hollywood and his kind of movies - movies that have a plot, genuine - or at least genuine-seeming - characters, and inspired dialogue. New Hollywood's recently adapted Star Wars mentality of keeping character and dialog to a minimum with action and special effects coming as fast as possible was anathema to someone like Wilder and his longtime co-writer I.A.L. Diamond. They wrote films in which the actors' dialogue was its own special effect. Even Fedora, though not top-of-the-line Billy Wilder, has a couple of good lines, like Detweiler's "The kids with the beards have taken over. Just give them a hand-held camera and a zoom lens." I sense a lot of Wilder in Detweiler, much like Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard (which Fedora is a clear descendant of). That earlier film saw Wilder at the height of his powers and represents not only a peak in his career but one of the best movies to ever come out of the so-called dream factory. As Wilder himself claimed in an interview, he got very lucky making Sunset Boulevard. They needed DeMille for a cameo in the picture, and they got him. They needed an old-time silent film star and found Gloria Swanson. A washed up director? Erich Von Stroheim as butler/director/protector was perfection. Whatever Wilder needed, he got. Even Montgomery Clift's early exit from the production was a blessing in disguise, as he likely would have been too anxious about the reflection of his own personal life in the role of Joe Gillis. I don't think anyone can top William Holden's interpretation of Joe as a combination of bemused, desperate, hopeful, and self-loathing (Holden should've won the Oscar, in my opinion).

Is this a knock-knock joke? Holden and Keller in Fedora.

Fedora was not so lucky. Wilder had wanted Marlene Dietrich for the Countess and Faye Dunaway for Fedora. Supposedly Dietrich hated the book and thought Wilder's script was no better. With Dietrich out, Wilder evidently decided not to approach Dunaway and gave the part to Marthe Keller, a Swiss beauty in the process of making a small splash with Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man (1976) and Black Sunday (1977) and opposite Al Pacino in Bobby Deerfield (also 1977).  Problem after problem plagued Wilder during filming and in post-production. While viewing a rough cut of the film, Wilder realized that Keller and Hildegard Knef's strong accents made their lines practically unintelligible. Further, their voices did not sound remotely similar, an element vital to the plot, so Wilder had to dub both women's voices with another actress's. Allied Artists, a financially sketchy company that had the distribution deal on the film, pulled out after an unenthusiastic screening at a benefit in New York City. The film was then picked up by Lorimar Productions which planned to sell it as a television movie to CBS. Before that happened, however, United Artists (UA) stepped in to save the film for theatrical exhibition. Based on recommendations from UA, Wilder cut twelve minutes from the film and previewed it in Santa Barbara, California, in May 1978. Wilder was hoping to show it at a theater that was playing either Fred Zinnemann's Julia or Herb Ross's The Turning Point to get a more similarly-minded audience, but neither film was playing in town. Wilder settled on the Walter Matthau/Glenda Jackson comedy House Calls.

I was at that preview held at the now-long-gone State Theater. The first half seemed to play well, but after the secret of Fedora's true identity was revealed, the audience began to get restless. By the time a line of dialogue was spoken about Detweiler and Fedora's affair years previous on a "beach somewhere ... Santa Barbara!" the audience burst into a roar of laughter. The scenes with Michael York didn't play well either. The film's mood had been broken, and Wilder had lost his audience. Watching the film, knowing Wilder was sitting in a roped-off section a few rows behind me, I felt bad for him and his writing partner Diamond. When the film ended and I got up to leave the theater, I was surprised to see Wilder and Diamond had already left. But it makes sense. Why would Wilder want to sit with an audience who could not appreciate the fruit of his labor?

Wilder, Keller, and Michael York filming the important flashback scene.

At this point Wilder refused to make any more cuts to the troubled film that he had worked on for nearly three years (Wilder later said, "In three years I could've made three lousy pictures instead of one."). He was done. Let Fedora sink or swim as is. On May 30, 1978, the nearly $7 million (a not insignificant amount in the late 1970s) Fedora had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, which was honoring Wilder with a small retrospective of his films. Almost another year would pass before Fedora received an American release in April 1979. It performed poorly, earning only about $1 million. Domestic reviews were harsh. Richard Schickel stated that the film was "ludicrous" and its maker over the hill. European critics were kinder than American ones with the phrase "old fashioned" used several times. So, Wilder was out of touch with the current cinema. He didn't necessarily perceive it as an insult. "Who wants to be in touch with these times?" he asked. The good news is that Fedora has been reappraised by modern critics who consider it Wilder's last film worth viewing (1981's abysmal Buddy, Buddy is a must to avoid) with a 6.9 rating on IMDB and 73% on Rotten Tomatoes. And the movie, which only received a VHS release back in the early 90s, got a proper Blu-Ray transfer just this year. So it seems after all this time the world is finally catching up to and appreciating the beauty, elegance, charm, wit, and heartbreak that is Fedora.

What price fame?

Sources: On Sunset Boulevard: The Life & Times of Billy Wilder by Ed Sikov
               Conversations with Wilder by Cameron Crowe
               Film Comment Volume 15, Number 1, Jan-Feb.1979
               Wikipedia page on Fedora
               IMDB
               Images courtesy of the internet