Four Cynics: The Sons of Billy Wilder

In his day, Billy Wilder was Mr. Cynic. His singular take on the American character and its psyche was more in tune with today's anything goes vision of the world than what Wilder's contemporaries were pursuing in the forties, fifties, and sixties. Wilder, a refugee from Austria, saw the world as a morally dark place, full of hustlers and con artists. This quality alone made his films stand out from an overcrowded pack. After the success of his directorial debut, 1942's lightweight comedy, The Major and The Minor, Wilder moved onto the topical subject of the war in Five Graves to Cairo, starring (in name only) Franchot Tone as Corporal Bramble and (the real star) Erich Von Stroheim as Field Marshall Rommel. Then, after establishing himself as a capable director with these two features, Billy Wilder's perspective really began to emerge as he set loose his first "son" - Walter Neff, the insurance salesman played by Fred MacMurray in the near perfect film noir, Double Indemnity.

Walter Neff, the eldest. All of Billy Wilder's sons have weaknesses - sex, money, love, booze, fame - that cause their downfall. Walter Neff's weakness is sex. Yes, there is money involved, and it is certainly a factor in the killing of Phyllis Dietrichson's abusive husband. But Stanwyck's femme fatale is the main attraction for Neff.

 

Barbara Stanwyck's Phyllis Dietrichson is one of cinema's sublime black widows - and Walter Neff's weakness.

After all, if money were the only motive, Neff's judgment wouldn't be so clouded. Sex trips up Walter Neff, and he gets caught by the authorities because of it. Walter also carries a certain amount of self loathing. He's one of those guys who never sticks with a woman for long. The women he does choose are not classy dames but ones who "drink from the bottle," as Neff's co-worker, friend, and father figure, Barton Keyes, describes them. Neff's choice of women shows his lack of self worth. He would prefer to spend time with a cheap broad or two than settle down with a nice, respectable girl, and lead a nice, respectable life. Neff actually gets the chance to be respectable with Dietrichson's daughter, Lola. In the film's final third Neff befriends Lola, who he feels may be on to Phyllis. However, rather than bedding down with her, Neff helps Lola fix the strained relationship with her boyfriend, Nino, unbeknownst to them both, has been spending time with Phyllis. (The film is nothing if not perverse.)

Walter gets Phyllis' husband to sign his life away unwittingly, yet his gaze focuses on her leg.

Another of Walter Neff's flaws is his intelligence. Neff's bright all right, but he's also looking for the angle, eager to get rich and move to easy street, not realizing there's no such address. Of course, his smarts also get him in trouble - the deepest trouble. All of Billy Wilder's sons, from Walter Neff to Ace in the Hole's Chuck Tatum, are too smart for their own good. Eldest brother Walter Neff blazed the trail.

Don Birnam, the prodigal. Wilder's next film - made the very next year - 1945's The Lost Weekend, presents a very different man with a different weakness: Alcohol. Ray Milland as the alcoholic writer, Don Birnam, is magnificent. He carries the film and is in practically every scene. Birnam is a would-be genius. In college, the school newspaper couldn't get enough of his stories. Upon graduation, he was set to conquer the literary world with prose on par with Hemingway's. Then reality - or more likely, writer's block - set in. He found that by having a drink, the creative juices flowed a little easier. But then one drink was followed by another and another and another until Don was too drunk to write. The pattern that emerged had no end.

Just in time: Helen reaches Don just as he hits bottom. 

In a crucial scene, Don reveals to his kind girlfriend, Helen, what makes him tick - what makes him drink. Turns out Don has tried a cure to dry out, but it didn't take. Don's main problem, it seems, is his lack of self esteem, or as he puts it, "I never did anything with my life, and I never will do anything with my life. Zero, zero, zero!" So Don takes solace in a bottle rather than in the love of this good woman. In the end, though, Don is the only one of Wilder's sons who has a chance at redemption because he is the only one who doesn't die at the end of the movie. Jane Wyman's almost too-good-to-be-true Helen arrives just in time to save a completely sober Don from ending his life by shooting himself.

One more for the road

The Lost Weekend's presentation of Don Birnam as he goes from one humiliation to another is still pretty strong stuff - getting caught stealing money from the purse of a patron at a piano bar and being forcibly removed; wandering up and down 75th Street unsuccessfully trying to hock his typewriter for money to buy another drink; landing at Bellevue Hospital after falling down a flight of stairs, then escaping to a liquor store where he demands the clerk give him a bottle. And finally, alone in his apartment, the DTs hit him like a tidal wave as he hallucinates a mouse coming out of the wall and a bat swooping down to kill it. While the film ends on a positive note as Don puts out his cigarette in a glass of booze, I can't help but feel that it's just a temporary respite, that Don will eventually succeed in killing himself either with a bottle or a gun. Would these sons of Billy Wilder end up any other way?

 

Joe Gillis, the neglected middle child. Of all Billy Wilder's sons, perhaps none was closer to his heart than Hollywood screenwriter, Joe Gillis, in Sunset Boulevard. Joe is the hack Wilder might have been if he hadn't been so damned talented. He is also possibly Wilder's most tragic creation - a good guy who should have done more. He has screen credits ("My last film was about Okies in the dust bowl, only you wouldn't know it. When it was released the whole thing played on a torpedo boat."). He knows the ins and outs of the town, who to talk to, who to know, and who to avoid. Unfortunately for Joe, however, he forgets what he knows when he meets up with former silent movie queen, Norma Desmond. Joe has been a decent guy for several years in Tinseltown, but he's tired of being behind the eight ball - late on his car payment and his rent - and he feels, justifiably, entitled to a better life. So he hooks up with the aging Norma ("You use to be in silent pictures," Joe tells Norma, "You use to be big." "I am big!" she replies, "It's the pictures that got small.").

Uncomfortably numb: Norma and Joe on the couch

Joe, like older brother Walter Neff, has a chance for escape and a respectable life in the form of studio scenario reader, Betty Schaefer. Only Betty is engaged to Joe's only real friend, assistant director Artie Green. Sunset Boulevard is one of Wilder's greatest creations. Delusional Norma Desmond, played to the hilt yet sensitively by Gloria Swanson, is one of the cinema's most enduring characters. Former director, Erich Von Stroheim, hits all the right notes as Max, Norma's chauffeur and former husband who helps keep her legend alive and holds the madness at bay. Along the way we are introduced to various movie types - the callous agent only worried about his ten percent; the producer, Sheldrake, who makes a mockery of the story a desperate, broke Joe tries to sell him; and Norma's bridge playing friends from the silent movie days - her "waxworks," as Joe puts it.

Joe with script reader and aspiring writer, Betty Schaefer

William Holden as Joe Gillis is sometimes lost in the shuffle when put side by side with these other Hollywood types. Holden was nominated for an Academy Award for his effort, and the film paved the way to a great career, including his Oscar-winning turn as another Billy Wilder cynic in 1953's Stalag 17. However, when folks speak of the film today, it tends to be Norma Desmond they remember. The film, though, is about Joe, and Holden's work here is exemplary. We may not always like what we see, yet it is with Joe Gillis that we can identify.

Chuck Tatum, the baby (a.k.a., the spoiled brat). Ace in the Hole's Chuck Tatum may be the most despicable character Wilder ever created. In fact, he may be the most despicable character in Hollywood history.

Starring Kirk Douglas as reprehensible newspaper reporter, Chuck Tatum, who finds himself stranded in a small New Mexico town after being banished from his post on a New York paper for libel, drinking, and general debauchery, Chuck is bored senseless. Thinking he was in for a light sentence with time off for good behavior, he's been stranded for more than a year with no worthwhile story to pave his way back to the Big Apple. But then local restaurant/souvenir stand owner, Leo Minosa, gets trapped in an old mine while searching for American Indian artifacts. Seeing Leo's story as his ticket out of town, Chuck plays it up for all its worth, convincing the corrupt local sheriff and construction company to consider the most dynamic way to save the trapped man rather than the quickest and safest. It doesn't end well.

Stranded and in need of a job, Chuck Tatum works his wily charm on newspaper editor, Mr. Boot.

Chuck Tatum has the worst characteristics of all his brothers. Like them he is single-minded. His greed comes from big brother Walter Neff; the writing background and opportunism from older brother Joe Gillis; the turn of a quick phrase and love of drink from Don Birnam. Unlike his older brothers, however, Chuck has no heart. He is sorry about Leo's fate . . . because the human interest angle to the story requires a happy ending.

Kirk Douglas, who made a career of playing heels, sinks his teeth into the dialogue written by Wilder and Walter Newman, relishing every word. A shout out must also go to Jan Sterling as bottle blonde Lorraine Minosa, wife of the poor, unfortunate Leo, and worthy cohort/adversary of the cutthroat Chuck. Her portrait of a woman worn down by life - when told by Chuck to put on a good show for the spectators by going to church to pray for her husband, Lorraine replies, "I don't pray. Kneeling bags my nylons" - is nothing short of first rate. (Wilder has some daughters I should write about one day. His view of the opposite sex is no more kind than his perspective on many of the male schnooks whose stories he told.)

Ace in the Hole was a box office failure, and it scared Wilder. He didn't direct for a year, and when he did emerge, it was with one proven Broadway adaptation after another - Stalag 17 in 1953, Sabrina in 1954, and The Seven Year Itch in 1955. Only one of these could be considered a Wilder son like the previous four, and that would be William Holden's Sefton in Stalag 17. In all Wilder's future successes, however, he would never again be as abrasive and or as much of a risk taker as he was with these four films and his depictions of their flawed, desperate (anti-)heroes. 


Sources : Wikipedia
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                Images gathered at random from the internet