Ace in the POLL!! BILLY WILDER DIRECTS

ah shit my beautiful poll

Indemnity or Apartment. hmm.. Apartment.

http://www.musicman.com/00pic/3764.jpg

Ima sucker for Wm Holden and Gloria Swanson, with Erich von Stroheim action figure for more nutty goodness.

Haven't we done this? Not to be a dick, etc.

shut up and deal

well played

One of my alltime favourite writer-directors. Can't choose between either of the two Fred MacMurray offerings yet.

im in the "wildly overrated" camp...but Double Indemnity is pretty slick.

The "wildly overrated" designation, but with Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, The Seven Year itch, Some Like It Hot and The Apartment in his filmography: I suspect Wilder could probably live with that.

most criminally underseen: A Foreign Affair

is that the one with the filing cabinet scene?

I don't remember one... It has Jean Arthur singing the Iowa state song, and Dietrich vamping Hitler.

you'd remember it if you saw it.

imbd suggests it is

Phoebe Frost: We'll go there right now!
Captain John Pringle: Where?
Phoebe Frost: To the files!
Captain John Pringle: In the middle of the night? Shouldn't we get permission?
Phoebe Frost: Did we get permission to land in Normandie? Let's go!

i voted for fran kubelik.

A Foreign Affair isn't even out on DVD!

I'd like a poll on Wilder's screenwriting credits.

you'd remember it if you saw it.

I can remember very little before this morning's breakfast.

Sunset Blvd.

Foreign Affair's out on DVD in the US, has been for a while. Hard to pick, but I think it's my favourite Wilder movie. He's not much of a plot person, but I seem to remember it having a really great setup and story.

It's not listed on Netflix!

if it's not listed on Netflix, the movie was never made.

have "only" seen:
1944 Double Indemnity
1945 The Lost Weekend
1950 Sunset Boulevard
1951 Ace in the Hole
1953 Stalag 17
1957 Love in the Afternoon
1957 Witness for the Prosecution
1959 Some Like It Hot
1960 The Apartment
1974 The Front Page

and it's undoubtely The Apartment. Hurray for Gin Rummy.

Favorite things in A Foreign Affair:
Dietrich singing "Black Market" with accompaniment by the composer Frederick Hollaender.
Millard Mitchell telling the GIs to tone it down at the beginning- "Some of you PX millionaires have found out you can parlay a pack of cigarettes into something more than twenty smokes."

But probably gonna vote for the other Berlin movie, One, Two, Three.

It's not going to get much love in this poll, but Irma La Douce is a pretty great little movie.

I'm just waiting for Morbs to return so he can rap my knuckles about my calling Wilder "vulgar" a few years ago.

I think it's fair to say we're all waiting for that.

You're gonna be Jean Arthur to Morb's Marlene, Alfred.

Morbs is not sultry.

in season, I am.

The Apartment is going to win this, but it shouldn't

I'm tempted to rent Fedora and Buddy Buddy to find out if there're as awful as they look.

Fedora is an interesting variation on Sunset Blvd., Holden and all.

"Buddy Buddy" is a version of that French film with Jacques Brel in it?

Irma la Douce's view on prostitution is kinda odd, even for a comedy made in 1963, but it's also quite charming in an old-fashioned way, and very funny too, so I think I'm gonna vote for that.

Though I guess in the Hollywood of 1963 the mere idea of making a comedy about prostitution was still outrageous, no matter what the actual movie was like.

Irma is nowhere in the ballpark of his previous Lemmon comedies, or even One Two Three.

Lots of terrible things on this list, as I wrote on another Wilder thread: The Major and the Minor, Love in the Afternoon, Kiss Me Stupid, Witness for the Prosecution, to name a few. Sure, Hawks, Cukor, Ford, Hitchcock, etc, made lots of duds too, but when Wilder, very much a member of the point-and-shoot school of directing, is off his game, he comes up with something akin to Bowie's Never Let Me Down.

watching Sunset Boulevard the other night, a film I like, I was struck by how much damn voice-over is on the thing.

Yeah that is weird, considering how big wilder was on "Show! Don't Tell!"

OK Alfred, none of those are terrible, even if Gary Cooper is a stiff in LitA.

have you seen the uncensored version of Kiss Me Stupid?

TMATM = coy; has rotten pacing
LITA = unpleasantness of Gary Cooper (he looks like he reeks of BO and Automats), Hepburn's hair, forced Lubitsch 'sophistication.'
KMS = just stupid. Some of the worst one-liners I've ever heard from a purported genius writer of clever banter. Wilder is rarely as funny as he thinks.
WFTP = My God. The movie stops for Laughton fat jokes, like the handrail lift. Marlene Dietrich and Tyrone Power "acting" (she's particularly terrible in the last ten minutes).

Ace in the Hole is really overrated.

feel like I haven't seen enough of these to really vote... hard to choose.

I think the only ones I haven't seen are Mauvaise Graine and Death Mills

iF ONLY aPATOW COULD EQUAL Kiss Me Stupid!

seeing as how Apatow's only directed 2 movies compared to Wilder's two dozen we maybe shouldn't be encouraging that TS poll just yet

that Lindbergh/Stewart movie's gotta be a bore, right?

voted ace in the hole. it not only sustains the unbeleivability of douglas's comically oversized character but actually just keeps building on it, asking you to suspend rational thinking by degrees. and it's message remains intact but never detracts from wilder's primary goal of *entertaining*.

I still think Douglas' attack of conscience weakens it substantially, tho it's one of BW's best non-comedies.

i'm shocked s1ocki hasn't shown up yet to condemn "love in the afternoon"

dont know it

OK, this was very good, maybe great, both a love letter to and exposé of Classic Hollywood, which he had to go to Germany to make because "the boys with the beards" had taken over. Recommended even if you are not a Friend of Fox.

i'm fine with Detweiler's rant bcz hey, he's talking about DePalma.

Detweiler? You mean "Dutch"?

btw Olive Films releases a Fedora BD on Oct 28.

Read about it.

Did you read about the dubbing of the actresses voices on Wikipedia?

*potential spoiler*

yes! halfway through I wondered "why does Knef sound like Keller? who's dubbing who?"

there is a great Lost Weekend gag in the Bugs Bunny cartoon Slick Hare.

review of the Brackett diaries, he didn't like many people

http://blog.vincekeenan.com/2015/01/book-ready-when-you-are-cb-charles.html

NYers can see both The Apartment and 1,2,3 in 35mm on Friday, which would be exhausting

http://www.bam.org/film/2015/black-and-white-scope

Fedora available on DVD.

like, for five months?

Kiss Me, Stupid Bluray out. The vile, smutty thing!

Hah. I think I'll get that as a birthday gift for a friend who loves it.

does he like "ACTION," like Dino?

Not really; it just makes his love for the film all that more baffling. But what can I say, it's a "charmer".

I have great affection for its prurient, curdled heart. (the uncut Euro version, obviously)

This maybe something that belongs in the "Post a Controversial Opinion" thread, but here goes: the narration in Double Indemnity bothers me way more than the much maligned voiceover in the original cut of Blade Runner. Kael gets at part of why when she calls it "so gaudy and terse that it seems an emblem of 40s hardboiled attitudes," but for me it is as much a problem of the film telegraphing its punches in an unnecessary way. I guess it could be argued that the narration helps focus on MacMurray's friendship with Robinson, but the final scene conveys already this much more succinctly and poignantly. Honestly, I really cannot think of any way that the narration/flashback structure enhances the film at all.

not a very good movie, but there should be a book-length study of representations of evil in cinema called closer than that with jack nicholson on the cover peering through his fingers at the viewer/bartender

I didn't include what Morbs called "the honorable miss" The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes .

https://humanizingthevacuum.wordpress.com/2017/07/23/shut-up-and-deal-the-best-of-billy-wilder/

Dietrich is great sizing up Congresswoman Jean Arthur in A Foreign Affair:

"I see you do not believe in lipstick. And what a curious way to do your hair, or rather not to do it."

Man, those early shots of John Lund driving his jeep to Dietrich's place through the ruins of Berlin... while "Isn't It Romantic?" plays on the soundtrack.

Dont know this one, put it on my watch list

It's one of BW's most enjoyable movies and it's a shame it's not more well-known. Even John Lund is good.

it has real emotional depth, i think due to Wilder and Dietrich's biographies.

The Fortune Cookie, which i hadn't seen in at least 20 years, is obv second-tier but better than i remembered. Matthau is positively Fieldsian.

I don't think the NFL would cooperate with this script today.

Some of Whiplash Willie's best line are throwaways ("Unwed mothers... I'm for that").

Kino Lorber Studio Classics drops A Foreign Affair on Blu August 6th!

tried to watch Avanti! a few wks ago and got about as far as the kitch-y coroner w/ the color-coded italian forms and turned it off. none of it was funny or charming and there was no reason to think it'd get better imo. there was a line where jack lemmon outright refers to juliette mills' character as fat that seemed really mean-spirited and would probably draw protesters today
― johnny crunch, Sunday, February 14, 2010 2:05 PM

After 1964 the guy totally lost it.
― Inculcate a spirit of serfdom in children (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, February 14, 2010

wrong and wrong!

Rewatched Avanti! last night and it's pretty good. Lemmon and the screenplay make no attempt to present him as much more than a blinkered louse for the first half of the movie. Clearly the female lead should've been cast with a plus-sized actress, but they only got character roles then. Also Wilder wanted to rescue Juliet Mills from her "Nanny" sitcom, and she comes through charmingly. Clive Revill is a great poised fixer/hotelier. And the last line of the film has Lemmon recanting his fat-shaming. (Also, the coroner scene is not "kitschy" but marvelous.)

In the "lost it" late period I also like the Holmes movie and Fedora.

also i rewatched Some Like It Hot last night and the skeptics can go to hell, or Spats Colombo's place.

Much of the Lemmon and Curtis interviews on the CC are to do with their costuming.

Are there really a lot of Some Like it Hot skeptics out there?

apparently, Woody Allen!

I also saw a Letterboxd comment that it's now "problematic." [redacted]

I watched Avanti! on Amazon last month: leaden and way too long.

A little too long, othwise disagree.

I do think one layer of Some Like It Hot now lost on almost everyone under 50 is its feeding off the pop culture, particularly the movies, of 1929-33 or earlier films about the period (Raft, Pat O'Brien, George E Stone, Rudy Vallee refs etc).

admit a lot of those references do go over my head, still a fun movie tho

I mean I know George Raft and Rudy Vallee but I don't doubt there's stuff I miss

Joe E Brown was kinda the Jim Varney of early '30s comedy.

ok, Fedora isn't bad. definitely his best post-Irma movie. Avanti is good but way too long, and Fedora slows to a crawl once the interminable flashbacks begin. But there's pleasure in any Wilder because he never shot any coverage and every shot means something. and the bits of business he gives everywhere, like Antonia with the gloves (looking like Mario 64). really lush colors in this music, elegiac, again not bad for his second to last movie (I think), and yes, it is very nice to see Fassbinder actors in a Wilder movie. Gottfried John grabbing William Holden from behind? there are moments here

Showed Double Indemnity tonight for the small-town film club/society/whatever I've been trying to launch. (Fourth monthly screening. Total attendance to date, including me: 18.) Someone noticed that Walter Neff wears a wedding ring the whole way through. Which is...an oversight, a mystery, evidence that Fred McMurray was one devoted husband.

Sabrina is nearly flawless filmmaking, I’m stunned to come here and see zero votes. Any NYers catching the Film Forum retrospective?

Haven’t made it over there yet

Saw Sabrina there tonight and sensed the astonishment in the audience. It got applauded.

I remember enjoying the first hour a lot, but then drifting as the romance takes precedence over the comedy

^^^ same.

Fedora is the real sleeper.

I can't with the late Wilder: he loses any semblance of rhythm, tonality, humor.

Yeah, Fedora just seemed like an especially dull giallo, though it was nice to see Gottfried John outside of RWFworld.

UCLA’s new restorations of The Major & the Minor and A Foreign Affair look absolutely gorgeous

Love love love Foreign Affair.

Now I've finally watched some Lubitsch on Criterion, it's tarnished Wilder for me very slightly -- it's easier to see what he was aiming for but (sometimes) missing.

Unrelatedly: when I was younger I never understood The Apartment, but I just hadn't been disaapointed by life yet.

Foreign Affair is pretty good, but I mostly feel bad for Jean Arthur in that.

Kiss Me, Stupid tonight. I was really with it for the first 40 minutes or so when it felt like a pretty funny, kinda sharp satire (on mid century American society blah blah blah). Then the sex farce mechanics kick in and the film loses much of its weight. Kim Novak, though physically right for the role, is not good here. Ray Walston was fine but original casting choice Peter Sellers would’ve been much better in his role. I was expecting some kind of dark twist at the end but it ends quite conservatively. Btw why is this film in black & wihite, it screams out for color.

There was an overloud laugher at my screening, it felt like having a constant intrusive laugh track.