The Sheila Variations

Pauline Kael: 5001 movies

Next review is the Billy Wilder-directed movie Ace in the Hole. Billy Wilder loved this movie but it was a huge box office failure.

Pauline Kael weighs in:

Ace in the Hole 1951

Billy Wilder produced and directed this box-office failure right after Sunset Boulevard and just before Stalag 17. Some people have tried to claim some sort of satirical brillaince for it, but it's really just nasty, in a sociologically pushy way. Kirk Douglas is the big-time New York reporter who is so opporunistic that when he gets to where a collapsed roof has buried a man in New Mexico, he arranges to have the rescue delayed so that he can pump the story up. The trapped man dies, while Douglas keeps shouting in order that we can all see what a symptomatic, cynical exploiter he is.

I saw it, not wacky about it, although there is that one spectacular shot where Kirk Douglas falls down and the camera is on the ground, and his head falls right into the camera range, smushing against the grass in close-up. Anyone remember that scene? I read somewhere that Spike Lee put that particular shot on his personal "best film-shots in movie history" list.

"Shut up and deal!"

Shirley MacLaine, during the seminar she gave at my school, talked a lot (of course) about The Apartment, a great movie directed by Wilder, and starring Jack Lemmon (and Fred MacMurray, too - in another of his great roles!).

Anyway, a couple of things to note, if you remember that movie:

-- Remember the final scene, where Miss Kubelik shows up at his apartment, and he's packing ... she breaks out the cards but he resists playing with her ... and he finally blurts out: "I love you, Miss Kubelik!" She keeps shuffling. He repeats: "Did you hear what I said, Miss Kubelik? I said I absolutely adore you!" She slowly looks over at him, grins, and holds out the deck of cards to him, saying, "Shut up and deal." There's a moment between them - he smiles - she smiles, takes off her coat - the music swells, and he starts to deal the cards, and the movie is over. It's a long well-written juicy scene (of course - Wilder wrote it with IAL Diamond, his writing partner)-- one of those great movie scenes with a beginning, middle and end, like a mini-play ... where the characters start out ONE way (he's moving, he's leaving, he's getting out) and end up another way (they're going to be together.) Beautiful. If you ever see that movie again (and it's one of my favorites), watch that scene again. First of all: It's all done in one take, which just makes me BEMOAN the current use of dueling close-ups in scenes such as this one. No. Billy Wilder let the audience watch some of his scenes like a play. He lets the audience choose who to look at. It's very exciting. And second of all: what you see in the film was the FIRST take. The two of them did it perfectly on the first take. Billy Wilder watched the whole thing unfold through the camera (usually you're getting rid of excess nerves on the first take, you're tense, etc.) - but Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine hit all the right notes, in perfect succession, with no cut-aways, in one extraordinary take. Wilder called: "CUT! PRINT!" And that was that.

-- Lastly, I loved this. Shirley MacLaine was trying to describe how Wilder directed. She said he was very strict in some ways, very flexible in other ways ... but here's where his genius was. She and Lemmon would run through a scene. Wilder would say when they were done, "Okay, that was very good. Now do it again, only take out 13 and a half seconds."

Heh heh. He was no dummy. The comedy was too slow. But he knew, down to the half-second, how much time needed to be taken out.

I love comic geniuses. They amaze me.

Movies Billy Wilder wanted to make - but never did

Okay, so you probably know that Billy Wilder directed Spirit of St. Louis, starring Jimmy Stewart as Charles Lindbergh.

Wilder and Lindbergh were friends, of a sort. Stewart is way too old to play Lindbergh, in my humble opinion, but he still does a wonderful job. (The movie don't quite work, though ... not sure why ... It just doesn't work, really). Jimmy Stewart was 19 when Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic, and remembers listening to the radio broadcast, that Lindbergh had taken off ... and he remembers sitting in his father's hardware store, taking a model airplane and making it fly on Lindbergh's projected path over his father's globe. He also went into the Air Force himself in WWII, in part because of Lindbergh's inspiration. (WHY ON EARTH IS ALL OF THIS STUFF IN MY BRAIN?? I literally have no idea why my brain retains the smallest details of JIMMY STEWART'S BOYHOOD EXPERIENCES. But mine is not to reason why.)

Anyway, I've posted before Billy Wilder's description of what he would have LIKED to do with Spirit of St. Louis - HIS idea for how to frame the story. But he knew to even suggest it would mean that Lindbergh would withdraw the project. So he held his tongue. Anyway, here's the movie Wilder WANTED to make.

Another very well-known fact is that Billy Wilder and Cary Grant were friends for many many years. And yet, oddly, Cary Grant never appeared in any Wilder movie. Even though, Cary Grant seems MADE for a Billy Wilder picture, and Billy Wilder had written role after role after role (Humphrey Bogart's part in Sabrina, for example) with Grant in mind. Here's Wilder's description of all of that. Cary Grant's elusiveness never hurt their friendship ... and yet still, it is one of those "what-if" situations. What IF Cary Grant had said Yes? Billy Wilder never cried over spilt milk ... and he ended up making Tony Curtis basically DO a Cary Grant imitation for most of Some Like it Hot as his indirect tribute. He adored Cary Grant.

But Cary Grant worked with only a couple of directors. He was not a trusting man. He had no agent, and had chosen to not wed himself to any one studio. He was extremely wary of having anyone mess with his image ... and Hitchcock was pretty much the only one he trusted completely.

Fascinating.

Anyway, in all of the stuff I have read of Billy Wilder, Cary Grant's name comes up again and again and again. "And he would have been great in THIS part ... and I wrote THAT part for him ..."

That was why Wilder and Humphrey Bogart didn't get along (to put it mildly) during the filming of Sabrina. Bogart KNEW that that part was meant for Cary, that he was second choice, and that pissed him OFF. (Would piss me off, too!! Not a good situation, not a confidence-builder ... to know you're second choice).

So, in one of my favorite art-of-filmmaking books - Conversations with Wilder, where Cameron Crowe sat down with Billy Wilder over the course of a couple of months, and asked him a billion questions about all of his movies ... Billy Wilder talked about Cary Grant.

And - he said that until they were old men together, Wilder kept trying to get Cary Grant to act again. Cary Grant had long retired, and Wilder kept sending him scripts "with grey-haired old guys in them". The answer was always NO.

Wilder had a fantasy of the ULTIMATE movie he wanted to do, starring Cary Grant. He had the entire thing shot in his head. And Cary Grant, because he was Cary Grant, never would have grown out of the part, even though he was 60 years old. He was always a leading man.

So anyway, here is the first 10 minutes of Billy Wilder's dream-movie, the movie he always wanted to do, but never did, starring Cary Grant:

-- It takes place during the Crusades.

-- There is a long sweeping shot through the muddy streets of a medieval town. Something is obviously about to happen, much activity.

-- A series of shots of the men of the town putting on coats of armor. Buckling up, raising flags, putting on helmets, getting the swords ready ... Okay. So we get the picture. The men are going off to the Crusade.

-- Another series of shots ... showing the men of the town locking their wives into chastity belts. They all have huge keys, their wives are crying, pleading not to be locked up, also not to go away ... but the men are firm. Their wife must be protected! She must be locked up! So a series of shots ... throughout the town ... lock, lock, lock, lock, lock, lock, lock. (You got it? A montage.)

-- Then, leaving their crying locked-up wives behind them, the men all leap onto their horses and, holding up flags and swords and shields, gallop out of town.

-- The camera follows the horses through the town, the galloping, the mud flying ... and as the horses pass by, out of frame, the camera rests on a small storefront. Unassuming. Medieval. And on a small sign by the door are the words: "Locksmith". And the camera slowly pans by the window, and we see the locksmith at work at his table inside. The locksmith is Cary Grant.

heh heh heh heh

God. It's so witty, so clever ... I think that's why I love Wilder movies, and Lubitsch movies ... all those old guys, from the golden age of Hollywood. The WIT. Where do ideas come from? Who knows. The idea fairy. I have no idea. But I love Billy Wilder's idea ... and I also love that even as a frail man, close to death, he got all excited, telling Cameron Crowe about his "dream movie", and how the first 10 minutes would go.

Billy Wilder - America

On arriving in America

I first saw America from the Aquitania. We were delayed half a day, we were up in the harbor. It was a snowing winter night. I stayed with my brother in his little house on Long Island. In the morning when I got up, I looked out the window. It was still snowing. And there was a big, black, stretch Cadillac. Out comes a young boy with a stack of newspapers and he deposited one on the front doorstep. The weather was bad, and the newspaper boy's family was driving him in that big car. But to me, I thought, "What kind of country is this?" Newspapers delivered by Cadillac! It was stunning! I liked it. I loved it.

Billy Wilder

A great interview with him about film noir.

One of my favorite books, at least in the realm of the art of film-making, is Cameron Crowe's wonderful book Conversations with Billy Wilder. Wilder was always famously honest, if even a little bit cranky in interviews - something that I find very charming and refreshing.

If it's a dumb question, he says, "That's kind of a dumb question."

Or like this excerpt from the interview: "So you see, it is not that I am tossing up and down in my bed like Goethe conceiving art, and wind is playing in my hair, and I plan it all out to the last detail. No."

Heh.

I love Wilder's words on the counter-intuitive casting of Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity:

He has to be seduced and sucked in on that thing. He is the average man who suddenly becomes a murderer. That's the dark aspect of the middle-class, how ordinary guys can come to commit murder. But it was difficult to get a leading man. Everybody turned me down. I tried up and down the street, believe me, including George Raft. Nobody would do it, they didn't want to play this unsympathetic guy. Nor did Fred MacMurray see the possibilities at first. He said, "Look, I'm a saxophone player. I'm making my comedies with Claudette Colbert, what do you want?"

"Well, you've got to make that one step, and believe me it's going to be rewarding; and it's not that difficult to do." So he did it. But he didn't want to do it. He didn't want to be murdered, he didn't want to be a murderer.

Wilder made all kinds of films - famous comedies ("Some Like it Hot" being the most obvious example, but there are so many more) - but then, on the flipside he made these film-noir classics. Double Indemnity. Sunset Boulevard.

An incredible man, incredible director.