There’s too much dirt under the carpet; it will come out sooner or later.
—Murray Hamilton as a gossip columnist
in the telefilm Death Casts a Spell
Clay Felker, the editor of New York magazine, phoned Wilder in the fall of 1975 to ask him to sit for a frank interview, and Wilder agreed. After Avanti! was lambasted by the critics and The Front Page received a mixed critical response, Wilder seemed to draw energy and resolve from disdain and financial adversity.
When Felker’s reporter, Jon Bradshaw, showed up for the interview, he seemed pleasantly surprised that Wilder’s spirit was not broken by his commercial failures. Wilder, annoyed, opened fire: “What did you expect to find when you came out here? A broken-down director? A wizened, myopic boob in his dotage? I guess you thought you’d find me playing with my old Oscars? In a wheelchair, maybe? Poor old Billy Wilder, the great director—God, you should see him now: a wreck, a ruin!” He continued, “Well, they told you wrong; I’m not just functioning in the Motion Picture Relief Home, I feel just as confident and virile as I did thirty years ago.”1 Bradshaw chose not to reply and instead wrote in his notebook that Wilder “looked younger than his sixty-nine years” and was casually dressed: slacks, a pullover, an open shirt, and loafers. He was also wearing a golf cap—when he was a journalist, reporters always wore hats indoors, and he had worn a hat in his office and on the set ever since. Wilder occupied the same office at Universal that he had when he was making The Front Page, and that was where he was now working on Fedora. His office had once been Lucille Ball’s dressing room, and his next-door neighbor was Alfred Hitchcock.
“Occasionally the vineyards produce a bad vintage,” said Wilder, a reference to the critic who called Avanti! a bottle of sour chianti. “But there will always be another harvest.” Still, “I’ve not hit a home run in a long time; Irma la Douce was a home run. By contrast, Avanti! was a strike-out; The Front Page was a nice hit and drove in a run or two, that was all. It was solid; but hell, I used to hit the solid stuff over the fences.” Yet he insisted that he was undismayed. “Next time up, I’m hitting for the fences.”2
Now that Wilder was a freelancer, he considered himself a “visiting professor” at Universal. He had a contract to prepare one project for the studio. At present he and Diamond were collaborating on the screenplay for Fedora, the project that Wilder was hoping would put him back in the big leagues. It was derived from the first of four novellas about Hollywood in the book Crowned Heads by Thomas Tryon, an actor turned writer. Wilder said he and Diamond “had been kicking around a Hollywood picture, when along came the galleys of this book.”3 The story concerns a retired Hollywood actress living in Europe.
On March 16, 1976, Universal officially announced that Wilder would make Fedora for the studio. Wilder, sounding a bit like Norma Desmond, commented, “It’s particularly thrilling to make a comeback!”4 He submitted the first draft of the screenplay to the studio in September 1976. He vividly remembered discussing the script with a young Universal executive in the black tower, Universal’s executive office building. The studio official “could barely stay awake” because the scenario was not about “car crashes and space ships.”5
William Holden, who plays an embittered independent producer in Fedora, seems to be speaking for Wilder when he proclaims, “The kids with the beards” are taking over the industry. The studios were being run by young people who had no regard for anyone’s record, Wilder told me. Fred Zinnemann said he remembered being asked by a young executive to name his accomplishments, and Zinnemann replied, “You first.”6 As it happened, Wilder learned later that the executives in the black tower were having second thoughts about Fedora. Two recent Universal films about Hollywood’s golden age had flopped: W. C. Fields and Me (1976) and Gable and Lombard (1976).
On November 19, 1976, Sidney Sheinberg, the president of Universal’s parent company, the Music Corporation of America, finally decided to scuttle Fedora. He asked Jennings Lang, who had produced The Front Page, to inform Wilder. Lang phoned Wilder and indicated that Sheinberg considered Fedora “uncommercial.”7 In the old days, Wilder reflected, “the moguls prided themselves on doing a few prestige pictures every year; if they spent $1.5 million on some deep-dish project, that was no big deal.” But with the collapse of the studio system in the 1960s, “the lights went out in Hollywood,” said Wilder. “The result is a terror of taking risks”; the majors became increasingly cautious about marketing a dark film to an audience glutted on placebo entertainment.8
Wilder walked off the Universal lot for good. While continuing to work with Diamond on the final draft of the screenplay of Fedora, he shopped the project around town. But he was unable to interest a major studio in it after Universal passed on it. He found himself catapulted back into the 1930s, “peddling a project nobody wanted to buy.”9
In the screenplay, Fedora continues her glamorous Hollywood career as a youthful-looking superstar well into middle age. When she retires from the screen after her face is disfigured by plastic surgery, “she trains her daughter Antonia to assume her legend,” pretending to be her. George Morris notes that “the audacity of this imposture would have made Norma Desmond green with envy.”10 Fedora herself assumes the identity of Countess Sobryanski and lives in seclusion on a remote Greek island. Fedora wanted “to go on forever,” Wilder commented. “She did not want to be seen shriveled in a wheelchair, in retirement.” Wilder observed that Fedora was something like Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which Dorian sells his soul to retain his youth and beauty. Wilder mused that the film should have been called “The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilder.”11 Foster Hirsch asserts that “the real-life model for Fedora was clearly Greta Garbo,” and Wilder never denied it.12 Not only has Fedora become a recluse like Garbo in her later years, but Wilder identifies one of Fedora’s greatest movies as Anna Karenina, in which Garbo starred in 1935.
Wilder still had a penchant for slipping wisecracks about other movies into a script. The countess recalls losing an Oscar to the actress “who played a nun with tuberculosis.” Audrey Hepburn, Wilder’s old friend, had played that part in The Nun’s Story (1959), but it was for Roman Holiday that she won an Academy Award. And, as the New York Times pointed out, Wilder “shaped and toughened the story in ways that inevitably recall Sunset Boulevard, as does the casting of William Holden, the gigolo in Sunset Boulevard, as the seedy, down-on-his-luck producer Barry Detweiler, in Fedora.”13
Wilder eventually grew tired of “dragging my ass along Hollywood Boulevard” like Barry, looking in vain for a studio to fund his film.14 In desperation he turned to his agent Paul Kohner to obtain financing for Fedora from a German studio, since Kohner, another refugee from Hitler’s Germany, still had connections in the German film industry. Kohner put in a call to the production chief at Bavaria Film Studios in Munich, where Wilder had shot One, Two, Three, and inquired whether he would like Billy Wilder to make a picture there for the studio. Kohner got an affirmative response and informed Wilder that the movie would be financed through Bavaria Film Studios’ subsidiary, Geria Films. The budget was fixed at $6.7 million.15
“I have some kind of reputation in Germany,” Wilder mused; “why, I don’t know, because, when I left Germany, I was just one of the writers at Ufa. Suddenly the mantle of F. W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, and Ernst Lubitsch falls on my shoulders.” Geria Films held a reception for Wilder to announce the production. “My God,” thought Wilder, “old Ufa is going to rise again!”16
Universal still held the distribution rights to Fedora as a result of its original investment in the project. So Wilder, nursing a grudge against the studio, bought out Universal’s interest in the picture. In effect, Wilder personally reimbursed Universal for its purchase of the screen rights to the Tryon novella for him. As one Hollywood insider put it, “Sid Sheinberg not only pulled the rug out from under Billy, he tried to sell it back to him!”17
Wilder’s original casting plan was to have the same young actress play both Fedora, now known as Countess Sobryanski, and her daughter Antonia. He would age the actress for the scenes in which she played the countess. He selected Marthe Keller after attending an advance screening of Bobby Deerfield (1977), in which she played opposite Al Pacino. Keller was a Swiss actress who had appeared primarily in French films. Wilder eventually decided that Keller would be satisfactory as Antonia, but he feared that she lacked the range to play the elderly countess. Moreover, he found Keller temperamental and sensed that she would be difficult enough to handle in playing the one part. So Wilder needed another actress to play Antonia’s mother.
His first choice was his old confrere from his Berlin days, Marlene Dietrich, whom he had directed in two films. He quickly sent off a copy of the screenplay to the reclusive Dietrich at her Paris apartment. Wilder later remembered that she shot back the screenplay to him by return mail, “as if she couldn’t get rid of it fast enough.” She attached an abrupt note: “I hated the script, and I don’t know why you want me to do it. How could you possibly think that?”18 Perhaps Dietrich felt that the increasingly strained relationship of Fedora and her daughter Antonia was uncomfortably close to her problematic relationship with her own daughter, Maria Riva. Moreover, Dietrich, at her advanced age, no longer wished to be photographed.
Keller herself suggested the German actress Hildegard Knef for the part. “Twenty years Dietrich’s junior, Hildegard was Marlene’s protegé,” writes David Riva, Dietrich’s grandson; she was also one of Germany’s top stars.19 Moreover, Knef had scored a personal triumph on Broadway in 1955 in Silk Stockings, a Cole Porter musical derived from Ninotchka. She had played in some Hollywood films, but she was better known for her European pictures.
Michael York plays himself in Fedora, as do Arlene Francis (who was in One, Two, Three) and Henry Fonda, who plays the president of the motion picture academy. The presence of these individuals, Wilder pointed out, adds an authentic flavor to the film, just as the appearances by Cecil B. De Mille, Buster Keaton, and Hedda Hopper do in Sunset Boulevard.
Although the cinematographer Gerry Fisher (The Go-Between, 1971) had not worked with Wilder before, composer Miklos Rozsa and production designer Alexander Trauner were creative associates of Wilder’s from way back. Rozsa was collaborating on his fifth Wilder film and Trauner on his eighth.
Principal photography began on June 1, 1977, in the Greek isles, where Fedora goes to live after her retirement from the screen. Wilder and his film unit started out on the island of Corfu, with four days of exteriors. They moved on to the island of Mandouri, where Trauner had found an isolated house that would serve as Fedora’s Villa Calpyso. Wilder wanted so much to finish on time and not go over budget, to please his German investors, that he reduced the rehearsal time on each scene. Keller complained that she never felt that she had nailed her characterization of Antonia “because Billy Wilder never discussed anything. You had to do what he said; and I felt a bit like a marionette.”20
Wilder and his production unit moved on to Bavaria Film Studios to shoot interiors. Fisher had exploited the natural locations in the Greek islands to exquisite effect. While shooting the scenes in Fedora’s mansion, with its dilapidated grandeur, on the studio soundstages, Fisher gave the film a bleak look, “reflecting the wasteland of the spirit” experienced by the inhabitants. As Verina Glaessner writes, in these latter scenes Fisher helped to undercut the “inherent nostalgia” of this tale of old Hollywood.21
Rex McGee records that, “in late July, Wilder and Diamond viewed about an hour of the footage” already edited by Stefan Arsten, and they “decided that they needed a new editor.”22 So Wilder fired Arsten and phoned Ralph Winters, who had cut Avanti! and The Front Page. Winters was involved in another film, but he suggested Fredric Steinkamp, who had won an Academy Award for coediting Grand Prix (1966). Wilder was also much impressed with Steinkamp’s editing of Bobby Deerfield.
In August Wilder and his production team moved on to Paris, to finish the shoot at the Studios de Boulogne, where he had filmed Love in the Afternoon. Here Wilder staged Fedora’s elaborate funeral, which is held in Paris. Trauner outdid himself by constructing a huge set, complete with marble pillars, splendid candelabra, and a wrought iron gallery above the casket, where the countess and her entourage sit, presiding over the proceedings. “This is a triple-A funeral,” Wilder beamed. But “behind Wilder’s jauntiness on the set,” journalist Mary Blume observed, “the pressure shows. He has started smoking again, trying to limit himself to a particularly nasty French cigar, of which even he can only smoke three a day.” Wilder confessed that shooting indoors for long periods gave him cabin fever. “Being quarantined on a sound stage and not being able to walk down a Paris boulevard,” he said, “is like being a pianist in a bordello while hearing the people screwing on every floor. It makes you crazy.”23
Principal photography wrapped on August 31, 1977, with Wilder having gone a few thousand dollars over budget, not enough for his German investors to complain about. Within a few days, he was back in Hollywood. Wilder and Steinkamp rented an editing suite at Twentieth Century–Fox to cut the film. They finished the first cut on October 20.24
During postproduction, a serious problem developed for Wilder. He was convinced that Antonia and the countess should have the same voice, since the daughter was impersonating her mother throughout much of the movie. But Marthe Keller and Hildegard Knef did not sound enough alike to sustain the illusion. Wilder decided to have the same German actress, Inga Bunsch, rerecord both Keller’s and Knef’s dialogue. Knef resented this turn of events: “First he destroys my face,” when Fedora is disfigured; “now he takes away my voice. What is left?”25 Surprisingly, Keller accepted Wilder’s decision to redub her voice, although she insisted that her own voice be employed in the final scenes of the movie, when Antonia is no longer masquerading as Fedora.
Miklos Rozsa was summoned to view the rough cut in October so he could get going on his background music. He was glad to be collaborating with Wilder again. In a 1974 interview, he said that he never forgot how Wilder went to bat for him when Louis Lipstone, head of Paramount’s music department, disliked the dissonance in Rozsa’s scores for Wilder’s pictures. Rozsa would telephone Wilder and say, “Billy, save me from this son-of-a-bitch!” And Wilder would always oblige.26 Rozsa recorded his score with a symphony orchestra in mid-December 1977. He matched Wilder’s film about old Hollywood with a “deliberately nostalgic” accompaniment.27
Lorimer Productions, the American representative of Bavaria Film Studios and Geria Films, was supposed to arrange for the distribution of the movie nationwide. On March 15, 1978, Wilder screened Fedora for Lorimar executives. Their verdict was that the film ran long at 128 minutes, and they declined to release the film at that length. Wilder and Steinkamp accordingly excised 15 minutes from the film.28
On May 12, Wilder held a preview at the State Theatre in Santa Barbara, where Sherlock Holmes had had a favorable sneak screening. “The first half of Fedora played well,” McGee reports, “but midway into the film the audience began to get restless.” There were a number of inexplicable laughs, known in the industry as “bad laughs.”29 David Picker, a UA executive, told me in conversation after a screening of a UA film in 1980 that he had attended the Santa Barbara preview of Fedora. That did not deter him from picking up the distribution rights of Fedora after Lorimer lost interest in the movie. He did so “for old times’ sake,” he explained; after all, UA had previously been Wilder’s distributor for fourteen years.
Fedora had its official world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on the closing night of the festival, May 30, 1978. The premiere was preceded by a retrospective of Wilder’s movies. “The French are great homage givers,” Wilder joked, with a mischievous smile; they even had one for Jerry Lewis.30 The response to Fedora was sharply divided: European critics loved it. American reviewers did not cotton to it, and some sneered or laughed inappropriately. Andrew Sarris commented, “The usual collection of freeloading trend-setters were reportedly laughing at all the wrong places. There is nothing quite so hideously heartless as the idiot cackle of the in-crowd when it senses that a career may be on the skids.”31
Still, the screening at Cannes gave the film worldwide publicity, and Wilder was keenly disappointed that UA did not release Fedora in the United States soon after. By then he had been involved with the picture for well over two years. “In that time I could have made three lousy pictures, instead of one,” he quipped.32 As a matter of fact, UA kept Fedora on the shelf until May 1979—a full year after its Cannes debut. To make matters worse, “the limited release and publicity hampered the film’s chances for success,” Glenn Hopp points out.33 Wilder complained about UA’s “releasing it in an insulting and perfunctory way and spending peanuts on the advertising campaign.”34
Like Sunset Boulevard, Fedora uses a flashback format to tell its story. The present film begins with Fedora (actually Antonia) throwing herself in the path of an oncoming train, just as the tragic heroine of Anna Karenina does. This precredit sequence continues with Arlene Francis, playing herself, announcing Fedora’s death on a TV newscast. After the opening credits, there follows Fedora’s wake, held in her florid mansion in Paris. “As the crowds file past her coffin,” Morris writes, “the jigsaw puzzle of Fedora’s past is pieced together through the recollections of her retinue and one of the mourners, Barry Detweiler.”35 It is their reminiscences that are portrayed in flashback throughout the movie. “She was going out in style,” says Barry, in voice-over on the sound track, “complete with TV cameras, like a goddamned Hollywood premiere.”
The real Fedora explains to Barry in a tête-à-tête during the wake that she took the name of Countess Sobryanski after Antonia began impersonating her, since the count was Antonia’s father. Nevertheless, she and the count never married; they were separated by World War II. She could not acknowledge Antonia’s existence because of the morals clause in her contract with MGM. “Remember those days?” she asks Barry. “You couldn’t have an illegitimate child” because that constituted “moral turpitude,” which could cause an actor to be suspended indefinitely.
The countess narrates for Barry the horrific episode in which the plastic surgeon Vando’s botched experiment (after two decades of success) disfigured her face. Dr. Vando (José Ferrer) explains that, after the failed treatment, “an infection set in; there were complications.” He adds ominously, “You can’t cheat nature without paying the price.” Fedora, “wheelchair-bound because of a facelift run amok,” retires from the screen.36
Henry Fonda, playing himself, is the president of the motion picture academy. Early in the film, he makes a pilgrimage to Fedora’s secluded island retreat to present her with a special Oscar for lifetime achievement. Antonia agrees to double for her mother for the occasion and succeeds in fooling Fonda. Afterward Fedora conceives the plan of continuing her career with Antonia standing in for her. For years Antonia impersonates her mother, both on- and offscreen, until Antonia becomes soured on the masquerade. Matters come to a head when she costars with Michael York, playing himself, in The Last Waltz, a period costume picture. Antonia is shown shooting a syrupy scene for the picture with her leading man. The opulent ballroom filled with waltzing couples recalls Wilder’s own Emperor Waltz, indicating that Wilder was quite capable of self-parody. At heart, Antonia is still a young girl. She falls hopelessly in love with Michael, but she is prohibited by her mother from revealing her true identity to Michael in order to perpetuate the illusion of the “ageless Fedora” for her fans.
Antonia is faced with the prospect of continuing to impersonate her mother while being deprived of a life of her own. As Kevin Lally notes, Antonia’s mother is able to continue her career vicariously, “by robbing her own daughter of her identity.”37 Antonia sinks into a deep depression and takes refuge in drugs, ending her film career. Barry Detweiler comes to Europe to visit the reclusive Fedora. He hopes to coax her into making a comeback in a remake of Anna Karenina, called The Snows of Yesteryear, so that he can revive his own stalled career as a producer. Of course, it is Antonia he meets in the guise of Fedora. She declines his offer of a comeback, but they part on friendly terms. “Time catches up with us all,” she says as he leaves.
Soon afterward Barry returns to Europe for Fedora’s funeral; it is only then that he learns from the countess, and from others as well, the truth behind Antonia’s tragic life and death. By film’s end, the movie has come full circle; it concludes by returning to Fedora’s wake, which is really Antonia’s wake. At one point during her conference with Barry, Countess Sobryanski, the real Fedora, raises her veil to expose her withered countenance. Her action is a metaphor for the manner in which she has lifted for Barry the veil of secrecy.
Barry reflects that an actress must be sugar and spice on the surface, “but underneath, cement and steel.” Antonia, unlike her mother, was not made that way. At this point, Michael York appears at the wake and approaches the coffin. He places a red rose on Antonia’s chest—for him, as for the endless stream of mourners, Antonia is Fedora.
“You sure know how to throw yourself a funeral,” Barry remarks to the countess. She muses that Fedora is a legend, and “a legend must not linger beyond her time. Monroe and Harlow, they were the lucky ones.” Before the end credits roll, Fedora adds, “Endings are very important—the final close-up—that is what people remember; the legend must go on.”
The film played first-run engagements in select cities. Richard Schickel, calling the movie “old hat” in Time, pronounced Wilder’s “melodramatic manner of storytelling” to be old-fashioned.38 Admittedly, Wilder responded, his care for narrative structure and character development had become unfashionable in Hollywood. “They call it old-fashioned; that’s the only way I know to work.” So “that’s the way I’m going to do it until they take the cameras away.”39 Elsewhere he added, “They say Wilder is out of touch with the times. Frankly, I regard that as a compliment. Who the hell wants to be in touch with these times?”40
The negative buzz about the picture occasioned Vincent Canby’s remark that “Fedora is such a seasoned, elegant, and funny film that it exists serenely above lobby talk.” Because “Wilder’s reputation is subject to more revisions than a White House press release,” Canby emphasized “the necessity, finally, to recognize Billy Wilder as the major filmmaker he is.” Fedora was the work of “a brilliant, irascible man who is nearly thirty years more experienced in the woeful ways of the world than he was when he made Sunset Boulevard.”41 The film’s humor is grotesque, sometimes disturbing; the movie is a unique blend of austerity and romanticism. Moreover, Keller’s performance was underrated, even by Wilder. As Antonia, she starts out fragile and then reveals strength and calculation as she attempts to evade the power of those who would control her.
Fedora did poorly at the box office after its initial engagements in big cities and did not reach a wide audience elsewhere. Be that as it may, the picture was well received in Europe, especially in Germany, where Knef was still a star, and in France, where Keller was popular.
Although Fedora received unenthusiastic notices when it appeared, like The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, it has over the years earned a solid critical reputation as an elegant, entertaining film that reaches the lofty realm of tragedy. In 2002, the Times of London went so far as to call Fedora “perhaps the richest of Wilder’s later films.”42 Cameron Crowe comments, “If Fedora missed the upper rung of Wilder’s greatest work, it’s only a matter of inches.”43 Morris concurs that Fedora “is a worthy addition to the work of one of the supreme artists of the American cinema.”44
For William Holden, alcohol had been a problem as far back as Sabrina. By 1977, when he made Fedora, “he realized his most significant accomplishments were behind him. He grew despondent and isolated, and his drinking worsened.”45 On November 16, 1981, Holden was found dead in his apartment by the building manager. His death was caused by his tripping over a throw rug while intoxicated, “then falling into the sharp edge of a bedside table.”46 The following month, Wilder told the New York Times, “To be killed by a bottle of vodka and a night table—what a lousy fadeout for a great guy.”47
Asked why he kept working if he felt out of place in the current Hollywood climate, Wilder answered, “If only to get away from the vacuum cleaner. I come to work the typewriter” in his office. In one of his more melodramatic moments, Wilder declared in a 1978 interview, “I will kill myself after this interview; I have just come to the conclusion that it’s no use.”48
Nevertheless, Wilder’s thoughts inevitably turned to his next picture as he searched to find “something that is negotiable with studios.” The modest ticket sales of Fedora had made the movie a calamity for Wilder, given his recent track record. It was tougher than ever to sell a new project to a studio. Moreover, he had to be cautious in selecting a project now that there were not many bullets left in “the elderly gun.” After making Fedora in the Greek islands, Munich, and Paris, Wilder renewed his resolution to shoot his next movie in greater Los Angeles, since location shooting in Europe was expensive. Furthermore, “I don’t have to climb any fucking mountains,” he explained, and “I don’t have to eat crappy food and have diarrhea.” Shooting around Los Angeles, “it takes only seven minutes to get to a location.”49
In the wake of Universal’s vetoing Fedora, Wilder was afraid that the major studios had written him off as over the hill. He had grown tired, he said, of pitching projects to young executives who were former employees of the studio mailroom. Much to his surprise, Jay Weston, a producer at MGM, invited him to make Buddy Buddy. The project was offered to him, Wilder emphasized; he did not have to audition: “No screen test!” Nevertheless, it was not a project that he would have chosen; “it chose me.” He continued, “Maybe I was a little tired of hitting my head against the wall; maybe it was a little dented.”50 Still, one reason that Weston’s offer appealed to him was that Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau agreed to costar in the picture if Wilder directed.
The film was to be based on a French play by Francis Weber, a boulevard farce titled L’emmerdeur. Weber also wrote the screenplay for the 1973 French film version directed by Edouard Molinaro. The movie was also called L’emmerdeur but was released in the United States the following year as A Pain in the Neck (or A Pain in the Ass). Wilder’s Buddy Buddy is a black comedy about the friendship that gradually develops between a tough Mafia hit man (Walter Matthau) and a woebegone individual (Jack Lemmon) who contemplates suicide after his wife leaves him. In the French movie version, Lino Ventura, an Italian actor, played the tough contract killer, Milan, and Jacques Brel, a popular French entertainer, played the would-be suicide, Pegnon.
One reason that Weber’s play appealed to Wilder was that it carried some resonance of the first screenplay he coauthored at Ufa, Der Mann, der seinen Mörder sucht (The man who tried to get himself killed, 1931). In it a pathetic wretch bent on killing himself becomes involved with a thief (rather than a hit man).
On May 12, 1980, Wilder drove through the gates at MGM after an absence of four decades. The studio had changed in many ways. James Aubrey, known in the industry as “the smiling cobra,” had been appointed president of MGM in 1970, with a mandate to bail the studio out of debt. Aubrey went on an economy drive while the studio was fending off its creditors. By the end of the decade, however, the studio was back on track, and David Begelman was brought over from Columbia as production chief, with a view to stepping up production. “They want to bring back the roaring lion,” said Wilder.51 One of the first projects Begelman approved was Buddy Buddy.
The studio was anxious to get moving on Buddy Buddy, since it boasted two top stars and a major director. Wilder and Diamond were encouraged to write their screenplay with dispatch. They complied by finishing the first draft in July 1981, after only two months, a much speedier job than was customary for them. In their script Milan became Trabucco, a paid assassin who has contracted to eradicate a crucial witness in a Palm Springs land fraud scandal. Pegnon is renamed Victor Clooney, a prudish censor employed in the Office of Standards and Practices at CBS-TV. His screwball wife, Celia, is enrolled in a sex clinic called the Institute for Sexual Fulfillment, where she has fallen in love with the director, Dr. Zuckerbrot.
The screenplay bears the marks of a typical Wilder scenario. When Victor assumes, quite wrongly, that Trabucco sympathizes with him about his wife’s desertion, Victor says he has always believed “in the kindness of strangers,” quoting Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). The stool pigeon Rudy Gambola is called “the man who knew too much,” the name of a 1956 Hitchcock picture.
On the one hand, Victor’s efforts to develop a friendship with Trabucco recall Wilder’s trilogy about male bonding. On the other hand, there was a measure of tenderness in the friendships portrayed in The Fortune Cookie, Sherlock Holmes, and The Front Page; there is none in Buddy Buddy. Victor’s attempts to ingratiate himself with Trabucco are ill advised, to say the least. Wilder “cast a cold eye” on the theme of male bonding in the present film. After all, notes Axel Madsen, he spent his formative years in Berlin during the Roaring Twenties, a crucible of disenchantment, a society full of decadence. He learned to reflect bitterly “upon man’s essential, constitutional foolishness.”52
In rounding out the cast of Buddy Buddy during preproduction, Wilder selected Paula Prentiss, a comedienne, to play Celia. Prentiss was adept at playing flighty females, as in The World of Henry Orient opposite Peter Sellers (1964). Wilder selected German actor Klaus Kinski to play Dr. Zuckerbrot. The brilliant but unbridled actor was best known for his German films with Werner Herzog, such as Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (Aguirre, the Wrath of God, 1972). Joan Shawlee, whose first Wilder film was Some Like It Hot, was back again, this time as the receptionist at the sex clinic who cheerfully repeats to callers the institute’s slogan, “Ecstasy is our business.”
Wilder decided on the county courthouse in Riverside, California, about an hour’s drive from Los Angeles, as an important location site for the movie. The screenplay dictated that there be a hotel across the street from the courthouse, so production designer Daniel Lomino constructed a mock-Spanish hotel facade in a parking lot facing the courthouse.
Principal photography began on February 4, 1981. Wilder filmed exteriors in and around Riverside throughout February. Cinematographer Harry Stradling Jr. (The Way We Were, 1973) had a reputation for being at his best while shooting outdoors with color photography. His reputation was fully justified by his camerawork around the county courthouse.
Wilder was scheduled to spend March and April shooting at MGM in Culver City. After the first two weeks of filming, he realized that he had “taken a wrong turn” in casting two comedians in the leads. “I needed someone serious as the hit man, like Clint Eastwood, instead of a comic actor like Matthau,” Wilder explained. Indeed, Lino Venturo, who played the contract killer in the French film, was a serious actor who specialized in playing tough guys. Wilder complained that, if the studio had not insisted that the script be finished in a scant two months, he would have seen that he had gone wrong and taken the time to go back to the drawing board. But at this point the production was moving forward, and he had to continue. He would have liked to walk off the picture, “but if I had backed out, they would have said it was because I was too old.”53
To make matters worse, during the eighth week of shooting, Matthau took a serious fall while rehearsing a scene in which Trabucco escapes from the police by sliding down a laundry chute in the hotel. Matthau was to land on a mattress beneath the chute, but the mattress was not placed in the proper position. So when Matthau tumbled out of the chute, he landed on his back and hit his head on the concrete floor of the soundstage. Chris Lemmon writes that his father, “beside himself with concern, thought that was the end for his good buddy. He folded up his jacket and placed it under Walter’s head.” Then, “with tears in his eyes, he looked down at Matthau and asked, ‘Are you comfortable?’ ” Matthau replied, “I make a living.”54 Matthau was in the hospital for only three days, but he hobbled around on crutches and wore a neck brace for three weeks. He recalled the heart attack he suffered while filming The Fortune Cookie. “Every time I work with Billy Wilder,” Matthau observed, “I either get a heart attack or fall down and break my back.”55
Klaus Kinski, a great German character actor who was also a pugnacious and unruly performer, shared Dietrich’s opinion of Wilder as too officious on the movie set. “No outsider can understand,” he writes in his autobiography, “the blustering hysteria and the authoritarianism of shooting a picture for Billy Wilder. The so-called ‘actors’ are simply trained poodles, who sit up on their hind legs and jump through hoops.”56 It is somewhat surprising that middle European actors like Kinski and Dietrich did not get along with Wilder, himself a middle European, on the set.
For his part, Lemmon noticed that Wilder seemed more tense while shooting this picture than he had on any of their previous pictures together, since he wanted very much to show the studio brass that he could still make a picture on schedule and on budget. He was not as open to actors’ suggestions as he had been when Lemmon worked with him before. “There was a little less freedom for the actors,” and Lemmon therefore kept his suggestions to himself.57
Still, Wilder had not lost his sense of humor. The camera operator found “the master” intimidating; the young man would ask Wilder’s “kind permission” to adjust the lens. Finally Wilder just told him what he had said to Raymond Chandler four decades earlier: “For God’s sake, we don’t have court manners around here.” At all events, the production wrapped on April 27, 1981. After directing the last scene on the docket, Wilder turned to Diamond and said, “Nice working with you, Iz.”58
During postproduction, Buddy Buddy was scored by Lalo Schifrin, who had done the music for films like Dirty Harry (1971). Schifrin could underscore a film in the traditional symphonic manner of composers of the Hollywood studio period like Franz Waxman and Miklos Rozsa. But his eclectic style also reflected his taste for modern music, especially jazz. By the time he wrote the music for Buddy Buddy, Palmer notes, Schifrin had become “the most prominent and productive member of the new generation of film composers.”59
After Schifrin had recorded his score and Wilder had collaborated with editor Argyle Nelson on the rough cut, MGM had a test screening of the picture. The younger members of the audience found the movie dull in spots, even though the film ran only ninety-eight minutes—the shortest movie Wilder had made since Five Graves to Cairo. Diamond commented afterward that teenagers “watch television in fifteen-minute chunks, and they aren’t interested in following a plot.”60
Buddy Buddy begins with Trabucco driving down a palm-lined street in suburban California. Schifrin accompanies the scene with “The Gnomes,” a bizarre theme borrowed from Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Trabucco checks in at the Ramona Hotel in Riverside and sets about meticulously assembling his high-powered rifle in his hotel room. He places it on a tripod in preparation for picking off Rudy Gambola, the mobster who is to testify that afternoon in the courthouse across the street. Trabucco aims to prevent the stool pigeon from getting a chance to sing.
Meanwhile, Victor Clooney, the clumsy schnook in the room next door, plans to kill himself because his wife, Celia, has run off with Dr. Hugo Zuckerbrot, the shady director of the Institute for Sexual Fulfillment. Victor ties the rope from the window curtain around a pipe in the bathroom and stands on the toilet seat. But he is such a loser that, when he steps off the toilet seat, the pipe bursts and he is deluged with gushing water. Trabucco hears the ruckus and checks out the adjoining room. He introduces himself to Victor as an expert in “pest control.” Victor tells Trabucco his sad story, and the assassin, suspecting that Victor’s suicide attempts will result in the police swarming all over the hotel, cunningly offers to drive Victor to the sex clinic to see Celia.
Victor assumes that Trabucco’s offer is the act of a true friend, but Trabucco tells him ruefully, “I’m nobody’s friend.” The naive Victor responds, “People are basically good; take you for instance.” Little wonder that Buddy Buddy has been called Wilder’s blackest comedy.
The sequence at the sex institute offered Wilder a chance to open out the play for the screen, since the play is set entirely in the hotel. Victor is shocked to learn from Celia that she has had her wedding ring melted down and that it now hangs, shaped like a gold penis, around Zuckerbrot’s neck. Victor, the conservative TV censor, cannot bring himself to utter the word penis, so he refers to the golden keepsake with “the p word.”
Unfortunately, Victor gets nowhere trying to win back his wife, so both he and Trabucco wind up returning to the hotel. Victor, who is determined to kill himself, tells the clerk to prepare his bill. “Are you checking out?” the clerk inquires, and Victor responds, “You might say that.” Back in his hotel room, Trabucco hears what sounds like a gunshot from Victor’s room, only to find that Victor has just popped the cork of a champagne bottle. He is planning to toast Celia before “checking out.” This gag, of course, was lifted from the last scene of The Apartment. Wilder saw nothing wrong with stealing from himself.
Celia reads the suicide note that Victor left with her. Although she does not want to reconcile with him, she asks Zuckerbrot to go to the hotel and talk him out of killing himself. At the hotel Zuckerbrot runs into Trabucco and assumes that he is Victor. Zuckerbrot injects Trabucco with a sedative because Victor is “a fruitcake”—Dr. Eggelhofer’s term for Earl Williams—and he thinks he is sedating Victor.
Now Trabucco, groggy from the tranquilizer, is in no condition to shoot Gambola. He convinces Victor that Gambola is a “goddamned stoolie,” a sleazy Mafia hood who does not deserve to live. Wilder sees to it that the mobster is not the object of the audience’s sympathy, so that they do not really care if he is assassinated. Moreover, Trabucco tells Victor, if he does not rub out Gambola, the mob will exterminate him in reprisal. Still grateful that Trabucco drove him to the sex clinic to see Celia, Victor agrees to carry out Trabucco’s contract killing as a favor: “I owe you one.” After assorted twists and turns in the plot, Victor succeeds in blowing Gambola away. He and Trabucco escape from the hotel by diving down a laundry chute into a laundry basket and exiting through the basement.
The cops have cordoned off the street as a crime scene. So Trabucco disguises himself as a priest, donning a Roman collar and black shirt, and places a small statue of Christ on the dashboard of his car. Trabucco talks to Captain Hubris, the officer in charge, in a phony Irish brogue. Hubris requests that he give the last rites to Gambola, an Italian Catholic. Trabucco marshals every Latin phrase he can think of and “blesses” the dying gangster: “Tempus fugit” (time flies), “e pluribus unum” (out of many, one), and “caveat emptor” (let the buyer beware). Hubris then allows Trabucco to drive through the roadblock with Victor.
In the epilogue, Trabucco has escaped to a deserted tropical island. He is in a South Sea paradise—until Victor arrives in a sailboat. Victor is likewise a fugitive, having blown up the sex clinic! Celia has deserted Zuckerbrot and taken off with the clinic’s female receptionist. Victor still blindly believes that in Trabucco he has found a true friend, and the disgruntled Trabucco realizes that he is stuck with Victor indefinitely. He surreptitiously suggests to his native houseboy that the local tribe reinstate its ancient custom of making human sacrifices to the gods, with a view to offering Victor as a candidate. The movie ends with a freeze-frame of Trabucco chomping on a cigar. “It is the final black moment of Wilder’s career,” notes Hopp. His last film concludes with no moral awakening, no redemption for the two fugitives.61
The world premiere of Buddy Buddy took place at Avco Centre Cinemas in Westwood on Friday, December 8, 1981. The film opened on December 11 to largely disappointing reviews. On the positive side, Vincent Canby in the New York Times called the film “the breeziest comedy Wilder has been associated with in years.”62 On the negative side, Kevin Thomas wrote in the Los Angeles Times that “Buddy Buddy isn’t all that funny.” The humor on the sexual revolution of the 1970s triggered by Zuckerbrot’s sex clinic was “pretty familiar by now,” and the film was only “mildly amusing.”63 David Ansen weighed in with a review in Newsweek headed “Some Like It Not.” He declared that Wilder’s untypically creaky slapstick and leaden gags made him wonder when Wilder was last at the movies. Was the director who was once ahead of his time now behind the times?64
Dr. Jack Green, a behavioral psychologist at Rush Medical Center in Chicago, called the picture “a romp about would-be assassins, inadequate husbands, immoral therapists, and errant wives. Wilder plays out his own attitude relative to the mob, the police, and psychiatry. In other venues, Wilder has demonstrated genius. In this tribute to inadequacy, he has shown everyone in it at their worst; no one is likeable and everyone is one-dimensional. There is an aftertaste of disdain that overlays the film.” A psychiatrist at the center said, “The purpose of the profit-oriented Institute of Sexual Fulfillment is total sexual freedom for all (illustrated by the nude customers and a man in a bathrobe carrying a blow-up doll), and a corrupt CEO ‘Doctor’ who has an affair with Victor’s wife, with no regard to the consequences—Victor’s suicide attempts. . . . The image of an analyst of German extraction (like Freud)” is of someone who “promotes promiscuity and sexual gratification . . . under the guise of ‘research.’ ”65
The critics by and large found Buddy Buddy to be a rather off-center, laborious farce. The dialogue lacked sparkle, the plotting was sluggish at times, and the story never jelled. Wilder’s use of verbal wit in a morally disturbing environment did not work this time around. Buddy Buddy emerged as a box office failure. It grossed a lackluster $6 million—it did not break even.
“Buddy Buddy was dead on the vine—Hollywood and Vine,” Wilder confessed in retrospect; “it was a misfire.”66 Fred MacMurray said he wondered how an experienced director like Billy Wilder and the other talents involved in the movie could all go so wrong about the same picture.67 Asked this question, Wilder replied, “Nobody in Hollywood is foolproof; nobody hits a homer every time.” He continued, “When you make a particular movie, you know damned well” after two or three weeks that it is going to “fall flat like a lead pancake. You, the director, are the pilot in the cockpit; you designed the plane and you thought it was going to soar. But that goddamned plane that you’ve constructed is not going to fly; it is going to crash.”68
When a Broadway play fails during the tryout on the road, it quietly closes out of town and is forgotten, Wilder said. Some of the plays of Hecht and MacArthur, for example, never made it to Broadway. “But when you make a bad picture, it pursues you the rest of your life. It comes back to haunt you.” MGM sold the ancillary rights for Buddy Buddy to TV and home video. “It hurts to strike out on your last picture,” Wilder said. If he could have chosen a movie to end his career with, it would not have been Buddy Buddy. “I didn’t know that was going to be my swan song; if I’d known, I would have bet on a different swan.”69