The movie Billy Wilder called the worst of his career: “It’s just terrible”
Spare a thought for Billy Wilder, one of the greatest directors of all time. Throughout his career, he made so many classic movies that it’s hard to know where to begin. Double Indemnity, Sunset Blvd, Sabrina, The Seven Year Itch, Some Like it Hot, and The Apartment are just a handful of them, and it’s pretty mind-blowing to realise that he only directed 26 movies. He is one of the few filmmakers who made more flawless movies than mediocre ones.
Although he directed his best work, Wilder spent most of his career as a screenwriter. After working in the German film industry, he arrived in Hollywood in the early 1930s and wrote screenplays for Ernst Lubtisch’s Ninotchka and Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, as well as the Howard Hawks classic Ball of Fire. After he turned to directing his screenplays in the mid-1940s, Wilder continued to provide screenwriting skills to many major films, even though he frequently went uncredited. He helped out with the original 1960 Ocean’s Eleven, for example, and the 1967 spoof Casino Royale.
Wilder’s movies might be from a different era, but he continues to be one of the most revered filmmakers to ever work in Hollywood. He was able to make both whip-smart comedy and atmospheric film noir. No one could write dialogue as quick-witted as he could, but he was also renowned for drawing out barnstorming performances from his actors. Whether it was Gloria Swanson’s semi-autobiographical portrayal of an ageing star in Sunset Blvd or tough guy James Cagney turning to comedy in One, Two, Three, his skill with actors was unparalleled. It’s no coincidence that he directed 14 different stars in Oscar-nominated performances.
Even a master like Wilder could make bad movies, though, and he was the first to admit it. In a 1994 interview with Kelly Lally, the director revealed that his penultimate film, Fedora, was his greatest disappointment. The 1978 drama stars William Holden as a washed-up Hollywood producer who tries to get to the bottom of the recent death of a reclusive star named Fedora, who used to be his lover (Marthe Keller). He discovers that she tried to maintain her youthful appearance by secretly letting her daughter replace her on screen while she masqueraded as an ageing countess (Hildegard Knef).
“That was another catastrophe,” Wilder lamented. “I wanted to have one actress play both parts. And we got the Keller girl, who’s not a very good actress—she’s Swiss. We were about two days before shooting, and we did a test—we put a mask on her to make her old, and she started crying. It turned out that she had been in a car accident and that all her nerves were exposed. She started screaming in agony, which forced them to find an older actor to play her mother.
He hoped that he could cast Marlene Dietrich and Faye Dunaway as mother and daughter instead, given their resemblance and acting ability, but that option failed to pan out. “I don’t know,” the director continued. “It’s just terrible.”
It’s easy to see how a filmmaker who was so adept at drawing out masterful performances would find it painful to look back on a movie where he hadn’t managed to achieve that. And yet, history has been kinder to Fedora than to his final film, 1981’s Buddy Buddy, even though that one starred his long-time collaborator Jack Lemmon.
