What was director Billy Wilder’s first movie in Hollywood?
No list of classic films is complete without at least a few movies from legendary director and screenwriter Billy Wilder. Across five decades, he helmed some of the most iconic movies in cinema history, many of which helped shape the personas of some of the biggest stars in Hollywood. From Audrey Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart to Marilyn Monroe and Shirley MacLaine, he played a pivotal role in creating what is now referred to as the Golden Age of Hollywood.
Billy Wilder’s movies comprise a laundry list of cinematic excellence, from the seminal film noir Double Indemnity to one of Monroe’s most classic films, The Seven Year Itch. “Nobody’s perfect,” spoken at the end of Some Like it Hot, remains one of the most frequently quoted lines in movie history, and was groundbreaking at the time given that it offered a tacit acceptance of a character’s queerness that would still pass the watchful gaze of the homophobic censors.
Made nearly two decades into his Hollywood career, The Apartment is considered by some to be Billy Wilder’s best film. Starring Jack Lemmon as an office drone who falls in love with a young colleague played by newcomer Shirley MacLaine, it deftly balances comedy alongside one of the least comedic subjects—suicide—and succeeds.
Billy Wilder was one of the many European-born filmmakers who were forced to flee from their homeland during the Holocaust. When he arrived in Hollywood 1934, he had already found success as a screenwriter in his native Austria, as well as in Germany and France. Once he arrived in America, he picked up right where he left off.
So, what was Billy Wilder’s first movie in Hollywood as a director?
Although Billy Wilder is often thought of as the consummate writer/director—an auteur before the word had cinematic connotations—he spent his first eight years in Hollywood working exclusively as a screenwriter. In the seven years between 1934 and 1941, he penned 12 screenplays, including for the classic films Ninotchka and Ball of Fire. When it came to directing, however, his first Hollywood venture was 1942’s The Major and the Minor.
Starring Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland, the madcap romance follows Susan, a newly jobless New Yorker who disguises herself as a 12-year-old girl to avoid paying the train fare for her journey back to her hometown in Iowa. During the train journey, she is taken under the wing of a dashing army officer who she develops feelings for. Somehow, it takes a biology student to recognize her disguise.
The Major and the Minor is a bizarre wartime romantic comedy that, thanks to Wilder’s pitch-perfect ear for comedy and the performances of Rogers and Milland, somehow works. There is more than a touch of Shakespeare about the plot of mistaken identity and the intersecting character threads that all tie up in a tidy bow at the end, but Wilder makes it entirely his own. When it was released, it was met with rapturous reviews from critics who clearly recognized the potential of the young filmmaker.
The fact that The Major and the Minor is not one of Wilder’s most beloved movies has far less to do with its quality than it does with the remarkable calibre and consistency of his later movies. For almost any other filmmaker, it would at least make the top five, but for the man who made Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Sabrina, and Some Like it Hot (to name a few) and won six Academy Awards, it doesn’t even crack the top ten.
