Issue 87: Billy Wilder Archives - Bright Wall/Dark Room

Honeysuckle Murder: (A Memorandum on) Death in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (and the Futility of Writing About It)

A crackerjack pulp thriller that alternately smirked and shocked its way into defining both a expanding cinematic genre and a director’s burgeoning career with its gallows vantage, Double Indemnity also maybe lets slip the secret of life as it nuzzles up against (and makes a joke, seduction, and parable out of) death itself.

Christl Ehlers in People on Sunday | Criterion

And Thus You Spend Your Fleeting Days

Veronica Fitzpatrick·

Issue 87: Billy Wilder

It may be that with its real locations, non-professional performers, and documentary-style cinematography of the city surrounds, People on Sunday presages aspects of both Italian neorealism and the French New Wave. but it’s also a film about presaging.

Billy Wilder and the 1930s Romantic Comedy

Elise Moore·

Issue 87: Billy Wilder

Wilder's early work in romantic comedy—Bluebeards Eighth Wife, Midnight, Ball of Fire, and The Major and the Minor—makes it easier to spot the element of enchantment that lingers in his tonally complex mature comedies

Jack Lemmon as C.C. Baxter in THE APARTMENT

Unhappy Accidents: Insurance and the Business of Living in Double Indemnity and The Apartment

Susannah Gruder·

Issue 87: Billy Wilder

Wilder makes a huge jump in genre between these films—from an existential noir to an off-beat romantic comedy—but the two share a kinship; both can be read as cautionary tales for what happens when you mix business with pleasure.

Some Like

Fran Hoepfner·

Issue 87: Billy Wilder

I'm not here to ask whether or not Some Like It Hot holds up. Of course it holds up! For crying out loud, what a bad question.

Out There in the Dark

Ethan Warren·

Issue 87: Billy Wilder

Three seemingly dissimilar works are united by three seemingly diffuse concepts that all lead back to the same place: the unique capacity of film to evoke some of the mind’s most indescribable sensations.

The original theatrical release poster for Billy Wilder's A FOREIGN AFFAIR | Paramount Pictures

Ruins and Redemption: Two Takes on Postwar Berlin

Lisa Lieberman·

Issue 87: Billy Wilder

Controversial when they were released, both Wilder’s A Foreign Affair and Rossellini’s Germany, Year Zero are now considered masterpieces of postwar cinema.

Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau in The Fortune Cookie (1966)

Wilder & Lemmon Pull Off One More Scam

Jason Toon·

Issue 87: Billy Wilder

If The Fortune Cookie isn't as powerful as Billy Wilder's earlier masterpieces, it's not as far off as its relative obscurity would imply.

Kirk Douglas in ACE IN THE HOLE | art by Tony Stella

You Can Have Me for Nothing: Escaping the Cynicism of Ace in the Hole

Elizabeth Cantwell·

Issue 87: Billy Wilder

We are all slowly suffocating on the dust of this country, on the oxygen-less air of American exceptionalism. No one is coming to drill us out.

The Sense of an Ending: Billy Wilder’s Parting Shots as Auteurist Stamp

Marshall Shaffer·

Issue 87: Billy Wilder

If one considers the chief tension of Billy Wilder’s work as the push and pull between cynicism and romanticism, the closing moments of a Wilder film complicate the notion that one can ever fully vanquish the other.