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