“The Spirit of St Louis” (1957)
Exhibit A in support of the thesis that Wilder not only excelled at creating rounded, flawed lead characters, he floundered when he wasn’t able to, is “The Spirit of St Louis.” Ostensibly the story of Charles Lindbergh’s famous pioneering transatlantic solo flight, the film suffers from a most un-Wilderian 2-D gosh-darn all-round great guy hero in Lindbergh (James Stewart), something made all the more craw-sticky because of what we know of the real-life Lindbergh now (and even then too — his alleged prewar Nazi sympathies and anti-semitism were already a matter of public record, even if his wartime contributions had proven some sort of redemption). The film, though, set before any of the more notorious events of his later life, is not without merit; the desaturated color photography is really quite beautiful, and the aviation scenes are adeptly filmed. But interest flags periodically over the too-long running time due to a story that, despite some clever use of flashback, ultimately just cries out for more human drama than the aviator’s sleepiness and the threat of instrument failure really provides. It’s the one film of Wilder’s that we really can’t see his heart in — it is as anonymously written and directed as any other biopic of derring-do and against-odds triumph, albeit with certain narrative skills a lesser director might not have brought. Even in his “get off my lawn” period, Wilder movies were, for better or worse, recognizably authorial, but this is one we’d be hard pushed to pick out of a line up. As such it’s rather gratifying that the film flopped on release — it seemed precisely calibrated (heroic protagonist, huge star, inspirational story) to be the kind of flattened-out, feelgood movie that studios assumed the undiscerning masses would flock to. Instead it represents a caesura in an otherwise remarkable run of films for Wilder, both in terms of quality and reception. Had it been a massive success, perhaps there would have been pressure on Wilder to keep his auteurist impulses similarly in check in future. Instead, audiences, bless their hearts, voted with their feet and we got “Witness for the Prosecution,” “Some Like It Hot,” “The Apartment” and “One Two Three.” [C+]
“Love In The Afternoon” (1957)
Based on the Claude Anet novel “Ariane, Russian Girl” (previously adapted as “Scampolo, ein Kind der Strasse” with a script co-written by Wilder), “Love in the Afternoon” marked the rather inauspicious beginning of a fruitful long-term collaboration between Wilder and screenwriter I.A.L. Diamond, and on paper must have seemed like an ideal first project — they just moved it from Germany to France and made everyone speak English, voila! The story centers on a widowed French detective and his daughter Ariane, a cello student. Fascinated by her father’s work, Ariane overhears a plot to off ageing playboy, Frank Flannagan, by an angry husband whose wife is Flannagan’s latest conquest. Ariane surprises Flannagan with a warning, and he is duly intrigued by her mysterious entrance into his life, and the lack of further details she’ll provide. And also, let’s face it, by the fact she’s played by the adorable Audrey Hepburn. Ariane, suddenly finding herself in love, decides to hide her innocence beneath a veneer of worldliness and countless affairs, in order to play the player into falling in love with her too (nope it doesn’t make a lot of sense here, and it doesn’t in the film either). Again, Wilder wanted Cary Grant for the romantic lead, and again, Grant turned him down (as he would all of Wilder’s subsequent offers too) and it instead went to Gary Cooper. Hepburn was Wilder’s only choice for Ariane, the wide-eyed innocent, and Maurice Chevalier leapt at the role of her father. Though the film flopped commercially in the U.S., it was a financial success in Europe under the title “Ariane.” It’s hard to watch this film without thinking of the influence of Ernst Lubitsch, whom Wilder worked with on “Ninotchka,” especially with the casting of Lubitsch regulars Cooper and Chevallier, and the gypsy musicians that seem to follow Cooper everywhere in the film. But in contrast to the works it sometimes evokes, everything about this film falls a little flat, from the romance to the jokes, and at 130 minutes, well, seriously, how long should it take a pushing-60 playboy to fall in love with Audrey Hepburn? This film is no one’s best, but no one’s worst either. Still, we’d hope for a lot more from Wilder. [C]
“Witness For The Prosecution” (1957)
On the one hand, “Witness For The Prosecution,” Wilder’s adaptation of mystery expert Agatha Christie‘s 1953 play, is one of the director’s dustier, creakier works — it’s undeniably theatrical (as, let’s face it, most courtroom dramas tend to be), with a screenplay that has a tendency to lapse into histrionics. The director confessed that his film was his attempt at “a Hitchcock movie,” but it never quite feels as suspenseful as good old Alfred’s work. On the other hand, however, the film hosts a trio of outstanding performances that more than make it worth the watch. Former swashbuckler Tyrone Power, in his last role (he died of a heart attack the following year, on the set of King Vidor‘s “Solomon and Sheba“) is enjoyably slippery as Leonard Vole, the defendant in a murder trial, accused of murdering an elderly woman who made him the beneficiary of her will, while Marlene Dietrich, such an obvious fit for Wilder’s sensibilities that it’s surprising he didn’t cast her in everything he made, walks away with entire scenes as Vole’s wife, an icy femme fatale. But it’s Charles Laughton, as Sir Wilfrid Robarts, Vole’s ailing lawyer, who dominates, as the hefty British acting legend tended to do. Winning an Oscar nomination for his trouble, he’s witty, powerful, scenery-chewing, and quietly aware of his own mortality — Robarts knows that this may be his final chance to wow in the courtroom. Indeed, Laughton would only appear in three more films, but should have rested happy knowing that, with Wilder, he’d delivered arguably his most seminal turn. [B-]
“Some Like It Hot” (1959)
It’s a little odd that the director’s most beloved film, and the one most associated with him, was, in the context of his earlier films at least, the most atypical. The director was always funny, even with a prisoner-of-war drama like “Stalag 17,” but he’d rarely tackled a comedy so outrageous and high-concept as “Some Like It Hot.” It’s fortunate, then, that Wilder, and his “Love In The Afternoon” collaborator I.A.L. Diamond, wrote a film that still stands today as one of the funniest and most joyous ever made. Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon play Joe and Jerry, two musicians who accidentally witness the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago in 1929. Pursued by mobster Spats Columbo (gangster movie veteran George Raft), they don dresses and assume the identities of Josephine and Daphne to run away to Florida with an all-female jazz band. Which, as it happens, includes the alluring ‘Sugar’ Kane (Marilyn Monroe, in her greatest role), who Joe swiftly falls for, donning a second disguise of oil heir Junior in an uproarious Cary Grant impression, to woo her. The farcical plotting is gloriously convoluted, and thanks to the threat from Raft, has real stakes involved, without ever letting up on the gags, which come thick and fast, right up to the unforgettable last line. Wilder keeps the film zipping along, and has three absolute comic hurricanes in his leads — Curtis cool as anything as he darts between identities, Lemmon gloriously funny in his interaction with smitten millionaire Joe E. Brown, and Monroe endlessly endearing and dunder-headed (no matter how many takes it legendarily took Wilder to get the performance out of her). Wilder might have made a more substantial picture, but never one as perfectly formed. [A+]
