Where to begin with Billy Wilder

As a child growing up in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, ‘Buffalo Billie’ was obsessed with American culture. From Hollywood icons to obscure jazz records, he absorbed the brash language, brazen consumerism and unfailing belief that with a lot of hard work and a little luck, anyone might be someone. In his case, it proved accurate – he has over 50 feature credits and 21 Academy Award nominations to show for it. With so many riches available, it’s hard to know where to start. 

The one thing that stands taller than Wilder’s pile of gold statues is his reputation. A renowned spinner of tall tales, his personality seeps through his carefully crafted screenplays, embedding them with a signature wit and fearlessness. Bouncing around genres from noir to comedy to war thrillers to musicals, his ability to say the unsayable with a wink offers a common thread through the chaos.

From his career beginnings as a journalist in Vienna and a scriptwriter at Germany’s UFA studio to hustling through Hollywood penning lines for Hawks and Lubitsch, right up to his own epitaph (it reads “I’m a writer, but then nobody’s perfect”), the written word holds the key to unlocking Wilder. He may not have considered himself an auteur, but there is a consistent worldview underpinning his diverse body of work. Romance grounded in realism, absurdities in the everyday and a rumbling rebellion against class conformity are peppered through his colourful characters and sharp dialogue.  

Wilder had been working in Hollywood for 25 years when he reached his critical peak, producing arguably his magnum opus in The Apartment (1960). A firm believer that the audience was never wrong, the mass appeal of this Christmas classic pleased Wilder, but belies the complexity and melancholy of the film itself. 

The Apartment is a romcom, built around the tragic 9-to-5 existence of C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) and his sole source of joy: the girl who works his office elevator (Shirley MacLaine). Baxter has forsaken his values for success, desperate to please his corporate overlords. Those at the top are a morally murky bunch, primarily concerned with where best to meet their many mistresses. Baxter’s one bedroom apartment proves ideal. 

Various Wilder trademarks are at their finest here – hopeless everymen armed with an acerbic wit, heartfelt romance tempered by a downtrodden reality, a class-conscious lens on American life. It also holds some of the strongest visual motifs of his career: rows of typewriters under soulless office lighting, drooping tinsel and Christmas decorations, the key swapped from man to man to conduct their sordid affairs.  

When he’s finally allowed home, Baxter channel surfs over a microwave dinner for one. Six decades ago, Wilder identified the fundamental loneliness at the heart of American innovation and ambition, laying it bare and laughing as he did it. 

Any Wilder education requires some genre fluidity, and it seems essential to have noir as an early stop on this train. Before fleeing Nazism, a young Wilder could be found propping up the bars of Berlin with a host of creatives who would go on to be leading lights of the genre, including collaborators Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer. Wilder’s own noir titles are some of his most celebrated: start with a double bill of breakout hit Double Indemnity (1944) and Hollywood takedown Sunset Blvd (1950). 

Double Indemnity finds Wilder collaborating with hard-boiled king Raymond Chandler, and gifts us one of cinema’s finest femmes fatales in Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis. Prowling across the screen with ruthless determination and a wry comment forever up her sleeve, Stanwyck lures insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) into a bloody scheme of murder and mayhem. The film scandalised the puritan corners of America and made its director’s name; in the words of Alfred Hitchcock, “Since Double Indemnity, the two most important words in motion pictures are Billy Wilder.” 

The femme fatale is upended in 1950s masterpiece Sunset Blvd, the outrage contained this time to fellow filmmakers. Featuring regular star William Holden opposite an iconic turn from Gloria Swanson, the film captures an ageing beauty of the silver screen desperate to regain her former glory. An aspiring screenwriter is lured into her isolated web by the promise of fame and a curious chemistry, only to meet his fate face down in the pool of her Beverly Hills mansion. The final collaboration between Wilder and co-writer Charles Brackett, whose partnership stretched back to Wilder’s arrival in Hollywood in the 1930s, is also their finest: perfectly plotted, deviously damning and outrageously entertaining.  

If all that death is taking its toll, switch gears into comedy. Wilder’s screenplays are never short of jokes, and they reach Airplane! (1980) level saturation in the delirious One, Two, Three (1961). Wilder’s most explicit critique of Cold War tensions is also his silliest, with James Cagney as a Coca-Cola executive hurtling from one disaster to another in West Berlin. For a double bill, pair it with gender-swapping star vehicle Some Like It Hot (1959), which captures three of the finest comic performances classic Hollywood has to offer, from Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe.

Wilder’s career suffered from the mid-60s, as the “kids with beards” of New Hollywood (his words, not mine) took over and studio men got left behind. But evolving trends did not diminish his writing. The late-era title whose reputation has most grown is The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), a moving, humanist take on the Great Detective disguised as a murder mystery romp. Wilder’s deeply personal version was a victim of studio interference, with much of his and regular latter-day co-writer I.A.L. Diamond’s vision lost to the cutting room floor. Despite Wilder’s disappointment in the final product, a Holmes who struggles, has a life outside of solving crimes, and whose flaws are on display, is one worthy of attention. 

While late-Wilder has plenty to recommend it, it is best enjoyed with an understanding of the filmmaker’s recurring ideas and worldview. Newspaper black comedy The Front Page (1974) is most interesting viewed alongside the superior Ace in the Hole (1951), and Hollywood industry drama Fedora (1978) as a companion piece to Sunset Blvd. The shining light of his 1970s output is fan favourite Avanti! (1972), which sees Jack Lemmon’s all-American businessman (perhaps a C.C. Baxter who never met Shirley MacLaine) forced to travel to Italy to collect the body of his dead father. There he discovers his father’s second life in laid-back Europe and a community of friends who present an alternative to his profit-driven existence. A mellowed out chaser to the quickfire crimes and quips of his youth. 

Almost Perfect: The Films of Billy Wilder runs at BFI Southbank from October to December 2026.