The world moves on: Billy Wilder’s cinema of ageing and obsolescence

There is one film that springs to mind when it comes to Billy Wilder tackling the travails of getting older: Sunset Blvd (1950). Yet throughout his long movie career as a writer and director, Wilder was preoccupied with how it feels to miss a boat that everyone else seems to have caught, and what we do with our lives once we’ve moved past the youthful ideal. Perhaps not coincidentally, Wilder cast many Hollywood legends in one of their last major roles, including James Cagney, Gary Cooper, Jean Arthur, Tyrone Power, Marlene Dietrich, William Holden and Gloria Swanson.

Sunset Blvd is the story of stuck-in-the-past silent film star Norma Desmond (Swanson) and her toxic relationship with the younger writer Joe Gillis (Holden), who stumbles into her life. Wilder built out their world richly. He cast Eric von Stroheim, a titan of the silent era on both sides of the camera, as Desmond’s devoted servant and ex-husband Max. Other figures from the days of pictures past – Buster Keaton, H.B. Warner, Anna Q. Nilsson – who Joe cruelly deems “the waxworks”, come over for card games. In that looming, crumbling mansion with one of the most famous addresses in Hollywood, it’s forever the 1920s.

Norma is treated as a blackly comic harridan, and as a Greek tragedy in human form. While sometimes it seems as if Joe’s scathing remarks about her in the narration are a stand-in for Wilder’s own thoughts, Joe’s cynical callousness is treated with as much derision as Norma’s delusions of grandeur. Ultimately, Max, whose ability to understand the passing of time doesn’t dim his love for Norma, remains Sunset Blvd’s most sympathetic figure.

Even when Wilder’s films were less explicitly age-focused, they were often concerned with a life being passed by too quickly. Jack Lemmon worked with Wilder more than any other actor, starring in seven of his 26 movies. He became the avatar of men so enmeshed in their unfulfilling jobs that their lives outside were squeezed out. This is literalised in The Apartment (1960), where Lemmon’s endearing corporate underling can’t actually go home some nights because the bosses from his office are using his apartment as a love nest. In Avanti! (1972), Lemmon’s middle-aged businessman is much higher up in the food chain, but his obsession with work makes him see anything else as an annoying distraction, even the beautiful Italian island of Ischia.

It wasn’t just Lemmon. In One, Two, Three (1961), James Cagney’s frazzled Coca-Cola executive endures chaos to try and get a long-awaited cushier job; Cagney was 62 at the time, and his character laments the “bunch of crew cut kids being promoted over [his] head”.  

There’s also The Seven Year Itch (1955), which follows married middle-aged publishing executive Richard (Tom Ewell) and his fixation on his beautiful younger upstairs neighbour (Marilyn Monroe). Originally a stage-play by George Axelrod, with whom Wilder co-wrote the screen adaptation, the narrative revolves around Richard’s internal monologue, full of deluded self-regard, for which the film mocks the unremarkable man relentlessly: “Remember, I have tremendous personal magnetism,” plays as a big laugh line. While the tones of their two movies are wildly different, when it comes to their overinflated egos, Richard reads in some ways as the comic male counterpart to Norma Desmond.

Other Wilder films approach the passing of time from a more melancholic angle. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) is very funny, but that Wilder hints that Holmes (Robert Stephens) was a man with a sexuality repressed by his era and fame lends an intriguing melancholy to both the movie and Stephens’ enigmatic performance. Beyond the central mysteries, it’s a story about roads not taken, and the failures that accrue with age, even if you do happen to be the smartest detective who ever (fictionally) lived.

Then there was Wilder’s penultimate film, Fedora (1978), which proved an intriguing bookend to Sunset Blvd. Again, William Holden played the leading man. This time, however, it was his character actively pursuing the ageing actress, Fedora (Marthe Keller), to star in his movie. The plot is still chiefly concerned with how cruel Hollywood is to women who dare to visibly age, but the difference in Holden’s character changes things.

Fedora was made 28 years after the 1950 classic. Holden was now 60, and looked older. In Sunset Blvd, Norma is still harbouring resentment about the dawn of the talkies killing off her stardom; in Fedora, it’s Holden’s struggling producer ruing the “kids with beards” of the New American Cinema that have taken over his industry. There was a metatextual element at play here. Wilder had made some of the most successful movies of the studio era, but he couldn’t get any studio interested in Fedora. Despite his previous effort, The Front Page (1974), having done well at the box office, its reviews were mixed, and before that there’d been more than a decade in the critical and commercial wilderness. Wilder wasn’t, had never been, “a kid with a beard”. 

He managed to scrabble together the financing, but Fedora was still widely considered a flop, which withered in Sunset Blvd’s shadow. To add insult to injury, he later lost out on making the film he intended as his swan song, an adaptation of Thomas Keneally’s book Schindler’s Ark, to perhaps the most famous bearded kid of all, Steven Spielberg (nevertheless, Wilder was very complimentary of the end result).

While plenty of his legendary peers kept directing as long as they could, there were 21 years between Wilder’s final feature, Buddy Buddy (1981), and his 2002 death. Considering that even when he was hot property his films were so often about men and women who were feeling out of touch, one might wonder if he was hyperaware of avoiding becoming like his protagonists.

Of course, fears that you missed the boat or that the world has moved on without you are both universal and eternal. That Wilder could illustrate those fears with such acutely wry warmth is among the reasons why so many of his films have endured for so long.

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