Billy Wilder and the Tightrope of Perspective
Wilder loved his sleazeballs. The trick was getting audiences to love them too.
A couple of lowlifes make their bed with a get-rich homicide scheme; a never-been writer drinks away the words and his self-respect; an indigent screenwriter degrades himself as the boy toy of an over-the-hill movie actress; a deceitful newspaper man is willing to kill for his next big break. This litany of American detritus is hard stuff to build a career on, let alone one of the most successful filmographies in cinema history. Few basked in tarnishing the silver screen quite as much as Billy Wilder. His warts-and-all realism has a liking for the warty over all else, yet he somehow charmed audiences then and now to become one of the most incorrigible, beloved filmmaking scamps of Hollywood’s Golden Age.
Everyone loves a hero. But why does everyone love Billy Wilder? And how did his retinue of scoundrels get past the censors and not just into our craws, but into our hearts? The answer may lie along the delicate tightrope of perspective — whose point of view the audience is inhabiting at a given moment — and few more gracefully and effectively walked that line than Mr. Wilder.
