Director Billy Wilder, fresh off the boat from Europe and without a bean in his pocket, picked up his first salary check in Hollywood by hiring out as a stunt man and jumping into a swimming pool in full fig. Since that day, he has splashed about so energetically in the cinema swim that now he is established beyond question as one of Hollywood's most successful screenwriters, as a director who ranks with George Stevens (The Diary of Anne Frank), William Wyler (Ben Hur) and Fred Zinneman (A Nun's Story) in the Big Four, and as a witsnapper, fathead-shrinker, Sunset Boulevardier and allround character who has achieved notoriety not often rivaled in movieland.
Having made 23 Hollywood pictures, most of them commercial successes, Wilder has been nominated 18 times for Academy Awards and won three, for Lost Weekend (director and coauthor) and Sunset Boulevard (co-author). Says he with a snarl: "I was robbed 15 times." But he adds: "I am batting twice as good as Ted Williams ever did."
Nevertheless, in the opinion of many critics, it was only last year, in the magnificent locker-room farce called Some Like It Hot, which rang up the biggest gross ($14 million) ever achieved by a Hollywood comedy, that Wilder revealed himself at his wildest and most wonderful.
Last week, with the release of The Apartment, which opened in Manhattan to rave reviews ("trenchant" . . . "sardonic" . . . "tumbling with wit" . . . "the most sophisticated movie I have ever seen"), Moviemaker Wilder obviously had another big hit on his hands. He also raised some intriguing questions in the minds of his audience about what, if anything, he is trying to say.
Berlin Accent. The Apartment has its moments of sentimentality, even soap opera, when the heroine tries suicide for love of a married man. It has moments of sharp, watercooler burlesque as it glances at an office Christmas party. But beyond that, unfolding the story of a nice little guy whose bosse's use his apartment as launching pad for some fairly sordid affairs, the picture takes on a hard, unwinking look of irony. Again and again, Wilder seems to speak in the accents of one of his favorite cities, prewar Berlin, a tough, sardonic, sometimes wryly sentimental place whose intellectual symbol was Bertolt Brecht. Is Billy trying to say something serious about men and women, heels and heroes? Is he as a sort of puritanical pander, trying to instruct as he entertains?
Wilder himself backs away from the question with alarm. Says he: "I want to be truthful, but if I have to choose between truth and entertainment, I will always choose entertainment. I have a vast and terrible desire never to bore."
Billy almost never does, on screen or off. Inside a head that makes him look like a benevolent old bullfrog resides a restless imagination, a "flypaper memory" and a wit that ranges from the merry to the mordant. Wilder, not Benchley, was the man who first said: "Wait till I slip out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini." He is also the author of this scathing epigram: "I would worship the ground you walk on if you lived in a better neighborhood."