AFS Series on Billy Wilder Starts Tonight

Austin Film Society starts a new Essential Cinema series tonight: "Censors, Drop Your Scissors! Billy Wilder's Later Comedies." The series runs on Tuesday nights for the next five weeks. I couldn't be more thrilled.

The films scheduled in the series are not the best-known films from writer/director Billy Wilder, like Some Like It Hot, Sunset Blvd., The Apartment, or Double Indemnity. You've probably heard of those and hopefully seen a few of them. These are the films he made after The Apartment, collaborating with his co-writer of the time, I.A.L. Diamond. Some might say Wilder's films declined starting in the mid-1960s  -- you'll have to see all of these films and decide for yourself.

I confess that if I were programming a Wilder retrospective myself, I would be tempted to pick the films Wilder co-wrote with Charles Brackett before starting to direct his own films, those witty, frothy 1930s comedies that I especially love. I'd include Ninotchka, Ball of Fire, Midnight, Bluebeard's Eighth Wife … and possibly some of the more dramatic films that I've never seen, since they're not on DVD, like Arise, My Love and Hold Back the Dawn. (Wilder and Brackett also wrote the first Henry Aldrich film -- a sort of cut-rate Andy Hardy -- called What a Life, which I've not been able to see.)

While Wilder's early screenplays are interesting and certainly entertaining, I appreciate AFS giving us the chance to see the films he made later in life, at a time when the Hollywood Production Code crumbling. Wilder and Diamond pushed the envelope as much as they could in these films, trying to make adult movies about relationships and sex.

One, Two, Three is the first film in the series -- it screens tonight at Alamo Ritz, and is sold out, but there are usually seats available on standby. The film is about Communism vs. Capitalism in Berlin, just before the Berlin Wall border was built. James Cagney plays the head of a Coca-Cola bottling plant in West Berlin who's dying for a promotion to get him out of Germany and into London. To curry favor with his boss, he hosts the boss's visiting daughter from Atlanta, Scarlett, who decides to run off with a Communist agitator. The comedy is rapid-fire and brilliant. You can see Wilder and Diamond's attempts to get around the Code -- in one scene, a woman calls her husband a "son of a --" and slams a drawer to mask the end of the phrase. Grownups know what she means even if she couldn't say it in a 1961 Hollywood film.

The second film in the series is Irma la Douce, playing on Sept. 15 at Alamo South, and it's probably my least favorite Wilder film. Interestingly, it was also Wilder's most successful theatrical release -- very popular and beloved at the time. Jack Lemmon plays a Paris policeman who falls for the streetwalker title character, played by Shirley MacLaine, and in order to keep her from soliciting other men, disguises himself as a rich Englishman who visits her exclusively. I never could believe she fell for this ruse -- in fact, I suspect her character knows what's going on all along -- and other aspects of the plot feel terribly contrived.

A movie about a tender-hearted prostitute was considered quite daring back in 1963, but I fear it doesn't hold up well. It's also too long -- Wilder comedies often clock in at a nice 100 minutes, but Irma runs for 2.5 hours. I do like the opening sequences, however, where Irma tells "the story of her life" to three sympathetic gentlemen, and it's a different story each time. The movie managed to get Production Code approval because it was marketed as a film strictly for adults.

This brings us to the movie that many people think is one of Wilder's worst, but which I cherish a fond affection for: Kiss Me, Stupid. I do think it's worth seeing to decide for yourself. The film is a polar opposite of the coy sophisticated sex comedies of the early Sixties, shot in pastels in big cities with Doris Day and Cary Grant. Instead, we get a black-and-white film starring Ray Walston set in the small town of Climax, Nevada.

Kiss Me, Stupid is a sex comedy that throws in every possible raunchy sight gag in the book -- even the cacti are suggestive. Walston plays a small-town music teacher who is married to "the prettiest girl in town" and is paranoid about losing her. When famous crooner Dino -- Dean Martin, natch -- shows up in town, Walston hatches a bizarre scheme to get his wife away from the singer's clutches while at the same time luring him with a fake wife, Kim Novak, so he'll buy Walston's songs.

I believe one reason the movie seems distasteful is that Walston is too aptly cast -- he's too realistic, he looks too much like your small-town music teacher. Peter Sellers was originally cast in the role, but ended up dropping out of the film, and I've always wondered how the film would be with him in the lead. I think it would have been more successful, but also more artificial. Jack Lemmon might have been perfect -- the wife is played by his real-life wife, Felicia Farr.

I love this story from Kevin Lally's book Wilder Times about Kiss Me, Stupid getting the Production Code seal. Geoffrey Shurlock, then head of the Production Code Administration, is rumored to have said, "If dogs want to return to their vomit, I'm not going to stop them." Lally's book quotes Shurlock as saying later that he intentionally wanted to rupture the Code, in order to force changes to a system that was outmoded.

Still, Wilder was obliged to reshoot a pivotal scene in the movie for U.S. prints, known as "the trailer scene," and in doing so downplayed the sexual aggression of the women in this film, which I think seriously damages the film as a whole. It was still condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency as "morally repulsive." Fortunately, the film has been restored in the U.S. with the original trailer scene, which is a vast improvement. You want to know more, watch the movie with me on September 22 at Alamo South.

I'm embarrassed to admit that I haven't seen the last two films in the series, even though I own the DVDs. I'm not sure whether it's laziness, a desire to ration out the few Wilder films I haven't seen … or a fear of disappointment in these later films. I have seen Wilder's 1974 remake of The Front Page and found it to be rather a letdown. Whatever the reason, I'm hoping to catch these two films during this series if I can.

The Fortune Cookie, from 1966, is playing on Sept. 29 right smack in the middle of Fantastic Fest, so the venue moved to Alamo Ritz. It is also playing on Sept. 30 at Ritz because the Sept. 29 screening is sold out already! I'm not sure if I'll be able to swing over there mid-fest, unfortunately, but I hope so. I also hope this pairing of Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon -- their first on film -- is better than that Front Page remake. Lemmon plays a TV cameraman who is mildly injured during a football game, but is convinced by his brother-in-law lawyer, played by Matthau, to exaggerate his injuries so he can clean up on the insurance money.

The AFS series closes with Avanti!, from 1972, on Oct. 6 at Alamo South. This film also stars Jack Lemmon, this time as a successful businessman whose father dies in Italy … and Lemmon has to travel through the country to pick up the body. Juliet Mills plays the daughter of a woman with whom Lemmon's dad had a long-running secret affair. The film was shot in Italy and apparently contains the first nude scene in a Wilder film. Again, it's long -- nearly 2.5 hours -- but I think I'll give it a try nonetheless. After all, if I'm fond of one of the director's "failures," it could happen again, couldn't it?

For more information about the films in the Essential Cinema series, check out the AFS page for the series as well as their descriptions of each individual film. You also can watch the original trailers on the AFS pages for each film. Buy your tickets now for these movies; as I mentioned earlier, one screening of The Fortune Cookie is already sold out, and others may sell out quickly too. If you're an AFS member, all these movies are free, and they're so much better in a theater with an appreciative audience.