A rogue named Billy Wilder - Ips Cuba

El 27 de marzo de 2002 se despedía físicamente el extraordinario cineasta Billy Wilder. Aún hoy les cuesta a muchos espectadores creer que quien había nacido el 22 de junio de 1906 en Sucha, Austria-Hungría, legara numerosos clásicos del séptimo arte que rebasaron las fronteras de Estados Unidos.

When he worked as a chronicler, he left Berlin.For his Jewish ancestry, he foresaw what was to come.Wilder would never forget his mother's death, grandmother and stepfather of him in Auschwitz's concentration camps.But his pilgrimage continued through French lands until he fell, fortunately, in North America.Without proposing it, Nazi anti -Semitism was contributing to the reaffirmation of the canon and the greatness of Hollywood classic cinema.However, the works of Erich von Stroheim, Ernst Lubitsch, Otto Preminger, Lewis Milestone, Fred Zinnemann and, of course, that of Billy Wilder, did not settle for revalidating how the Americans wanted to see under the demands of the powerful producer and theStatutes of the Hays Code.

Mauvaise Graine (Dangerous Curves, 1933), Wilder's first film, reveals very little - except in some lines and psychology of characters - the features that will characterize its subsequent cinema: the impact of the opening of the story, the aesthetic detail in the Care of the plane in the image, in the elaboration of visual metaphors: case of the subsequent employment, very regular, of stairs in his work [1]. Of course, when he had to consecrate the content to the detriment of the form, he did. In addition, continuous flashbacks, the point of view, the game of appearances ..., but the promising director is already noticeable and before the daring screenwriter. The takeoff and deployment of issues and issues on the human being, in a convulsed society for changing war and comedy, especially the comedy of everyday life and memory. But in Wilder there is almost no genre in its purest state. He cared about the script, the structure of the stories, the characters, the staging and reiterated some themes. Although he provided variations to his thematic insistence.

In Wilder's feature films it attracts attention, in the first place, sarcasm and parody as variants of humor, of social criticism.The above is contained in abundant references about Hollywood cinema and cinema inside the cinema.Here are some of those examples, localizable without inspecting the copious literature on the director:

- When, in The Lost Weekend (days without footprint, 1945), the drunk played by the excellent Ray Milland expresses: “Suddenly, I am above the ordinary.I have a lot of security.I am walking on a tightrope through the Niagara cataracts.I am one of the greats.I am Miguel Ángel molding the beard of Moses.I am Van Gogh painting the sunlight.I am Horowitz playing the ‘Emperor concert’.I am John Barrymore before the cinema strangled him. ”

- In The Seven Year Itch (temptation lives above, 1955), the protagonist's wife says: "Lately, you think of Cinemascope, with stereo sound."And before, in another of his dreams, we appreciate him in a parody of the classic scene from here to eternity (Fred Zinnemann, 1953), where Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr kiss them lying on the shore of a beach.

- When, in the apartment (1960), C.C.Baxter (Jack Lemmon) changes channels to evade the commercials of one that will broadWill Wilder's dislikes be reflected for certain works and authors?

- The generation of sequences from the fact that the character of Tyrone Power, in Witness for the Prosecution (position witness, 1957), recommends to an unknown lady which hat should carry.She then confesses to acquaintances that she was a ridiculous hat.Later, watching the Western Jesse James (Henry King, 1939) in a movie theater, he complains: "Please, ma'am, the hat!"And she replies: "It's you ... it's your fault, you know?You chose it. ”The bandit Jesse James is the very young Tyrone Power.Wilder is perverse!

- And none like Sunset Boulevard (the twilight of the gods, 1950), which concentrates and contrasted all kinds of genres, issues and issues, tones and situations to achieve a great audiovisual mosaic: art inserting in life,life imitating art.The contrasts between the new and the old, silent cinema and sound cinema, theatricality and naturalness, fragility and rejoicing.Mix of Gothic with terror, the police with the melodrama overlapping the appeal of suspense: broadly, it is already known how much it happened.What matters is how Wilder will take care of that.“I don't make anything happen.I only write it, ”I would say the scoundrel Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas) in Ace in the Hole (the Great Carnival, 1951).

- It is true that Fedora (1978) is very illustrative in terms of cinema inside the cinema, Hollywood.Not in Balde Claudius Seidl is well to examine: “There are more mirrors in this film than people in action.The story has been lost somewhere, and the ‘History’ appears.Fedora no longer tells a story: the plot of the film is diluted in its form, the movie no longer means anything: she speaks only of herself.And that is her story ”[2].

- For the above, it does not exceed the masterful Sunset Boulevard, with William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim and even the appearances of Cecil B. Demille, Buster Keaton and Hedda Hopper.When actress Nancy Olson confesses in an interview: "Eva naked is a classic, but not as the twilight of the gods," she certifies a truth.It was unforgivable that Swanson lost the Oscar to Judy Holliday by born yesterday (George Cukor), but the academy could not afford it for many reasons, nor the character of Norman Desmond and less to a Hollywood critic like Wilder.How much ironic momentum is warned when we hear the Desmond say: “What joy is to be in the studio rolling a movie!They don't know how much I have missed them.I will not abandon them again. ”

The golden stage of Hollywood would be characterized by having great screenwriters. They were readers of classics and how much they considered had cinematographic possibility. Hence they were promoters of adaptations and also given to version books of contemporary authors. Regarding literature and cinema, Wilder can also be remembered by the rigors of their scripts that, almost always, responded to a four -handed writing (Charles Brackett and “Izzy” Diamond the main ones) or more (Lesser Samuels, Walter Newman, Edwin Blum, George Axelrod). This did not assume to rest in his co -writer. It is known of the determined modifications of him. When a certain literary work did not adjust to how he understood the procedure of narration and the foundations or the development of a story, his story came off the original. Raymond Chandler himself was exhausted when he worked with Wilder the Double Indemnity (Perdition, 1944) script from the novel Pact of Blood, by James M. Cain. Do not forget that Wilder was also the well -sounded screenwriter for his time Ninotchka (Ernst Lubitsch, 1939), fireball (Howard Hawks, 1941) and if he did not wake up (Mitchell Leisen, 1941) [3].

Conflicts between women and men are the order of the day in Wilder's plots.They, who prevail in his cinema, fail, frustrate or dominate themselves like them.But, compared to women, they try to bring more moral weight or propose conciliators to the epochal context and the "integrity" consented at that time.

Could it be linked to feminism?Not at all, even many of his fans would say.Perhaps it would be suspected to admit it, because he is away from his purposes as a screenwriter.But his women, first -order ladies or prostitutes in terms of importance in stories, are in superficial appearance (unless some other case), because they really stand out for being daring and seductive, rogues and resolved to achieve what whatwhat do they want.

While Gabriel Ramírez rightly remembers the woman in Billy Wilder's cinema: “In any case, the relationships established in films between men and women, are raised as a conflict for the initial situation to be the one beforeOr it reaches a friendly point and within what is considered normal at the time of filming the films ”[4], the teacher did not always have to overcome the impositions of the Hays code, but to adjust to them;But, for the tone and expository horizons of comedy, it made fun of some particular decisions related to sexuality, such as the issue of passion and the relative to those who should assume the dominant role in heteronormative relationships in a society "Puritana ”as the American.

In the usual code reads: “The scenes of passion must be treated without forgetting what human nature is and what are the usual actions.There are scenes that cannot be presented, because they could awaken dangerous emotions in young people, delayed and criminals. ”However, in A Foreign Affair (Berlin Occidente, 1948) is the girl (Jean Arthur), towards the final minutes, who decides to conquer the officer, from whom she could doubt if she really has accepted her.

In Kissame, silly (1964) it shows, for the complacent and the absences or cuts of scenes and parliaments?, That the director wanted to take advantage of a plot where the female characters could do more than their own [5].But how much is for the history of cinema is that “Wilder makes it clear that we live in a repressive environment, where periclitated and amorphous rules destroy instincts and spontaneous communication.Always seen from an optimal comic - although much less than in most of his films - and with the constant of transformism.The radicalization of the film is attenuated by the shy "Happy End" with which Wilder closes the film.Zelda will return with her and Polly's husband to her club.The dream has only lasted one night;The adventure will not change the codes of conduct ”[6].

Although Wilder did not make cinema about women that we largely recognize in many of his friend George Cukor, the protagonists and secondary of his films overcome the merely denotative.Claudius Seidl thinks otherwise: “Those Wilder films in which women have an active leading role are rather projections, dreams or simple misunderstandings.He does not intend to give an explanation of the feminine soul ”[7].Not domesticating or violating them, judging or ridiculing them - in Irma the Douce (1963) he could do the opposite - he shows that he did understand women.

Within that framework, it could be briefly backed by those titles with women's names. But it would be naive if I stayed with that appreciation, given that there are only four (Sabrina, Irma ..., Love in the Afternoon/Ariane and Fedora), not counting two scripts that co -written and did not directed: the eighth blue beard woman ( Ernst Lubitsch, 1938) and Ninotchka. Now, it is not accidental that I will like it hot (some prefer to burn, 1959), for this critic, perhaps one of the best tributes [8] to female emancipation and universe, not because of the cult of the curves and grace of Marilyn Monroe, but for sincere respect for skills and releases between saying and doing women, to put it with the words of a friend. Beyond the transvestism, it was alarming for his time (and they are still more than suggestive and current) how much can be seen between the lines and direct phrases of some prefer to burn. Perhaps I lean somewhat because Noël Simsolo says, about the final sequence, in which “the rejection of transvestism causes the creation of a couple and reveals the deep nature of each of them. Lemmon was clearly the female component of the couple he formed with Curtis. While ‘nobody is perfect’, it can be thought that ‘nobody is called deception’, starting with the millionaire ”[9].

At the same time, the issue of emigration and subsequent sociocultural reintegration can be located in several of her feature films, as in the trials of Mrs. Vole (Marlene Dietrich), a position of witness witness. In a flashback she sings: "When I get to a good place there I want to stay (...) maybe home never again." Somehow, she foreshadows, without knowing it, her miserable destiny. But if there is constant criticism of ideologies and nationalisms, institutions and companies in struggle, see how much ardent characters discuss, especially those taken in and out of scene C. R. Macnamara (James Cagney) and Otto Ludwig Piffl (Horst Buchholz) of the Excessive and embalad Comedy One, Two, Three (one, two, three, 1961). The film was shot when the east-west conflict of Berlin had not reached the most critical scales of dissociations and deaths. As González Arroyo says in his detailed study praise of the imperfect. Billy Wilder's cinema: “Fortunately the world is another. The wall fell, One, Two, Three remains untouched ”[10].

Of all Wilder's film heroes, none is more transparent and less interesting than The Spirit of St. Louis (the lonely hero, 1957).While the characters of the writer and director are almost always conceived from ambivalence or the impudence and selfishness at close range, they are antihero;When not, they are restless, imaginative and very rogues.

I will not follow an order; Wilderian characters are, among others, Joe (Tony Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemmon) in some prefer to burn; Susan Kathleen Applegate (Ginger Rogers) in the older and minor; Fred Macmurray (Walter Neff) and Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) in perdition; all in Berlin Occidente; Sir Wilfrid Robarts (Charles Laughton) in charge witness; Baxter (Jack Lemmon) in the apartment; Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau in The Fortune Cookie (in silver tray); Jack Lemmon would repeat, is his fetish actor, and even Sherlock Holmes (Sherlock Holmes private) played by Robert Stephens; But also the fierce individualist Chuck Tatum by Kirk Douglas in the Great Carnival. Normand Desmond? No, she is a victim of an industry dominated by men. She ends crazy and Wilder's characters are extremely sane. Gillis (William Holden) yes, is Wilderian to the core, as well as Tatum and Leonardo Vole. But, as Wilderians perverse, even if they try to redeem themselves, they will have their deserved.

Charles Lindbergh (James Stewart) is not a habitual [11] character of Wilder because he is limited by the historical referent and by his own autobiography.Despite his anti -Semitism and devotion by Hitler - it is not said or suggested in the film - the American pilot is a hero of the national epic.Those who surround it are the ones who impregnate something of the seal or the Wilder touch to this extensive story - of more flashbacks than a memoir - about a human feat.The theme would be: the adventure of crossing the Atlantic Ocean on a non -scales flight.The issue is the obstinacy and courage of the aviator that would highlight his country.Subsequently, recalls Juan Carlos González Arroyave that Stewart would admit on one occasion that in Spirit he did not have the leading role.He had an airplane [12].

Together with Luis Buñuel, Ingmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, John Ford, John Houston, Orson Welles, Federico Fellini, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Akira Kurosawa, among others, Billy Wilder is one of the film directors to whichMore books have been written.There is a lot of talk about the biography Billy Wilder.Life and time of a filmmaker, by Ed Sikov.Now, the scholar cannot stop consulting, by Sam Staggs, the twilight of the gods.But the greatest closeness to the man and the scriptwriter can be found, without hesitation, in conversations with Billy Wilder, by Cameron Crowe, a fascinating book.No more no less.

The bibliography is always important to meet a filmmaker.But if the viewer intends to discover details and aquilatat the set of a work, it has to see cinema.It is true that it is already very different from what it was.This matter can be figured like a huge technical, artistic and historical sequence.It is not devotion to the past, or pessimism before the present.It is a compliment to the audiovisual testimony of humanity.Simply, times have changed [13].It happens that there are vital films and authors, so new ways of conceiving and making films, looking at them and thinking about them.

The importance of geniuses does not fall to put ourselves in face how valid their abilities are, but how they can, through creation, involve everyone from a common good: entertainment as intellectual fun, not as self -complacency.The genius appears as such once, for generosity - in the background is personal satisfaction -, generalizes what should not be hidden ", which represents the first rejection of anonymity, a way to indicate where themerit.

Despite all the problems he faced in his personal life, Wilder had many reasons to be, a resentful?But the daring of his feature film (26 in total) - bitter and sarcastic environment with society, American cinema and culture together - gave us a director dissatisfied with his rich work.Although the way in which his films mediated (and still mediate) in the self -exploration of the human being must have satisfied a lot, wherever he is, to the happy genius of Billy Wilder, that which he determined, with unquestionable mischief, he would be sealed in his grave:"I am a writer, but nobody is perfect."(2020)

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Grades:

[1] En la trama, por ejemplo, de The Lost Weekend (Días sin huella), llama mucho la atención las veces que los personajes bajan y suben las escaleras. Más allá del aprovechamiento estético en los contextos de puertas hacia adentro, puede suponerse qué hay detrás de la afición del director a los peldaños, incluso cuando están aparentemente ausentes, como en El carnaval, o se equiparan con el ascensor del inmenso edificio corporativo de la oscarizada El apartamento. Mas, valdría analizar en un extenso estudio no solo como un reclamo literal sino simbólico, esta constante en el cine de Billy Wilder.

[2] Claudius Seidl: Billy Wilder, Ediciones Cátedra, S.A. 1994, Madrid, p.281.

[3] Según Juan Carlos González Arroyave: “El primer argumento que se le atribuye es el de Menschen am Sonntag (Gente en domingo, 1929), una precursora del neorrealismo y que, curiosamente, fue fotografiada por Fred Zinnemann y codirigida por Robert Siodmak y Edward G. Ulmer, quienes harían parte del grupo de realizadores europeos que, como Wilder, terminarían en Hollywood”. (https://www.tiempodecine.co/web/billy-wilder-pasos-firmes-en-la-oscuridad/, consultado 23/03/2020).

[4] Gabriel Ramírez: “La mujer en el cine de Billy Wilder” (https://www. elcorreoweb.es/aladar/la-mujer-en-el-cine-de-billy-wilder/, consultado 19/3/2020).

[5] Como en Testigo de cargo, una película más hitchcockiana que Hitchcock, donde los mayores y mejores contrastes no se producen entre el juez (Charles Laughton), el acusado (Tyrone Power) y Christine Helm (Marlene Dietrich), sino entre esta última, el juez y su enfermera (Elsa Lanchester).

[6] Juan Carlos Rentero: Billy Wilder. La romántica amargura de un cínico, Ediciones JC Clementine, España, 1999, p.70.

[7] Claudius Seidl: ob. cit, p.87.

[8] Lo concibe también Juan Carlos Rentero en ob. cit y antes Ramón Freixas y Joan Bassa en La tentación vive arriba/Amantes (Colección: Programa doble, libros “Dirigido”, Barcelona, 1996, pp.58-59). Aquí ellos recomiendan: “Conviene despejar un malentendido que persigue a Billy Wilder precisamente desde el estreno de La tentación vive arriba, y es el de la carga misógina de su cine. Equívoco que tiene su arranque en la presencia de su compañero de escritura, George Axelrod, misógino confeso. Una impostación que la filmografía de Wilder basta y sobra para refutar, y en particular La tentación vive arriba, si bien una primera lectura del filme parece abonar la tesis (las ideas de Axelrod están ahí), Wilder tira por otro lado y vacía la estructura para dotarla de un contenido muy diferente”.

Posteriormente, otros críticos e historiadores se han encargado de repetir, a mi entender, por razones fuera del set de filmación o posteriores a la terminación de Con faldas y a lo loco, que incluyeron opiniones fuertes pero razonables del director sobre la Monroe, debido a sus acostumbradas llegadas tardes, malacrianzas e inseguridades, que Wilder era un machista a ultranza. Esteve Riambau por ejemplo, en su artículo “Wilder en Sunset Boulevard”, plantea a propósito de La tentación vive arriba: “Marilyn Monroe es su espectacular objeto del deseo, pero su personaje tampoco sale mucho mejor parado que el de su oponente masculino. Si el tiempo ha convertido sus faldas plisadas milimétricamente elevadas por el vapor que emerge de los subsuelos de Nueva York en un icono de la sociedad del espectáculo, Wilder volcó en esta película una profunda misoginia que se extiende por toda su filmografía”. (Dirigido por, Especial Billy Wilder, Nº 312, mayo 2002, Barcelona, p.30). Para 1970 ya a Wilder parece que le dan lo mismo los rumores y pone en boca de su Sherlock Holmes cuando conversa con Watson: “Le has dado al lector la impresión de que soy un misógino. En realidad, no me molestan las mujeres. Simplemente no les tengo confianza. El brillo en sus ojos y el arsénico en la sopa”. A lo que Watson le responde: “Esos comentarios son los que te hacen único. Extravagante, diría yo”.

[9] El libro de Billy Wilder, traducción de Núria Pujol, Cahiers du Cinema, Colletion Grands Cinéastes, Edición particular para El País, Francia, 2007, p.64.

[10] Juan Carlos González Arroyave: Elogio de lo imperfecto. El cine de Billy Wilder. Colección Cine, Editorial Universidad de Antioquia, Colombia, 2008, p.128.

[11] De las escasas líneas wilderianas del piloto se advierte cuando, en charla con el jefe de los constructores de aviones, intercambian estas palabras: “-Quise darte lenguadinas. -¿No hay lenguadinas? –No hay lenguadinas. –Frank, debo decirte algo. Espero que no te enojes. –Claro que no, flaco. –Tus lenguadinas son horribles. Saben a soldadura con acetileno y… -Pero te las comiste. –Pensé que era lo mejor. Quería tener el avión a tiempo.”

[12] Juan Carlos González Arroyave: Elogio de lo imperfecto. El cine de Billy Wilder. Colección Cine, Editorial Universidad de Antioquia, Colombia, 2008, p.128.

[13] A partir de los años sesenta hay menos flashbacks, casi no hay ninguno, en el cine de Wilder. Está interesado más en el fluir de la narración, los cambios de fortuna en los personajes y la historia en sí. De hecho, ya puede intentar desnudar literalmente a algunos de sus personajes, como en La vida privada de Sherlock Holmes (1970), aunque viene a hacerlo, con total libertad y por primera vez, en Avanti! (¿Qué ocurrió entre mi padre y tu madre?, 1972).