Well… Nobody’s Perfect! The Career of Billy Wilder. (Part 5)

After the success of "Witness for the Prosecution" Wilder was able to strike up his own deal with United Artists so he could produce pictures and they would put them out. His next project saw him reunite with screenwriter  I. A. L. Diamond who he had first worked with on "Love in the Afternoon", The pair set about writing a new adaptation of a 1935 French film called "Fanfare of Love" That film is about two musicians who disguise themselves by dressing as women to escape from gangsters whom they witnessed committing a crime.

Wilder and Diamond wrote...

The film was made in California during the summer and autumn of 1958 at Samuel Goldwyn Studios in Hollywood. Many scenes were shot at the Hotel del Coronado in Coronado, California, which appeared as the "Seminole Ritz Hotel" in Miami in the film, due to it being in keeping  with the 1920s time period and was near Hollywood.

Marilyn Monroe, although fantastic in the film she was apparently challenging to work with she lacked concentration and she was struggling with an addiction to prescription drugs. Marilyn was constantly late to set, and she could not remember the majority of her lines, Tony Curtis said in an interview she would need  35–40 takes for a single line. I'm sure that was an exaggeration. 

Wilder spoke in 1959 about the prospect of making another film with Monroe:

"I have discussed this with my doctor and my psychiatrist and they tell me I'm too old and too rich to go through this again."

Wilder also admitted: "My Aunt Minnie would always be punctual and never hold up production, but who would pay to see my Aunt Minnie?" He did also state that Monroe played her part wonderfully.

The film was made for $2.9 million and grossed $49 million at the US Box Office, 

Monroe worked for 10% of the gross so earned in excess of $4 million & Curtis for 5% of the gross so was paid over $2 million... I assume Lemon just took a regular payday.

Wilder's contract stated he would be paid 17.5% of the first million after break-even and 20 percent thereafter. So he made $175'000 when they took $4 million at the box office and when all was said and done he was paid something like $9 million for making that picture. that is $95 Million in 2024 money.  

The film's closing line, "Well, nobody's perfect", is ranked 78th on The Hollywood Reporter list of Hollywood's 100 Favorite Movie Lines, but it was never supposed to be in the film. Diamond and Wilder put it in the script purely as a "placeholder" until they could come up with "something better", but they never did.

The Guardian ranked the closing scene at No. 10 on their list of "The top 100 film moments".

Billy Wilder managed to drag himself out of his "Scrooge McDuck" money pool long enough to team up with I. A. L. Diamond to write another classic... 

Wilders initial idea for "The Apartment" came from seeing "Brief Encounter" (1945) directed by David Lean and written by Noël Coward, Where Brief Encounter is very chased WIlder wanted to expand the story to where a similar pair would as far as going to a friend's apartment for a tryst but still end up thwarted. That was in the late 40's when The Hays Production Code ruled out making a film about adultery in Hollywood, So the idea was shelved. Wilder and Diamond also took note of the 1951 Hollywood scandal where a film producer shot a talent agent for having an affair with his actress wife and during the court case it came out that the talent agent had used low-level employee's apartments to conduct the affair. Diamond added to the plot the experience of one of his friends who after breaking up with his girlfriend he came home one day to find she had let herself in and had committed suicide in his bed. From all that the pair penned a cinematic classic.

Straight off the back of the incredible success of Some Like It Hot, Wilder and Diamond were keen to make another picture with Jack Lemmon. The real magic and heart of this movie is supplied by Lemon' s co-star Ms Shirley MacLaine she had started acting on Broadway in 1953 and in 1954 she landed a contract with Paramount Pictures. Her first movie role was in

Alfred Hitchcock's "The Trouble with Harry" (1955) which she went on to win the Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year – Actress. She went on to appear in a string of films and in 1959 she was nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award and a Golden Globe nomination for playing Ginny in the film "Some Came Running" (1958). It's safe to say she was on the radar of most filmmakers in Hollywood but it was "The Apartment" that made her a movie star.  The film also includes actor Fred MacMurray who had previously worked with Wilder back in 1944 when he starred in "Double Indemnity" but MacMurray generally played charming clumsy characters in live action Disney films like "The Shaggy Dog" he said that   after the film's release he was accosted by women in the street who berated him for making a "dirty filthy movie", and one of them even hit him with her purse.

The critics at the time were pretty split on the film with reviews spanning from "gleeful, tender, and even sentimental" and Wilder's direction "indigenous" to "a paradigm of corny avant-gardism" and a "a dirty fairy tale".

Regardless of what the critics said the film grossed $24.6 million at the Box Office against a production budget of $3million.

It went on to win the Best Motion Picture and Best Director Oscars for Billy Wilder
and won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond and it won Oscars for best Best Art Direction and Best Film Editing.

In 1994, The Apartment was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

The 2012 Sight and Sound magazine critics poll ranked the film 14th greatest of all time (tied with Fellini's "Dolce Vita" which is also a film from 1960). In the 2012 poll by the same magazine directors voted the film 44th greatest of all time. In 2002 the film was included in "The New York Times Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made", The Writers Guild of America ranked Billy Wilder & I.A.L. Diamonds screenplay the 15th greatest ever written .

In 2015, The Apartment ranked 24th on BBC's "100 Greatest American Films" list, voted on by film critics from around the world. The film was selected as the 27th best comedy of all time in a poll of 253 film critics from 52 countries conducted by the BBC in 2017.

So... It's pretty good! It's also in my Top 30 movies of all time! (for what's that worth)

Having just crushed it with a comedy about Adultery and attempted suicide he decided to try a political cold war satire... What could go wrong! 

James Cagney is the most memorable thing about this movie his performance is relentless, The pace of this movie is incredible. Wilder said in 1999,

"We knew that we were going to have a comedy, we [were] not going to be waiting for the laughs. But we had to go with Cagney, because Cagney was the whole picture. He really had the rhythm, and that was very good. It was not funny. But just the speed was funny ... The general idea was, let's make the fastest picture in the world ... And yeah, we did not wait, for once, for the big laughs.

Wilder & Diamond were cheeky by including  several references to Cagney's career in the script including the actor Red Buttons doing a  Cagney impression. The cuckoo clock in MacNamara's office plays "Yankee Doodle Dandy". Cagney also refers to his contemporary Edward G. Robinson by using Robinson's line "Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Rico?" from the movie "Little Caesar", which was a gangster picture that competed with "The Public Enemy" at the box office back in 1931. 

Wilder decided to shoot the movie in Berlin in 1961... During the production the USSR closed the border between West and East Germany and started to construct The Berlin Wall,  The production relocated to Munich to complete filming.   

The theatrical poster for the film, with a woman holding three balloons, was designed by graphic design legend Saul Bass. The original poster design that Wilder originally wanted for the film featured a United States style flag sticking out of a Coca-Cola-style bottle. that poster had to be scrapped when Coca-Cola threatened legal action against United Artists for copyright infringement.

Due to the constantly shifting situation regarding "The Cold War" the movie was a bit of a hot potato, many Americans didn't see the funny side we were still three years away from Kubrick's "Dr Strangelove" and that was risky in 1964. The lighthearted treatment of the East-West Berlin story felt much more sinister in 1961 due to the cement still drying on The Berlin Wall s reviews at the time were split,

 Variety.  wrote, "Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three is a fast-paced, high-pitched, hard-hitting, lighthearted farce crammed with topical gags and spiced with satirical overtones. The story is so furiously quick-witted that some of its wit gets snarled and smothered in overlap. But total experience packs a considerable wallop. While notable killjoy Pauline Kael, wrote, "a tiresome succession of stale and inane gags. She was also bemused by what seemed to her the forced enthusiasm of the favorable reviews.

The movie bombed at the Box Office in the  U.S. and Europe especially Germany, , The film recorded a loss of $1.6 million. When it was re-released in 1985 in France and West Germany it was a box office success, especially popular in West Berlin.

Again, the film was always brilliant it was just ahead of its time! I rank it amongst Wilders best.