Everything you need to understand or teach
Billy Wilder.
Products may contain comprehensive summaries, analysis, notes, articles, essays,
lesson plans and more. See below for details on what is included.
Wilder, Billy (1906—)
Born Samuel Wilder in an Austrian village, this six-time Academy Award winning director, screenwriter, and producer was dubbed Billy after Buffalo Bill of the 1880s travel...
Read more
Billy Wilder (born 1906) has been honored repeatedly as one of Hollywood's finest directors, writers, and producers. He created more than 50 films, encompassing such well-known comedies as The Apartme...
Read more
Although Billy Wilder won fame for directing films, especially several brilliant ones between 1944 and 1960, he was always a screenwriter. He never directed a film he did not write; his writing career...
Read more
Critical Essay by John Gillett
[The technical problems of The Spirit of St. Louis are] managed with all the professionalism and flair that Hollywood can muster for such occasions.
The presentation of ...
Read more
Critical Essay by George N. Fenin
After the whitewashed film version of The Seven Year Itch and the uninspired Spirit of St. Louis, Billy Wilder is now experimenting in the sophisticated and whimsical...
Read more
Critical Essay by Henry Hart
[One, Two, Three] is 1961's best comedy. Which is a rather sad fact, for Wilder comedy is socially disintegrative. It amuses, but it devitalizes, and we are less, n...
Read more
Critical Essay by Pauline Kael
One, Two, Three is overwrought, tasteless, and offensive—a comedy that pulls out laughs the way a catheter draws urine…. [It] was actually shot in Berlin a...
Read more
Critical Essay by John Simon
Billy Wilder's films are belt-and-suspender films: they combine the jaunty, sportif appearance of the belt-wearer with the comfortable, homespun look of the suspend...
Read more
Critical Essay by John Russell Taylor
Why Meet Whiplash Willie? What's wrong with The Fortune Cookie [the film's U.S. title] for a title? At least it has the virtue of sounding like a co...
Read more
Critical Essay by Joseph Mcbride and Michael Wilmington
Wilder's forte is the great American congame. In practically all of his movies (original stories and adaptations alike) the plot revolves...
Read more
Critical Essay by Stephen Farber
Wilder's work, like the work of most of his contemporaries, is compromised; in his case, though, the compromises have been condemned with unusual severity. The ...
Read more
Critical Essay by Joseph Mcbride
In his new movie, Avanti!, Billy Wilder is still trying hard to become Ernst Lubitsch. The strain shows, some of the romanticism is forced and mechanical, but there is...
Read more
Critical Essay by George Morris
As moving as much of it is, Fedora is a problematic film. I wish Wilder had given the thwarted romance between Barry and Fedora the same intensity he brings to the simi...
Read more
Critical Essay by Andrew Sarris
From the first strains of Miklos Rozsa's vintage '40s score [in Fedora] we are transported to a timeless realm in which nothing has really changed. The co...
Read more
Critical Essay by James Agee
Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder have a long and honorable record in bucking tradition, breaking rules, and taking risks, according to their lights, and limits. Nobody th...
Read more
Critical Essay by Penelope Houston
In Sunset Boulevard the Brackett-Wilder team took an outsize, legendary character, examined her coldly and ironically—but did not destroy her legendary qualit...
Read more
Critical Essay by Henry Hart
[The Spirit of St. Louis is] good, albeit not great….
No script, however ingenious, could by itself have made a film so good as this. Accomplished direction was als...
Read more
Wilder, Billy (1906—)
Billy Wilder
Billy Wilder
Critical Essay by John Gillett
