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 has spanned more than fifty years. Nurtured in the studio system in both Germany and Hollywood, he provides an instructive test of the auteur theory. Although many of Wilder's visual-literary storytelling devices--mistaken identities, disguises, formal narration--are as old as storytelling itself and derive from his silent film experience, his typical themes are highly personal. Over and over Wilder's characters and plots bespeak a love-hate relationship with American life and values, the duality of cynicism and sentimentality, the attraction and repulsion of moviemaking itself, and a growing preoccupation with his own body of work.

Wilder was born in Sucha, in Polish Galicia (then part of Austria) one hundred miles east of Vienna. Born Samuel Wilder, he was nicknamed...