Wilder's forte is the great American congame. In practically all of his movies (original stories and adaptations alike) the plot revolves around some sort of swindle. (p. 2) In Wilder's view, sex and money are inextricably linked. His characters use sex to obtain cash and position and involve themselves in frauds to get sex. Sometimes, however, greed and lechery conflict, and the whole scheme blows up…. This kind of mordancy is often charming but sometimes, in more serious situations, m...

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 common critical view of Wilder—much too simple a view, I believe—is that he is a cynic who repeatedly tempers the harshness of his vision in deference to the box office. (p. 9) Wilder's tendency to caricature is one way of diluting the acid. But even at its most frivolous, this caricature cannot help exposing Wilder'...

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 suspender-wearer. I wish I could report that the results are foolproof and unimpeachable. Actually, they fall between two wears…. [It] is time to realize that though Wilder has made some extremely skillful, effective, and, in part, even penetrating films, he has never done anything first-rate. One reason for this is, probably, insufficient...

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 thought they could get away with Double Indemnity, but they did; nobody thought they could get away with The Lost Weekend, but they did; apparently nobody thought they could get away with Sunset Boulevard, but they did; and now, one gathers, the industry is proud of them. There are plenty of good reasons why Sunset Boulevard (a beautiful tit...

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 and Munich (where the Brandenberg Gate was reconstructed), but the real location is the locker-room where tired salesmen swap the latest variants of stale old jokes…. If you find these jokes fresh and funny, then by all means rush to see One, Two, Three, which will keep shouting them at you for two hours. It's like you-know-what...

[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 the story itself, by Wilder and his co-scriptwriter Wendell Mayes, is less happily organised, however. Lindbergh is not only the central figure throughout, but during the latter half the narrative is, of necessity, restricted to one man, a plane and the limitless ocean below. Such a situation might provide a director of [Robert] Bresson�...

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 comedy, which Billy Wilder's new film is, rather than a B-Western, which it emphatically isn't. The new title does not even have the advantage over the original in mere intelligibility: before going to the cinema I knew what a fortune cookie was, but I needed the film to explain to me all about whiplash lawyers and their way of life...

[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 also required, and that Mr. Wilder has abundantly supplied….

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 much of which the Master might approve…. In the last few years, as the porno revolution and advancing age have deprived Wilder of his old ability (and desire) to scandalize, he has relaxed considerably in his handling of sex. The Private Life of Sherlock Homes, and now Avanti! find him in a mellowing, more gracious mood; he is less def...

In Sunset Boulevard the Brackett-Wilder team took an outsize, legendary character, examined her coldly and ironically—but did not destroy her legendary quality. Billy Wilder, now on his own, does rather the same, in a very different setting, in the hard and brilliant Ace in the Hole…. The technique, in contrast to the leisurely, personal style of Sunset Boulevard, is one of impersonal, direct observation…. Wilder isolates individuals not in distracting asides from the main theme, but to...

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 cold cruelty of the blue Mediterranean forms an aptly Wilderean backdrop for a crazy yarn about a star who has apparently defeated time…. Wilder may have outsmarted himself by his morbidly convoluted method of telling the story of Fedora by beginning after we have seen Marthe Keller run down by a train, thus setting into motion Detweiler...

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 realm of Continental comedy [in Love in the Afternoon]. This is the story of an aged American viveur who becomes involved in a series of afternoon sexual affairs with the daughter of a private detective in Paris. It is not particularly "explosive," to be sure, but at times the director manages to sketch an interestingly sarcastic...

[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, not more, after it's over. However, while it's unreeling it's engrossing. Au fond, or au naturel, Wilder is a bird of passage, a luftmensch, an intellectual vagabond. He bites the back, not the hand, that feeds him. Not only is nothing sacred to him, but nothing is ever on the level, and his wit consists in tilting trut...

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 similar relationship between Sherlock Holmes and his German Spy. I also wish he had devoted less time to the unraveling of the surface mystery…. And yet. And yet. Fedora is an elegant reminder of a formal perfection that has all but vanished from contemporary filmmaking. When Wilder's camera tracks past a luxurious ballroom of waltz...