SOME LIKE IT WILDER:
THE COMPLETE BILLY WILDER
September 10 - November 13, 2005


Program Introduction

Saturday, September 10
2:00 p.m.
THE MAJOR AND THE MINOR
1942, 100 mins. Restored 35mm print from UCLA Film & TV Archive. With Ginger Rogers. Wilder toyed with the censors in his Hollywood directorial debut, a hit romantic comedy about a woman posing as a young girl.

Saturday, September 10 and Sunday September 11
4:00 p.m.
DOUBLE INDEMNITY
1944, 106 mins. Restored 35mm print. With Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson. Wilder Teamed up with Raymon Chandler to create the essential Hollywood Film Noir, the story of an insrance salesman lured to his doom by a predatory femme fatale.

Sunday, September 11
2:00 p.m.
THE BAD SEED (MAUVAISE GRAINE)
France, 1934, 76 mins. Directed by Wilder and Alexander Esway. With Danielle Darrieux, Pierre Mingland. Wilder's jazzy, fast-paced directorial debut, about the adventures of a young woman and a gang of car thieves, was made in France in a freewheeling style that prefigures the films of the French New Wave.

Saturday, September 17 and Sunday, September 18
2:00 p.m.
THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH
1955, 105 mins. With Marilyn Monroe, Tom Ewell. Restored 35mm CinemaScope print. With Monroe's iconic performance as the alluring blonde who cools off above a subway grate, The Seven Year Itch is a cleverly subversive comedy about marriage and temptation.

Saturday, September 17
4:00 p.m.
KISS ME, STUPID
1964, 126 mins. Restored uncensored 35mm print. With Dean Martin, Kim Novak. This delightfully vulgar sex farce about infidelity features a startling self-parody by Martin as "Dino," an alcoholic playboy singer who falls for the charming wife of an aspiring songwriter.

Sunday, September 18
4:00 p.m.
THE LOST WEEKEND
1945, 100 mins. With Ray Milland, Jane Wyman. Temperance advocates feared that Wilder's Best Picture Oscar winner about a writer's alcoholic binge would encourage drinking, while liquor industry lobbyists offered Paramount five million dollars to destroy the negative. "I undershtand that liquor interesh...are rather worried about thish film," wrote James Agee. "Thash tough."

Saturday, September 24
2:00 p.m.
A FOREIGN AFFAIR
1948, 116 mins. With Jean Arthur, Marlene Dietrich. Wilder mined his experiences as a German émigré for this story of a love triangle between an American soldier, a Congresswoman from Iowa, and a German singer who meet in postwar Berlin.

Saturday, September 24 and Sunday, September 25
4:30 p.m.
SOME LIKE IT HOT
1959, 120 mins. Restored 35mm print. With Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon. Wilder's gender-bending classic follows two male musicians joining an all-woman orchestra to elude cold-blooded gangsters. Its closing line, "Nobody's perfect!" sums up its world view.

Sunday, September 25
2:00 p.m.
STALAG 17
1953, 120 mins. Restored 35mm print. With William Holden, Don Taylor, Robert Strauss. This unlikely comedy, set in a German POW camp, features Holden's Oscar-winning performance and alternates brilliantly between raucous dark humor, pathos, and surprising sexual undercurrents.

Saturday, October 1
2:00 p.m.
THE FRONT PAGE
1974, 105 mins. With Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Carol Burnett. Wilder boldly adapted the same play that inspired Howard Hawks's immortal His Girl Friday. The addition of profanity was essential because, as Wilder explained, that's how newspapermen really talked.

Saturday, October 1
4:00 p.m.
and Sunday, October 2
4:30 p.m.
THE APARTMENT
1960, 125 mins. Restored 35mm Dolby Digital print. With Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine. Wilder's multiple-Oscar-winning satire about sex and the workplace rat race centers on a pushover company man who lends his apartment to executives for their affair—until he falls for his boss's latest girlfriend.

Sunday, October 2
2:00 p.m.
IRMA LA DOUCE
1963, 144 mins. With Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine. The stars of The Apartment are reunited in Wilder's biggest commercial success, this screwball farce about an affair between a Parisian prostitute and a well-intentioned policeman.


Saturday, October 8
2:00 p.m.
LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON
1957, 126 mins. With Gary Cooper, Audrey Hepburn, MauriceChevalier. In the first of Wilder's twelve writing collaborations with I.A.L. Diamond (Some Like It Hot, The Apartment), Cooper is an aging playboy who hires a detective to locate a mysterious young woman.

Saturday, October 8 and Sunday, October 9
4:30 p.m.
SABRINA
1954, 113 mins. With Humphrey Bogart, Audrey Hepburn, William Holden. A charming Holden and a gruff Bogart are wealthy brothers who compete for the affections of their chauffeur's innocent daughter in Wilder's seductive Cinderella story.

Sunday, October 9
2:00 p.m.
AVANTI!
1972, 143 mins. New 35mm print. With Jack Lemmon, Juliet Mills. Lemmon is an uptight businessman who travels to Italy only to fall in love with the daughter of his late father's mistress in Wilder's wistful late-career gem—and his first film to include profanity and nudity.

Saturday, October 22
2:00 p.m.
THE EMPEROR WALTZ
1948, 106 mins. With Bing Crosby, Joan Fontaine. Wilder's first and only musical, commissioned by Paramount as a Crosby vehicle, is a lavishly produced love story about an American phonograph salesman and a bankrupt Austrian countess.

Saturday, October 22 and Sunday, October 23
4:00 p.m.
ONE, TWO, THREE
1961, 110 mins. With James Cagney. This breathtakingly rapid-fire Cold War satire, set in West Berlin, features Cagney in firecracker form as a Coca-Cola executive whose promotion rests on his ability to look after his boss's flirtatious daughter.

Sunday, October 23
2:00 p.m.
FIVE GRAVES TO CAIRO
1943, 96 mins. With Franchot Tone, Anne Baxter, Erich von Stroheim. At the height of World War II, Wilder updated a World War I espionage tale to create a taut thriller/propaganda film set in Egypt about a spy who must obtain key Nazi secrets from General Rommel.

Saturday, October 29
2:00 p.m.
ACE IN THE HOLE (A.K.A. THE BIG CARNIVAL)
Introduced By Wilder biographer Ed Sikov
1951, 111 mins. With Kirk Douglas, Jan Sterling. In this acidic portrayal of a media circus, Douglas p lays a reporter who turns the attempted rescue of a mine cave-in victim into a national frenzy.

Saturday, October 29
4:30 p.m.
and Sunday, October 30
4:00 p.m.
THE FORTUNE COOKIE
1966, 125 mins. With Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau. Lemmon and Matthau's first screen pairing is a scathing satire about an insurance salesman scheming to cash in on his brother-in-law's injury.

Sunday, October 30
2:00 p.m.
BUDDY, BUDDY
1981, 96 mins. With Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau. Wilder's last film, and his most underrated, is a bitter and brilliantly constructed comedy with Lemmon as a would-be suicide who finds himself continually crossing paths with a professional assassin.

Saturday, November 5
1:30 p.m.
THE SPIRIT OF ST. LOUIS
1957, 150 mins. With James Stewart. With Stewart as Charles Lindbergh, Wilder flings aside his trademark cynicism to create a sumptuous widescreen love letter to America.

Saturday, November 5 and Sunday, November 6
4:15 p.m.
THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES
1970, 125 mins. New 35mm print. With Robert Stephens. This elegiac evocation of late-Victorian England is also a boldly modern take on the dark side of the "real" Sherlock Holmes.

Sunday, November 6
1:30 p.m.
WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION
1957, 116 mins. With Charles Laughton, Tyrone Power, Marlene Dietrich. An unusual murder case tempts an ailing barrister back into action in this Hitchcockian courtroom drama based on an Agatha Christie play. The plot twists are so startling that a narrator implores the audience not to disclose its secret ending.

Friday, November 11
7:30 p.m.
and Sunday, November 13
2:00 p.m. and 6:30 p.m.
SUNSET BOULEVARD
1950, 110 mins. Directed by Billy Wilder. With William Holden, Gloria Swanson. "I am big. It's the pictures that got small!" intones aging silent-film star Norma Desmond, who ensnares Holden's young screenwriter in Wilder's magnificent poison-pen valentine.

Sunday, November 13
4:30 p.m.
FEDORA
1978, 113 mins. Rare 35mm print imported from the British Film Institute. With William Holden, Hildegarde Knef, Marthe Keller. The sun-dappled yet ghostly Fedora is a swan-song variation on Sunset Boulevard, with Holden as a faltering producer bent on bringing a popular-and eternally youthful-looking-actress out of seclusion to star in his next picture.

Program Introduction
"A brain full of razor blades and a heart full of chutzpah" is how Billy Wilder described Walter Matthau's character in The Fortune Cookie. Add tenderness to the mix and you'd come close to describing the blend of cynicism and romance that marked Wilder's films. A journalist in Vienna and Berlin in the 1920's and 1930's, Wilder became a screenwriter in Germany and emigrated to the United States. "I became a director because so many of my scripts had been screwed up," Wilder said. For nearly forty years, he was the greatest Hollywood director who wrote or co-wrote all of his films. This retrospective includes every movie directed by Wilder.

Wilder's films combine sharp, modern sophistication with a genuine longing for romance. Wilder was a tough social critic, and constantly pushed the boundaries of good taste and the Production Code. Yet his films often feature an innocent central character who reflects Wilder's idealistic side. Many of the films also use voice-over narration, adding a layer of irony and ambivalence by offering the wry, detached view of a perceptive outsider. Wilder's movies are sardonic, but far from despairing; his most famous line, "Nobody's perfect!" is delivered not as a defeatist observation but as a liberating affirmation.

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