THE BEST OF BILLY
Four Classics Films by Billy WIlder
Q&A with UK Professor Jordan Brower
ABOUT SUNSET BOULEVARD
"Arguably the greatest movie about Hollywood, Billy Wilder's masterpiece Sunset Boulevard is a tremendously entertaining combination of noir, black comedy, and character study." —Rotten Tomatoes
"Dead fame, the grim phantom that often uniquely besets careers in Hollywood, becomes the theme for one of the most remarkable pictures ever produced." —Los Angeles Times
An aging silent film queen (Gloria Swanson) refuses to accept that her stardom has ended. She hires a young hack screenwriter (William Holden) to help set up her movie comeback. The screenwriter believes he can manipulate her, but he soon finds out he is wrong. The screenwriters ambivalence about their relationship and her unwillingness to let go leads to a situation of violence, madness, and death.
ABOUT BILLY WILDER
Originally planning to become a lawyer, Billy Wilder (1906-2002) abandoned that career in favor of work as a reporter in Vienna and then Berlin. He broke into films as a screenwriter in 1929 and wrote scripts for many German films until Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. Fleeing Nazi Germany, Wilder emigrated to Paris, then to the US. Although he spoke no English when he arrived in Hollywood, Wilder was a fast learner and thanks to contacts such as Peter Lorre, he was able to break into American films. His partnership with Charles Brackett started in 1938 and the team was responsible for writing some of Hollywood's classic comedies, including Ninotchka (1939) and Ball of Fire (1941). The partnership expanded into a producer-director one in 1942, with Brackett producing and the two turned out such classics as Five Graves to Cairo (1943), The Lost Weekend (1945) (Oscars for Best Picture, Director and Screenplay) and Sunset Boulevard (1950) (Oscars for Best Screenplay), after which the partnership dissolved. Wilder had already made one film, Double Indemnity (1944) without Brackett, as the latter had refused to work on a film he felt dealt with such disreputable characters. Wilder's subsequent self-produced films would become more caustic and cynical, notably Ace in the Hole (1951), though he also produced such sublime comedies as Some Like It Hot (1959) and The Apartment (1960) (which won him Best Picture and Director Oscars). He retired in 1981.
ABOUT JORDAN BROWER
Jordan Brower is an assistant professor of English at the University of Kentucky, where he teaches film and media studies. His first book, Classical Hollywood, American Modernism: A Literary History of the Studio System, was published with Cambridge University Press in January 2024. He is currently editing The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and Film and at work on a new monograph on crises in contemporary Hollywood.