A portrait of renowned Hollywood director Billy Wilder examines his early years as a journalist, initial struggle as a screenwriter, ties to his German home world, and successes with such films as Sunset Boulevard and Some Like It Hot.
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Billy Wilder is one of America's most versatile film directors with an oeuvre ranging from film noir ("Double Indemnity") to comedy ("Some Like It Hot") to drama ("Sunset Boulevard"). In the first English-language biography of Wilder in a generation, Kevin Lally, managing editor of Film Journal International, recounts Wilder's story, from his childhood in Vienna of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to Hollywood, where he worked as a screenwriter before becoming a director. Lally also takes a close look at each of Wilder's films.
From Publishers Weekly
Sunset Boulevard, Stalag 17, Double Indemnity, Sabrina, Some Like It Hot, The Lost Weekend?the list of masterful hit films directed by Billy Wilder goes on and on. In this insightful though not scintillating work, Lally, managing editor of the Film Journal, offers a comprehensive examination of Wilder's life in films, and a perceptive exploration of how the filmmaker's personality molded his art. Born in 1906 to Austrian Jewish parents in Poland, Wilder's hard-boiled take on the human condition, Lally contends, was formed by his early work as a journalist in Vienna and as a screenwriter and dance-hall gigolo in Berlin, but above all by the loss of much of his family in the Holocaust. The future filmmaker arrived in Hollywood in 1933, penniless but loaded with talent and experience. His sardonic sensibility marked his cinematic voice from the beginning and was, Lally says, ahead of its time: the prostitutes, masqueraders and antiheroes that permeate Wilder's best-known work presaged the shift in consciousness that swept America decades later. Lally scrutinizes each of Wilder's films, offers vivid sketches of the stars he worked with?Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon, Marlene Dietrich and Gloria Swanson among them?and delves into his perfectionist sense of craft, seriousness of purpose, acid wit, comedic sense and long partnership with screenwriter I.A.L. Diamond. It has been 15 years since Wilder made his last film (Buddy, Buddy), but this penetrating bio, despite pedestrian prose, makes his work seem as fresh and up-to-date as if the curtain were rising on it just today.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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