AFI series shows Wilder's panache

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During a career that flourished from the late 1930s to the middle 1960s, writer-director Billy Wilder (1906-2002), the subject of a centennial retrospective series now in its first weekend at the AFI Silver Theatre, remained a singular Hollywood sophisticate, cynical wit and polished professional.

Nominated 21 times for Academy Awards, Mr. Wilder won three Oscars for screenwriting ("The Lost Weekend," "Sunset Boulevard" and "The Apartment"), two for directing ("Lost Weekend" and "The Apartment") and one for producing (completing a hat trick for "The Apartment").

He survived a pair of longtime writing collaborators, Charles Brackett and I.A.L. Diamond, and several one-shots, notably the detective novelist Raymond Chandler. With the latter, he shared a famously incompatible but cinematically brilliant partnership when they were adapting James M. Cain's "Double Indemnity" (1944), a film noir classic well before anyone (even the French) had coined the overripe term.

Born Samuel Wilder to a respectable Jewish family in a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire that is now in Poland, the future movie immortal brought a curiously knowing baby face to early family photos. Later portraits suggest a natural progression to cherubic satyr.

William Holden, whose stellar career never would have been the same without two Wilder vehicles, "Sunset Boulevard" and "Stalag 17," once described his director as "a tall, loose-jointed man with a brain full of razor blades." In retirement, Mr. Wilder likened his indelible Viennese accent to "a mixture of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Archbishop Tutu."

According to family legend, the nickname Billy originated with his mother, who spent some time in the United States during her youth and adored Buffalo Bill Cody's showmanship. While ostensibly studying for a law degree, Mr. Wilder dropped out of the University of Vienna to pursue a more precarious trade, freelance newspaper journalism. Despite rudimentary English, the ardent jazz lover contrived an early byline coup by spending a day with Paul Whiteman, the most popular American bandleader of the 1920s.

Moving to Berlin, Mr. Wilder continued celebrity journalism for an afternoon tabloid, for which his subjects ranged from Jackie Coogan to Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. He also began grinding out movie scenarios ("about one a week" according to a later estimate) and acquired enough finesse on the dance floor to supplement his income as "a teatime partner for lonely ladies" at the Eden Hotel.

He was one of the collaborators on a beguiling semidocumentary feature of 1929 titled "People on Sunday," which contributed several directors to Hollywood: Robert Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer and Fred Zinnemann as well as himself.

An active screenwriter in Berlin during the early 1930s, Mr. Wilder was astute enough to arrange a multistage migration to the United States via France and Mexico. While awaiting a visa, he secured work as a screenwriter at 20th Century-Fox, where he had a mentor in the transplanted German director Joe May.

The aspirant was becoming fluent with colloquial English by the time he was hired at Paramount, where he met a more successful directing model in Ernst Lubitsch, along with a native American writing partner in Charles Brackett.