AFI series shows Wilder’s panache

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.

The initial Lubitsch-Brackett-Wilder collaboration was the screwball romantic comedy “Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife” in 1938. Their second was “Ninotchka” the following year. It resulted in acclaim and Oscar nominations for most of the principals.

Mr. Wilder was permitted to observe Lubitsch at work during “Ninotchka,” although he was cautioned to be discreet lest he spook Great Garbo. He was granted the same privilege by Howard Hawks two years later during the production of another Wilder-Brackett romantic comedy, “Ball of Fire.”

By that time, Mr. Wilder was lobbying to direct the screenwriting team’s material himself. Preston Sturges already had demonstrated to the Paramount management that a clever writer might be the optimum director for his own stuff. The studio decided to humor Mr. Wilder as well. The immediate payoff, in 1942, was “The Major and the Minor,” still one of the most entertaining and accomplished romantic farces ever hatched in Hollywood.

With the exception of the Chandler interlude on “Double Indemnity,” the partnership with Charles Brackett endured through “Sunset Boulevard” (1950). The co-writers earned a considerable amount of autonomy during the 1940s, and they came to personify clever screenwriting during the golden age of the studio system.

“Eighty percent of a picture is writing,” Mr. Wilder once insisted. “The other 20 percent is the execution, such as having the camera on the right spot and being able to afford good actors in all the parts.”

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