Billy Wilder, Dancing on the Edge by Joseph McBride (Columbia University Press) 2025 and How Did Lubitsch Do It? by Joseph McBride (Columbia University Press) 2020
Without Ernst Lubitsch we wouldn’t have had a sophisticated American film comedy that drew upon a cosmopolitan culture and in particular a vanishing memory of Viennese society. And therefore maybe a different Billy Wilder style – he was in awe of the finesse of Lubitsch’s talent. Both men were Jewish immigrants. Lubitsch was born in 1892 in Berlin from Russian Ashkenazi parentage. Wilder was born in Poland in 1906 and moved to Berlin when a young man.
Lubitsch directed silent films in Germany that are still under-appreciated. And Wilder scripted films in Germany which are harder to see (with the exception of the wonderful People on Sunday). But it’s their Hollywood work that matters most. Lubitsch’s comedies of manners infiltrated Wilder’s comedies / dramas about conflicted characters. They’re linked yet separate and inimical artists who, at their best, created a witty, intelligent and entertaining cinema of the highest order.
Of the two directors it’s Lubitsch who is in need of greater remembrance. That’s one of the aims of How Did Lubitsch Do It?
Mc Bride’s concern is that American filmmaking is presently sinking “into the mire of frenetic hit-em-over-the-head sensationalism and coarse anti-humanism.” And that the subtle values of male and female relationships, finely orchestrated in such films as Trouble in Paradise (1932), Ninotchka (1939) To Be or Not to Be (1942) or The Shop Around the Corner (1940) is desperately needed but may no longer be possible. Though these classics are still shown in film schools Lubitsch is less studied or written about than say Hitchcock or Welles. Yet from the early 1920’s to the late 1940’s Lubitsch was revered by the film industry and especially fellow directors as the master director in Hollywood.
Early in his career Hitchcock was influenced by Lubitsch of whom he said he was “a man of ‘pure Cinema’” Hitchcock was referring to Lubitsch’s The Marriage Circle (1924) and his adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan (1925). The latter film has early examples of what came to be known as the Lubitsch touch and a wonderful sequence of comic cinematic suspense, set at a racetrack, that’s worthy of Hitchcock (The hypocrisy of the upper classes is exposed with its group of socialites disapprovingly and voyeuristically weighing up the character of Mrs Erlynne through their binoculars.)
Yet the advent of sound brought us what many regard as Lubitsch’s greatest comedy, Trouble in Paradise. On the surface this is a light hearted film about jewel thieves and romantic escapades. Yet deep, concerning themes of respect / greed for money, human worth, responsibility, opportunism and split affections (the debonair thief George Marshall loves both his partner in crime Miriam Hopkins and rich business woman Kay Francis) are revealed: the mood switches of the sublime Trouble in Paradise alternate between sadness and joy, performed like a Mozart opera or piano concerto.
In 1939 Lubitsch directed Greta Garbo in Ninotchka (scripted by Billy Wilder) a satire on the clash of communist and capitalist values; the 1940 The Shop Around the Corner with its exquisite blend of nostalgia and romance; 1942 gave us Lubitsch’s daring anti-Nazi comedy To Be or Not to Be; the following year brought us the delightful Heaven Can Wait and Lubitsch’s final film Cluny Brown (1946) saw him again peaking with it’s autumnal wisdom.
Lubitsch’s direction was masterfully indirect, so natural as to be almost invisible. It never felt imposed or controlling (even though in rehearsals Lubitsch would always physically act out for his performers how each scene should play) but suggestive – a canny blend of spontaneity and rigour. In many ways the Hays code of censorship worked for Lubitsch who had to infer and suggest eroticism.
It was that ineffable Lubitsch touch. And throughout Joseph McBride’s excellent book are reflections from critics, writers and directors on what this actually was. They slightly differ in their interpretations but all are agreed that Lubitsch brought a thoughtful originality to the screen’s depiction of sex. I love Lubitsch’s own throw away response to his achievement, nothing less than the emotionally maturing of American cinema with Lubitsch establishing a gold standard for romantic comedy and founding the narrative musical.
“Lubitsch touches” said Soviet director Pudovkin to executives at Paramount in 1928. To which Lubitsch replied, “And very good Lubitsch touches, too, if I may say so!”
Billy Wilder is famous for that sign in his office asking how did Lubitsch do it. And with a sigh, acknowledging the master, Wilder admits that only maybe, in a scene or two, of his own films, did he come close to something like the Lubitsch style. He needn’t have felt so disappointed for Wilder’s film output is equally remarkable.
Wilder’s range of subject matter is larger than Lubitsch’s. Wilder tackled dark Gothic critiques of Hollywood stardom (Sunset Boulevard and Fedora); film noir (Double Indemnity); a writer’s alcoholism (The Lost Weekend);a Cinderella comedy drama (Sabrina); prostitution (Irma La Douce); big business satire (The Apartment); exploitative journalism (Ace in the Hole); cold war farce (One, Two, Three); marital manipulation (Kiss me Stupid) cross dressing comedy (Some Like it Hot); an aviator biopic (The Spirit of Saint Louis) and even a revisionist comedy about Sherlock Holmes (The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes) – the latter film offended Holmes purists but often Wilder, in his varied career, equally disturbed and entertained critics and audiences with a probing moral force verging on the acerbic. For Wilder’s approach has been labelled as too abrasively cynical. His detractors find him uncaring and cold. For myself, and Joseph McBride, that’s so wrong.
Billy Wilder’s characters, no matter how schematic and ruthless they can be, are essentially flawed human beings full of contradictions. Take Wilder’s 1960 film The Apartment – a story about getting on in corporate America. C. C. Bud Baxter (Jack Lemmon) who wants to become an executive is rapidly promoted because he allows his bosses to use his apartment for one night stand sex with women employees. Yet behind each opportunistic move, up the ladder, is a complicated romanticism. Baxter falls in love with Fran a lift operator (Shirley Mc Claine) who’s being dated by the head of the corporation Jeff Sheldrake (Fred McMurray). Fran attempts suicide but Baxter and his doctor neighbour save her life.
“The sense of battered innocence Mc Claine and Lemmon radiate as performers not only helps make their characters so relatable and their sordid situation more palatable to audiences, it conveys a guarded sense of hope and optimism. In that rests the final proof of Wilder’s romantic sensibility – not one that denies reality for a comforting fantasy but a realistic sense of how the world works, a depiction of how troubled people navigate the pitfalls of love and how they somehow can overcome and survive those dangers.”
One of the many pleasures of Billy Wilder, Dancing on the Edge is encountering such insightful close readings of the films, their intension and effect. Cynicism and romanticism are closely related in Wilder’s view of the world as he plotted his filmic sensibility so sharply and carefully with screenwriters Charles Brackett (Though argumentative and politically opposite to Wilder) and even better with the liberal and more genial I.A.L.Diamond.
McBride examines these writer / director relationships in detail; makes fresh connections between Wilder’s German and American film careers; loves Wilder’s work but not uncritically; he analyses the films that he sees as flawed (parts of Fedora) or definite failures (Sabrina, Love in the Afternoon); accurately describes what’s really going on in the masterpieces (eg Some Like it Hot) and supplies enough of Wilder’s hilarious anecdotes and quips without ever making this a gossipy book.
McBride is an impressive film scholar who writes with enthusiasm and sensitivity (His previous books on Frank Capra and John Ford are essential texts). McBride has a very readable style (I couldn’t put down either the Lubitsch book or the Wilder, in fact I was enjoying them so much that I had to read more slowly and carefully ingest all his fresh information and stimulating thought.)
I enjoy One, Two, Three more than Mc Bride does (Yes, it’s a frenetic, even coarse, cold war satire, but James Cagney’s high octane performance, as a capitalist Coca-Cola executive, has to be seen to be believed); in agreement with him over the energetic ‘vulgarity’ of Kiss Me Stupid (Ray Dalston, Dean Martin and Kim Novak on top form) – it’s still misunderstood; that the corrosive Ace in the Hole is a major Wilder film (though I thought McBride’s discovering a Holocaust theme was stretching things a bit); I’m not as sympathetic as he is to the indifferent Irma La Douce: greatly admire the dark wit of Fedora, with it’s washed up star, and concur with McBride, that both Fedora and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes are majestic and moving late Wilder works.
I thought everything that could be said about Lubitsch and Wilder had already been published. But I was wrong. McBride’s books (each 560 and 660 words long) are generous and deserved love letters to two irreplaceable major directors.
Alan Price©2025.
Billy Wilder, Dancing on the Edge by Joseph McBride (Columbia University Press) 2025 and How Did Lubitsch Do It? by Joseph McBride (Columbia University Press) 2020
Without Ernst Lubitsch we wouldn’t have had a sophisticated American film comedy that drew upon a cosmopolitan culture and in particular a vanishing memory of Viennese society. And therefore maybe a different Billy Wilder style – he was in awe of the finesse of Lubitsch’s talent. Both men were Jewish immigrants. Lubitsch was born in 1892 in Berlin from Russian Ashkenazi parentage. Wilder was born in Poland in 1906 and moved to Berlin when a young man.
Lubitsch directed silent films in Germany that are still under-appreciated. And Wilder scripted films in Germany which are harder to see (with the exception of the wonderful People on Sunday). But it’s their Hollywood work that matters most. Lubitsch’s comedies of manners infiltrated Wilder’s comedies / dramas about conflicted characters. They’re linked yet separate and inimical artists who, at their best, created a witty, intelligent and entertaining cinema of the highest order.
Of the two directors it’s Lubitsch who is in need of greater remembrance. That’s one of the aims of How Did Lubitsch Do It?
Mc Bride’s concern is that American filmmaking is presently sinking “into the mire of frenetic hit-em-over-the-head sensationalism and coarse anti-humanism.” And that the subtle values of male and female relationships, finely orchestrated in such films as Trouble in Paradise (1932), Ninotchka (1939) To Be or Not to Be (1942) or The Shop Around the Corner (1940) is desperately needed but may no longer be possible. Though these classics are still shown in film schools Lubitsch is less studied or written about than say Hitchcock or Welles. Yet from the early 1920’s to the late 1940’s Lubitsch was revered by the film industry and especially fellow directors as the master director in Hollywood.
Early in his career Hitchcock was influenced by Lubitsch of whom he said he was “a man of ‘pure Cinema’” Hitchcock was referring to Lubitsch’s The Marriage Circle (1924) and his adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan (1925). The latter film has early examples of what came to be known as the Lubitsch touch and a wonderful sequence of comic cinematic suspense, set at a racetrack, that’s worthy of Hitchcock (The hypocrisy of the upper classes is exposed with its group of socialites disapprovingly and voyeuristically weighing up the character of Mrs Erlynne through their binoculars.)
Yet the advent of sound brought us what many regard as Lubitsch’s greatest comedy, Trouble in Paradise. On the surface this is a light hearted film about jewel thieves and romantic escapades. Yet deep, concerning themes of respect / greed for money, human worth, responsibility, opportunism and split affections (the debonair thief George Marshall loves both his partner in crime Miriam Hopkins and rich business woman Kay Francis) are revealed: the mood switches of the sublime Trouble in Paradise alternate between sadness and joy, performed like a Mozart opera or piano concerto.
In 1939 Lubitsch directed Greta Garbo in Ninotchka (scripted by Billy Wilder) a satire on the clash of communist and capitalist values; the 1940 The Shop Around the Corner with its exquisite blend of nostalgia and romance; 1942 gave us Lubitsch’s daring anti-Nazi comedy To Be or Not to Be; the following year brought us the delightful Heaven Can Wait and Lubitsch’s final film Cluny Brown (1946) saw him again peaking with it’s autumnal wisdom.
Lubitsch’s direction was masterfully indirect, so natural as to be almost invisible. It never felt imposed or controlling (even though in rehearsals Lubitsch would always physically act out for his performers how each scene should play) but suggestive – a canny blend of spontaneity and rigour. In many ways the Hays code of censorship worked for Lubitsch who had to infer and suggest eroticism.
It was that ineffable Lubitsch touch. And throughout Joseph McBride’s excellent book are reflections from critics, writers and directors on what this actually was. They slightly differ in their interpretations but all are agreed that Lubitsch brought a thoughtful originality to the screen’s depiction of sex. I love Lubitsch’s own throw away response to his achievement, nothing less than the emotionally maturing of American cinema with Lubitsch establishing a gold standard for romantic comedy and founding the narrative musical.
“Lubitsch touches” said Soviet director Pudovkin to executives at Paramount in 1928. To which Lubitsch replied, “And very good Lubitsch touches, too, if I may say so!”
Billy Wilder is famous for that sign in his office asking how did Lubitsch do it. And with a sigh, acknowledging the master, Wilder admits that only maybe, in a scene or two, of his own films, did he come close to something like the Lubitsch style. He needn’t have felt so disappointed for Wilder’s film output is equally remarkable.
Wilder’s range of subject matter is larger than Lubitsch’s. Wilder tackled dark Gothic critiques of Hollywood stardom (Sunset Boulevard and Fedora); film noir (Double Indemnity); a writer’s alcoholism (The Lost Weekend);a Cinderella comedy drama (Sabrina); prostitution (Irma La Douce); big business satire (The Apartment); exploitative journalism (Ace in the Hole); cold war farce (One, Two, Three); marital manipulation (Kiss me Stupid) cross dressing comedy (Some Like it Hot); an aviator biopic (The Spirit of Saint Louis) and even a revisionist comedy about Sherlock Holmes (The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes) – the latter film offended Holmes purists but often Wilder, in his varied career, equally disturbed and entertained critics and audiences with a probing moral force verging on the acerbic. For Wilder’s approach has been labelled as too abrasively cynical. His detractors find him uncaring and cold. For myself, and Joseph McBride, that’s so wrong.
Billy Wilder’s characters, no matter how schematic and ruthless they can be, are essentially flawed human beings full of contradictions. Take Wilder’s 1960 film The Apartment – a story about getting on in corporate America. C. C. Bud Baxter (Jack Lemmon) who wants to become an executive is rapidly promoted because he allows his bosses to use his apartment for one night stand sex with women employees. Yet behind each opportunistic move, up the ladder, is a complicated romanticism. Baxter falls in love with Fran a lift operator (Shirley Mc Claine) who’s being dated by the head of the corporation Jeff Sheldrake (Fred McMurray). Fran attempts suicide but Baxter and his doctor neighbour save her life.
“The sense of battered innocence Mc Claine and Lemmon radiate as performers not only helps make their characters so relatable and their sordid situation more palatable to audiences, it conveys a guarded sense of hope and optimism. In that rests the final proof of Wilder’s romantic sensibility – not one that denies reality for a comforting fantasy but a realistic sense of how the world works, a depiction of how troubled people navigate the pitfalls of love and how they somehow can overcome and survive those dangers.”
One of the many pleasures of Billy Wilder, Dancing on the Edge is encountering such insightful close readings of the films, their intension and effect. Cynicism and romanticism are closely related in Wilder’s view of the world as he plotted his filmic sensibility so sharply and carefully with screenwriters Charles Brackett (Though argumentative and politically opposite to Wilder) and even better with the liberal and more genial I.A.L.Diamond.
McBride examines these writer / director relationships in detail; makes fresh connections between Wilder’s German and American film careers; loves Wilder’s work but not uncritically; he analyses the films that he sees as flawed (parts of Fedora) or definite failures (Sabrina, Love in the Afternoon); accurately describes what’s really going on in the masterpieces (eg Some Like it Hot) and supplies enough of Wilder’s hilarious anecdotes and quips without ever making this a gossipy book.
McBride is an impressive film scholar who writes with enthusiasm and sensitivity (His previous books on Frank Capra and John Ford are essential texts). McBride has a very readable style (I couldn’t put down either the Lubitsch book or the Wilder, in fact I was enjoying them so much that I had to read more slowly and carefully ingest all his fresh information and stimulating thought.)
I enjoy One, Two, Three more than Mc Bride does (Yes, it’s a frenetic, even coarse, cold war satire, but James Cagney’s high octane performance, as a capitalist Coca-Cola executive, has to be seen to be believed); in agreement with him over the energetic ‘vulgarity’ of Kiss Me Stupid (Ray Dalston, Dean Martin and Kim Novak on top form) – it’s still misunderstood; that the corrosive Ace in the Hole is a major Wilder film (though I thought McBride’s discovering a Holocaust theme was stretching things a bit); I’m not as sympathetic as he is to the indifferent Irma La Douce: greatly admire the dark wit of Fedora, with it’s washed up star, and concur with McBride, that both Fedora and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes are majestic and moving late Wilder works.
I thought everything that could be said about Lubitsch and Wilder had already been published. But I was wrong. McBride’s books (each 560 and 660 words long) are generous and deserved love letters to two irreplaceable major directors.
Alan Price©2025.
By Alan Price • film, year 2025 • Tags: Alan Price, film