Saturday, April 24, 2010

My hero / Billy Wilder by David Nicholls

 

Billy Wilder by David Hockney

My hero 

Billy Wilder by David Nicholls

'It's the sweet, sour quality that I love in Wilder's movies'

David Nicholls
Saturday 24 April 2010

I

t's often forgotten in this era of movies-on-demand, but there was a time when you could wait years for a chance to see Some Like It Hot. In the late 70s I stayed up to watch it and became an immediate fan of Billy Wilder. Romantic comedy, farce, film noir, drama, war film, satire – Wilder and his collaborators excelled in them all, and yet it's fair to say he's not the most "cinematic" of directors. His priorities are character and story, and in this sense he's very much a writer's director. He uses voice-over, that most novelistic of screen devices, and relishes smart talk, much of which bears the stamp of his personality: droll, urbane, quick-witted, sometimes barbed or vulgar but also heartfelt, touching.

For all his sardonic pronouncements, Wilder worked wonderfully with actors, and the movies are crammed with virtuosic displays of what used to be called "business": the Cary Grant voice ("Nobody talks like that!") and the maracas in Some Like It Hot, the tennis racket and bowler hat in The Apartment – crowd-pleasing moments. Wilder was always a populist: "Some pictures play wonderfully to a room of eight people. I don't go for that. I go for the masses." And yet he never short-changed his audience, patronised or lectured them. Mass entertainment didn't have to mean mindless entertainment, which is perhaps why he fell out of favour in the 70s. "Most of the pictures they make nowadays are loaded down with special effects. I couldn't do that. I quit smoking because I couldn't reload my Zippo."

The Apartment jostles with Annie Hall and The Philadelphia Story as my favourite film. In one of the finest, saddest scenes, Shirley MacLaine sits in a Chinese restaurant and complains that they don't make the shrimp like they used to: "sweet and sour". It's this sweet, sour quality that I love in Wilder's movies, and which I aspire to in some of my own work. Romantic but never sentimental, cynical but humane, Wilder is proof that mainstream, popular entertainment can be smart too.

THE GUARDIAN




2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016






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