This was coming sooner or later. I should tell you that The Apartment (1960) is my favorite movie of all time, so I might be biased here, but bear with me. I’ve decided to only write this now because it’s New Year’s Eve and this is the movie I associate with it the most, and because I wanted to finish off the year with my favorite movie. I first saw it when I was 15. Billy Wilder-wise (get it?), I’d already seen Some Like it Hot (1959) and Sunset Boulevard (1950) and loved them both. Then, one day, I saw The Apartment. Up until then, I wasn’t quite sure what my favorite classic movie or my favorite movie in general was. I used to go back and forth between Casablanca (1942), All about Eve (1950), and The Philadelphia Story (1940). They are now my second, third and fourth favorites, in that order, simply because The Apartment came along and changed everything.
It’s hard to explain how a movie becomes your favorite or why, but when I saw The Apartment, I knew this was ‘it’. From then on, I decided I wanted to become a screenwriter. I wanted to be like Billy Wilder. I wanted people to feel about my movies the way I felt about The Apartment. The movie is almost 56 years old and it’s one of the big, big classics, so I’m sure I won’t have to tell you the plot. But this isn’t about the plot. It’s about what Billy Wilder and Izzy Diamond do with it. The balance between comedy and drama is perfect, to say the least. Billy Wilder was and still is the king of ‘dramedy’. In the scene where Fran (Shirley MacLaine) talks about how her affair makes her feel (‘wife goes away, the boss has a fling with the elevator girl’), he doesn’t let it get too dark. Like in almost every scene, he brings it back up with a touch of comedy (‘they don’t make these shrimp like they used to’). Oh, that Billy Wilder touch!
The characters, all of them, are morally dubious and undeniably flawed, but we root for them nonetheless. We can relate to them and we want everything to turn out okay for them. Especially for C. C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon), who is undoubtedly one of the greatest characters in movie history. And what a performance! Everyone and everything was Oscar-nominated in this. It ended up winning 5, including for Best Picture and, you guessed it, Best Screenplay. How could it not? The script is flawless. Everything falls into place perfectly and at the right time and nothing is left unsaid or unresolved. It was chosen as the 15th greatest screenplay of all time by The Writer’s Guild of America, but, in my opinion, it should have been at least in the top 10. It’s a masterpiece and a masterclass. This, to me, is the best. Billy Wilder-wise and otherwise-wise. Happy New Year!
Ace in the Hole (1951) is probably the darkest Billy Wilder has ever been. Maybe. I mean, he did do Double Indemnity (1944), after all. But Ace in the Hole is a different kind of dark. Not in a noir way, but rather in a raw, real and unapologetic way.
Ernest Lehman will go down in history as one of the most prolific and successful Hollywood screenwriters of all time. As an aspiring screenwriter myself, he’s one of my main inspirations. How could he not be? Look at this: Sabrina (1954), The King and I (1956), Sweet Smell of Success (1957), North by Northwest (1959), West Side Story (1961), The Sound of Music (1965), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), Hello, Dolly! (1968)… He wrote ALL of those, among others. I’ve mentioned Sweet Smell of Success here on the Garden before, and it’s one of my very favorite movies of all time. And that’s mostly due to that fantastic screenplay. Those one-liners! It’s one of those movies that you go like ‘Oh, I wish I’d thought of that!’. Weirdly enough, he got four Oscar nominations for writing in his career, but this wasn’t one of them and it’s probably his best screenplay, in my opinion. He did, however, get nominated for Sabrina, North by Northwest, West Side Story, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. He said of his screenplay for North by Northwest that he wanted it to be ‘the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures’, and by golly, isn’t it?
Bette Davis really was something, wasn’t she? Not only was she a tremendous talent and a consummate professional with an extraordinary career that includes Jezebel (1938), All about Eve (1950) and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), but she also, as they say, ‘fought the system’. She fought for better roles for women, she fought for good scripts and good directors, she refused to be the ‘girl next door’, she became the first female President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1941, and in 1942, she and John Garfield created the famous Hollywood Canteen. On top of that, she sued Warner Bros. She talks about it on her 1972 interview with Dick Cavett, which you can watch on YouTube. Fascinating story. The whole interview is an eye-opener and a great insight into 1930s and 1940s Hollywood. She talks about her ‘enormous discipline’ and how that helped her along the way. And, as you can read on her tombstone, she did it the hard way. Hats off.
The Old Hollywood Garden 