Hollywood Cynic

Steve Kurtz from the June 1999 issue

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Related to Wilder's outsider status is his most famous trait, cynicism. Growing up in a harsh world, he had to develop a hustler's knack for survival. It figures that when he started making films, he'd create a gallery of protagonists who were hard-shelled, tough-talking, world-weary, and more than a bit misanthropic. And it also figures that some times--as in Kiss Me, Stupid or Ace in the Hole (1951), in which Kirk Douglas plays a reporter who exploits the tragedy of a man stuck in a cave--Wilder would go too far and turn off audiences.

Of course, whatever the reasons for his sensibility, Wilder's films are still being enjoyed because he had immense skill and was lucky enough to get to a place where he could utilize it. He started directing to protect his scripts, an excellent reason when you're as good a writer as he was. His greatest talent, even more important than his way with snappy dialogue, was that he knew how to tell a story. This is why his directorial technique is never flashy--he wants you to become so involved that you forget you're watching a movie. (It's also why he sometimes attacked art house favorites such as Bergman, Godard, and Antonioni; he felt they couldn't tell a story and used artiness to cover up this failing.) He believed in hooking the audience at the outset and never letting them go.

That's evident even in his Hollywood directorial debut, The Major and the Minor, in which Ginger Rogers disguises herself as a 12-year-old to get half-fare on a train and for the rest of the film must keep up the charade for higher and higher stakes. The plot grips Rogers in its vise, and the audience as well.

The same might be said about Wilder's biography as it's laid out in On Sunset Boulevard. In detailing Wilder's exodus from an old world to a new one of possibilities, and his rise from obscurity to accomplishment, Sikov has scripted not only a Hollywood scenario but a quintessentially American one as well.