A TRIBUTE TO BILLY WILDER:
“I'm a writer but then, nobody's perfect”
The human comedy of a great master
In cooperation with Lab 80 film and Federazione Italiana Cineforum, Bergamo
Film Meeting presents five films by the great director and screenwriter in
the original version (from restored negatives): Double Indemnity
(1944), Love in the Afternoon (1957),
Witness for the Prosecution (1957), Kiss
Me Stupid (1964), The Fortune Cookie (1966).
The film copies feature Italian subtitles, and will remain available after
the Festival for other cultural circuits.
“I
am like a baker. I try and make bread more tasty by adding cumin, or by giving
a different shape to pretzels. It will somehow taste different, but it will
still be bread”. This is how Billy Wilder defines himself in an interview
to a French periodical from the mid-Sixties. Commonly regarded as one of the
greatest masters of comedy, a genre that in a forty-year long career he articulated
in its most different varieties, Wilder also practiced most classic American
film genres (apart from westerns and musicals).
His “cumin-flavoured bread” and “pretzels” are now
landmarks in the history of cinema. A master of sparkling and incisive dialogue,
and of a filming technique whose excellence resides in its discreteness, Wilder
is a moral (yet not moralistic) director, one that was often tagged as “cynical”,
“merciless”, “cruel”. On the contrary, he has always
been looking for human authenticity, as against the “respectability”
of bourgeois sex, success, and money.
The five films may be said to summarise Wilder’s poetics: an insurer
agent is seduced by a dark lady and fatally infringes legality (Double
Indemnity); a young girl plays the seduction game with an expert
seducer and finally tames him (Love in the Afternoon);
a successful lawyer realizes he has been cheated by his own cleverness (Witness
for the Prosecution); a wife and a prostitute joyfully exchange
roles for a night (Kiss Me Stupid); an unlikely
cheater rebels against his brother-in-law’s schemes, thus gaining back
his Menschlichkeit (The Fortune Cookie). These are
all human beings who wear a mask: sometimes they use it for their own purposes,
sometimes they take it off, but in the end they all want (and sometimes manage)
to stubbornly assert their own identity. In short, Wilder’s verve, elegance
and disenchantment delve well into the depths of the great “human comedy”.
Films:
Double Indemnity (1944, 106’)
With Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson.
Love in the Afternoon (1957, 130’)
With Audrey Hepburn, Gary Cooper, Maurice Chevalier.
Witness for the Prosecution (1957, 114’)
With Charles Laughton, Marlene Dietrich, Tyrone Power, Elsa Lanchester.
Kiss Me Stupid (1964, 126’)
With Kim Novak, Dean Martin, Ray Walston, Felicia Farr.
The Fortune Cookie (1966, 125’)
With Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Ron Rich, Judi West.
