Billy, Jix & Who
The wonderful Wilder and whether the truth is out there
June 22
One of those great European refugees who transformed the English-speaking cinema while still learning the language, Billy Wilder, was born on this date in 1906 in a remote part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, ‘half an hour from Vienna,’ as he loved to put it, ‘by telegraph’.
Wilder, not surprisingly, given the Nazis killed his mother, grandmother and step- father, was a convinced cynic; but, remarkably, like another Jewish exile who inspired him, Ernst Lubitsch, he was also that American ideal, the cynic with a heart.
He had the broadest range of any of the classic directors, from the high melodrama of ‘Sunset Boulevard’ through the noir of ‘Double Indemnity’ to the romance of ‘Sabrina’ and the delicious comedy of ‘Some Like It Hot’. He claimed it was because he was easily bored.
Enough of what I think: read instead an excellent book by Jonathan Coe, ‘Mr Wilder and Me’, a fictionalised account of Wilder and his great co-screenwriter, I A L ‘Izzy’ Diamond, making their last but one film, ‘Fedora’, as the times moved away from movies with words to movies with effects like ‘Alien’ and ‘Close Encounters’.
Watch the movies; meanwhile, relish the Wilder Wit:
‘If you’re going to tell people the truth, be funny or they’ll kill you.’ ‘An audience is never wrong. An individual member of it may be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles together in the dark - that is critical genius.’ ‘I have ten commandments. The first nine are, thou shalt not bore. The tenth is, thou shalt have right of final cut.’ ‘Make subtlety obvious.’ ‘Money makes even bastards legitimate.’ On Ernst Lubitsch: ‘He could do more with a closed door than other directors could do with an open fly.’ On Marilyn Monroe: ‘Marilyn was mean. Terribly mean. The meanest woman I have ever met around this town. I have never met anybody as mean as Marilyn Monroe or as utterly fabulous on the screen.’ ‘My Aunt Minnie would always be punctual and never hold up production, but who would pay to see my Aunt Minnie?’ ‘The Austrians are brilliant people. They made the world believe that Hitler was a German and Beethoven an Austrian.’ On being asked to direct ‘The Sound of Music’: ‘I would have focused on the Nazis.’ Because of the changing fashion in Hollywood, he had to rely on German production money to make ‘Fedora’. Jonathan Coe: ‘He said it was a win-win situation. If the film was a success it was his revenge on Hollywood. If it was a failure it was his revenge on Auschwitz...I felt a compulsion to attempt a portrait of a man who could make a joke like that.’
And my favourite lines from his movies:
Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), ‘Sunset Boulevard’: ‘I am big. It’s the pictures that got small’. Lorraine Mimosa (Jan Sterling), ‘Ace in the Hole’: ‘I don’t go to church much. Kneeling bags my nylons’. Spats (George Raft) Colombo’s alibi in ‘Some Like It Hot’: ‘I was at Rigoletto’. One of his heavies: ‘Yeh, we was with with you at Rigolettos.’ Jerry (Jack Lemmon): ‘Look at that! Look how she moves! That's just like Jell-O on springs!’ Sugar "Kane" Kowalczyk (Marilyn Monroe), ‘Some Like It Hot’: ‘Water Polo? Isn’t that dangerous?’ Joe (Tony Curtis), pretending to be rich and channelling Cary Grant: ‘It sure is. I had two ponies drowned under me.’
And, lastly, one of many fine endings, every one contriving the cynic-and-sentiment effect in exact dosage: the much-used and put-upon CC Baxter and Miss Kubelik achieve bliss in The Apartment:
June 23
William Joynson-Hicks, who died on this date in 1932, was a striking example of the maverick figure British public life throws up and is never entirely sure what to do with or treat seriously. Others would include Enoch Powell, Tony Benn, Jeremy Corbyn, Boris Johnson, and, at one time, Winston Churchill.
Often, too, there is a nickname or uncommon first name which acts as a great aid to recognition: Joynson-Hicks became known as Jix, and it stuck. A member of the increasingly influential professional middle classes, he was a London solicitor with a voracious appetite for work and making contacts, a gift for oratory, and the fiercest attachment to the previous century’s public morality.
In one of those twists of fate and politics, and to general surprise, he was made Home Secretary in 1924, thus allowing free rein to his puritanical zeal. D H Lawrence, Radclyffe Hall and Boccaccio, authors of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Well of Loneliness, and The Decameron respectively, were pursued and prosecuted by Jix, along with works on birth control, all categorised by him as part of ‘this tide of filth coming across the channel’.
The London nightclubs that proliferated in the 1920s were an obvious target for this righteous wrongheadedness: in another doomed attempt to turn the clock back, he tried to shut them down, and, after a great deal of effort, failed.
He was also a fierce defender of the Book of Common Prayer against its revision in 1928, which he saw as an attempt to reintroduce Papism. He was guilty of anti-semitism, and, for reasons best known to himself, defended the action of General Dyer in killing at least 379 unarmed Indians and injuring over 1,200 more in the massacre at Amritsar in 1919.
He was, then, an unlikely promoter of women’s rights. Yet in 1925, in a debate on the private members’ bill introduced by the Labour MP, William Whiteley, Jix committed the Government, without any Cabinet consultation, to lowering the enfranchisement age for women from 30 to 21 at the next general election. Thus it happened: 1929 was known as ‘The Flapper Election’; the Conservatives lost. To this day no one is clear why Jix did it.
Other achievements in a career in which it becomes almost impossible to detect a coherent philosophy were penal reform, better hours for shop workers, seeking to introduce a programme of public works to counter unemployment, and playing a key role in defeating the General Strike.
He also repealed the law preventing chocolates being sold in the first interval at the theatre as well as the second.
And now he is almost entirely forgotten.
Should you be interested, I recommend the story set in the 1920s from my collection, ‘So Last Century’, featuring, among others, Jix, Jay Gatsby, Evelyn Waugh, and Spats Colombo (see yesterday).
June 24
On this date in 1947, Kenneth Arnold, an American businessman and politician, made the first widely reported sighting of UFOs during a flight in his private plane near Mount Rainier, Washington. His description prompted a new term, ‘flying saucer’.
In 2013, intrigued and innocent, I wrote about how UFOs, conspiracy theories and the like were faring in the full light of all the expert knowledge now available in the digital age. To my surprise then but not now, I found my vision of a ruthless objectivity now obtainable through the ease of access to substantiated information was not going as well as it might.
But I still found some consolations. You can judge for yourselves if you care to: this is my piece from that sadly missed and cleverly titled Economist magazine: ‘Intelligent Life’:
To which I would add only that I should have made a little more of the most important discovery of my further education, and one that seethes around us now: the difficulty of disproving a belief with facts. It’s like attempting to tackle quantum mechanics with a screwdriver.
Oh, and at least Skeptics in the Pub is still flourishing: https://www.skepticsinthepub.org
My day has middled on a cheery note.
My day has ended on a cheery note. Merci!