Ace in the Hole

Wilder was born on June 22, 1906, in Sucha, then part of Austria, now Poland. His family always called him Billie, although his real name was Samuel. In Vienna, he began working as a journalist for the Juranek newspaper. He continued working in Berlin, a city where his love for cinema blossomed. A viewing of Battleship Potemkin (among other titles) impressed him so much that it would forever mark his destiny.
His time in Berlin was not easy, as he had to combine reporting on nightlife and crime with various jobs to make ends meet. At UFA, he met some of the most renowned directors, but after Hitler’s rise to power, he had to flee Nazism. He left Germany and went into exile from Paris to the United States. It was 1934. When he arrived in Hollywood, he had only $11.
His mother, stepfather and grandmother died in concentration camps.
Once in Los Angeles, he began working as a screenwriter for Paramount. This led to his collaboration with Ernst Lubitsch, for whom he wrote the screenplays for Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife and the brilliant dialogue for Greta Garbo in Ninotchka.

During this time, with his second screenplay – Music in the Air – he met Gloria Swanson. Sixteen years later, he would call her to star in one of his masterpieces, Sunset Boulevard.

He wrote almost seventy screenplays. Among them, in addition to those mentioned, are other comedy masterpieces such as Ball of Fire and Hold Back the Dawn.

He said he became a director “in self-defense”, so others wouldn’t ruin his scripts.

As a director, he made 26 films. At least four of them remain on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 greatest films in the history of American cinema: Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot, and The Apartment. He won 7 Oscars (for Best Picture, Director and Screenplay, as well as an honorary one), having accumulated 21 nominations.

Wilder was a director with a unique career spanning from 1930 to 1981, when he filmed Buddy. He was seventy-five years old, and insurance companies stopped backing his film policies. He continued writing screenplays, always fighting to make one last film. One more that, like all the others, would have been full of style, irony, and truth. “Even my mistakes have been honest.”

He died at the age of 95, at his home in Beverly Hills, from pneumonia, twenty-one years later.

Now, on the 120th anniversary of his birth, we commemorate and pay tribute to his figure as an extraordinary director and screenwriter. Agarimo comprises five films from the 1950s that demonstrate the enduring relevance and universality of his cinematic themes.

Filmografía Filmography
1981 Buddy
1978 Fedora
1974 The Front Page
1972 Avanti!
1970 The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
1966 The Fortune Cookie
1964 Kiss Me, Stupid
1963 Irma la Douce
1961 One, Two, Three
1960 The Apartment
1959 Some Like it Hot
1957 The Spirit of St. Louis
1957 Love in the Afternoon
1957 Witness for the Prosecution
1955 The Seven Year Itch
1954 Sabrina
1953 Stalag 17
1951 Ace in the Hole
1950 Sunset Boulevar
1948 The Emperor Waltz
1948 A Foreign Affair
1945 The Lost Weekend
1944 Double Indemnity
1943 Five Graves to Cairo
1942 The Major and the Minor
1934 Mauvaise graine

Notable filmography
1974 The Front Page
1961 One, Two, Three
1960 The Apartment
1959 Some Like It Hot
1957 Witness for the Prosecution
1954 Sabrina
1950 Sunset Boulevard
1945 Days Without a Trace