16 - Nobody's Perfect: Billy Wilder and the Postwar American Cinema

Summary

Film scholars often attribute differences between pre–World War I and post–World War II Hollywood films to the influx of exiles from strife-torn Europe. Film noir, in particular, is said to reflect themes, character types (the “femme fatale”), and stylistic devices (oppressive shadows) associated with the “expressionist” cinema of Weimar Germany. Billy Wilder, an East European Jew who came to America in the early 1930s and whose first noteworthy directorial effort was Double Indemnity, a prototypical film noir, is a critical case in assessing the European influence on post–WWII Hollywood.

The matter is complicated, however, for at least three reasons. First, because “expressionist” German silent cinema had already had a profound impact on Hollywood movies of the 1930s, above all in the impact of F. W. Murnau's Sunrise (1927) on directors like Capra, Hawks, von Sternberg, Cukor, and Ford. Sunrise was the ultimate achievement of the German silent cinema. It was also an American film, however. Made in America for the Fox studio, Sunrise uncannily anticipated the contours of the genres that were soon to crystallize in Hollywood – in particular, the genre Stanley Cavell calls the comedy of remarriage [It Happened One Night (1934), The Philadelphia Story (1941), et al.] and, a few years later, film noir. Second, because “expressionism” is at most a superficial feature of Wilder's films, which align themselves primarily with the comedies of Ernst Lubitsch, whose American films reflect a very different aspect of German silent cinema. There is a third reason as well.