The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (447 page)

Dianne Wiest
, b. Kansas City, Missouri, 1948
Dianne Wiest had won the best supporting actress Oscar twice by the age of fifty—in
Hannah and Her Sisters
and
Bullets Over Broadway
—and she’s quite capable of winning more if someone has need of vivid, comic cameos rooted in human nature. For just as Wiest’s eyes seem to narrow (is it short sight?), so her imaginative being can open up. She can make us believe that she is pretty or plain, a freak or the salt of the earth (well, the grease or the greasepaint).

She has worked frequently on stage, even as a director occasionally, but she had a steady run of film work once she had been discovered:
It’s My Turn
(80, Claudia Weill);
I’m Dancing As Fast As I Can
(82, Jack Hofsiss); a battered wife in
Independence Day
(83, Robert Mandel); very touching as the wife in
Footloose
(84, Herbert Ross);
Falling in Love
(84, Ulu Grosbard);
The Purple Rose of Cairo
(85, Woody Allen);
Hannah and Her Sisters
(86, Allen);
The Lost Boys
(87, Joel Schumacher); the romantic aunt in
Radio Days
(87, Allen);
September
(87, Allen);
Bright Lights, Big City
(88, James Bridges);
Parenthood
(89, Ron Howard); as the mistress in
Cookie
(89, Susan Seidelman);
Edward Scissorhands
(90, Tim Burton); the school director in
Little Man Tate
(91, Jodie Foster); Helen Sinclair, the actress, in
Bullets Over Broadway
(94, Allen);
Cops and Robbersons
(94, Michael Ritchie);
The Scout
(94, Ritchie);
The Associate
(96, Daniel Petrie);
The Birdcage
(96, Mike Nichols);
Drunks
(96, Peter Cohn); uncommonly glum as a Montana housewife in
The Horse Whisperer
(98, Robert Redford);
Practical Magic
(98, Griffin Dunne);
The Simple Life of Noah Dearborn
(00, Gregg Champion);
I Am Sam
(01, Jessie Nelson);
Not Afraid, Not Afraid
(01, Annette Carducci);
Merci Docteur Rey
(02, Andrew Litvack);
The Blackwater Lightship
(04, John Erman).

She was in the TV miniseries
Category 6: Day of Destruction; Robots
(05, Chris Wedge);
A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints
(06, Dito Montiel);
Dedication
(07, Justin Theroux);
Dan in Real Life
(07, Peter Hedges); as the ultimate shrink in the TV series
In Treatment
(08);
Passengers
(08, Rodrigo García);
Synecdoche, New York
(08, Charlie Kaufman);
Rage
(09, Sally Potter);
Rabbit Hole
(10, John Cameron Mitchell).

Fred McLeod Wilcox
(1908–64), b. Tazewell, Virginia
1938:
Joaquin Murrieta
(s). 1943:
Lassie Come Home
. 1946:
Blue Sierra; The Courage of Lassie
. 1948:
Three Daring Daughters; Hills of Home/ Master of Lassie
. 1949:
The Secret Garden
. 1951:
Shadow in the Sky
. 1953:
Code Two
. 1954:
Tennessee Champ
. 1956:
Forbidden Planet
. 1960:
I Passed For White
.

Nothing in Wilcox’s early career prepared one for
Forbidden Planet
. He knocked around for fifteen years—on publicity, as assistant to King Vidor, and directing tests—before he began directing Lassie and Elizabeth Taylor at MGM.
Lassie Come Home
is as pretty as a Victorian Christmas card with fine character studies and a surprising sense of Scotland.
The Secret Garden
, from the Frances Hodgson Burnett novel, is a most accomplished rendering of child psychology, brilliantly played by Margaret O’Brien, Dean Stockwell, and Brian Roper.

His last film for MGM was
Forbidden Planet
, one of the most delightful and inventive of science-fiction films. It is a free adaptation of
The Tempest
, with Ariel a computer and Caliban a destructive ray. Full of clever effects, it is a pretty and amusing fantasy, enchanting to children and an intriguing study of the more profound theme.

Cornel Wilde
(1915–89), b. New York
1956:
Storm Fear
. 1957:
The Devil’s Hairpin
. 1958:
Maracaibo
. 1963:
Lancelot and Guinevere
. 1965:
The Naked Prey
. 1967:
Beach Red
. 1970:
No Blade of Grass
. 1974:
Sharks’ Treasure
.

When one considers how much the cinema has catered to childish audiences, it is remarkable that there are so few childlike directors. Primitives are to be found—although King Vidor is a lonely eminence—but the naïve picturing of the world is represented by Cornel Wilde, and by no one else. Was there a hint of such conviction in the unmitigated sincerity of his cheerfully flat acting? Wilde’s own films deal with adventure situations that became increasingly parablelike with the years. It is easy to say that the thunderous message behind, say,
The Naked Prey
and
No Blade of Grass
is innocent—but so are the Dordogne cave paintings. In both cases, the images are self-sufficient and very moving. In
Naked Prey
and
Beach Red
, there are moments where one has the illusion of watching the first films ever made. Although she never seemed remotely prehistoric, Wilde’s beautiful blonde wife, Jean Wallace, featured in most of his films, is one of the cinema’s true Eves.

As an actor, he was forceful but blunt, like someone shouting “Hallo,” or like the Olympic fencer he might have been in 1940 but for war:
The Lady with Red Hair
(40, Curtis Bernhardt);
High Sierra
(41, Raoul Walsh);
Life Begins at Eight Thirty
(42, Irving Pichel);
Wintertime
(43, John Brahm);
Guest in the House
(44, Brahm); as Chopin in
A Song to Remember
(46, Charles Vidor); bewildered by the astonishing Gene Tierney in
Leave Her to Heaven
(46, John M. Stahl);
The Bandit of Sherwood Forest
(46, George Sherman);
Centennial Summer
(46, Otto Preminger);
Forever Amber
(47, Preminger);
It Had to Be You
(47, Rudolph Maté and Don Hartman);
Road House
(48, Jean Negulesco);
Shockproof
(49, Douglas Sirk);
Two Flags West
(50, Robert Wise);
The Greatest Show on Earth
(52, Cecil B. De Mille);
Treasure of the Golden Condor
(53, Delmer Daves);
Saadia
(53, Albert Lewin);
Star of India
(53, Arthur Lubin);
Passion
(54, Allan Dwan);
The Big Combo
(54, Joseph H. Lewis);
Woman’s World
(54, Negulesco);
The Scarlet Coat
(55, John Sturges);
Hot Blood
(56, Nicholas Ray);
Omar Khayyam
(57, William Dieterle);
Edge of Eternity
(59, Don Siegel);
The Norseman
(78, Charles Pierce); D’Artagnan in
The 4th Musketeer
(79, Ken Annakin).

Billy Wilder
(1906–2002), b. Vienna
1934:
Mauvaise Graine
(codirected with Alexander Esnay). 1942:
The Major and the Minor
. 1943:
Five Graves to Cairo
. 1944:
Double Indemnity
. 1945:
The Lost Weekend
. 1948:
The Emperor Waltz; A Foreign Affair
. 1950:
Sunset Boulevard
. 1951:
Ace in the Hole
. 1953:
Stalag 17
. 1954:
Sabrina
. 1955:
The Seven Year Itch
. 1957:
The Spirit of St. Louis; Love in the Afternoon; Witness for the Prosecution
. 1959:
Some Like It Hot
. 1960:
The Apartment
. 1961:
One, Two, Three
. 1963:
Irma la Douce
. 1964:
Kiss Me, Stupid
. 1966:
The Fortune Cookie/Meet Whiplash Willie
. 1969:
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
. 1972:
Avanti!
. 1974:
The Front Page
. 1978:
Fedora
. 1981:
Buddy Buddy
.

Billy Wilder spent most of the 1980s in a state of eloquent, bitter indignation, because Hollywood would not hire him to make more films. They were too busy finding kids who could erase the tradition of the wellmade film. Wilder spent more time with his magnificent art collection, fretting and fuming over unconsummated projects. Not even his anger depleted his exceptional vitality. Meanwhile, the witless world turned ever softer over him. He was not just a survivor, but
the
survivor, our last link with the merry, wicked talk of the golden age. By his very being, Wilder could make old Hollywood seem like a suburb of Vienna.

Then along came
Sunset Boulevard
, the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical from his film, tribute enough to its classic status (and tacit admission that the very tricky story had worked in 1950 only because of someone’s rare magic).
Sunset Boulevard
never quite worked on stage: it was always too big, too unironic, and more adoring of show business than Wilder ever felt. For there is not really anyone in the original film whom Wilder would want to spend half an hour with—except for Max von Mayerling. (Wilder might have been Stroheim’s son.) Still, Wilder went along with the big show, coolly pouring on praise so that he wouldn’t have to consult too much. And surely he was adroit enough to feel the comedy of his own “comeback” on Norma Desmond’s tacky legend. Meanwhile, his
Sunset Boulevard
was safer than ever, not just a classic but a monument to ambiguity—and one of the earliest cultural admissions that we love these gods and goddesses we hate. When all was said and done, who beyond Louis B. Mayer had really been offended by
Sunset Boulevard?

Wilder had his ups and downs critically. Andrew Sarris once saw “less than meets the eye,” then thought again and drew the very barbed director back into the fold. I remain skeptical. Wilder was always a collaborator, a man who loved lines and stories more than pictures. He was a trimmer, who knew how to sweeten his own sour pills but who time and again slipped out of the ugly position of offering tough medicine. He could be ordinary to dull far too often (
The Major and the Minor, Foreign Affair, Stalag 17, Sabrina, Spirit of St. Louis, Love in the Afternoon, Witness for the Prosecution, Irma la Douce, Avanti!, The Front Page, Fedora, Buddy Buddy
—these are grim things on a dark night, and
Witness for the Prosecution
is among the crassest offenses ever given to innocent celluloid). And yet, there are a few films that have changed the way we measure our own duplicities:
Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, The Lost Weekend
, and
Some Like It Hot
. Not one of these works does other than bite its own tail, furious that brilliance has been so tortured. But you cannot forget the vicious twist, whether it is grotesque or hilarious.

Any assessment of Wilder must begin and end with the stress he lays on writing, and on barbed lines that often outlive his persistent compromise. He began as a journalist and, after court reporting, he moved into the German film industry as a scriptwriter: he was a junior collaborator on
Menschen am Sonntag
(29, Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer); thereafter,
Der Teufelsreporter
(29, Ernst Laemmle);
Seitensprunge
(30, Stefan Szekely);
Der Mann, der seinen Morder sucht
(31, Siodmak);
Emil und Detektive
(31, R. A. Stemmle);
Ein Blonder Traum
(32, Paul Martin);
Scampolo, ein Kind der Strasse
(32, Hans Steinhoff);
Das Blaue vom Himmel
(32, Victor Janson); and
Madame wunscht keine Kinder
(33, Steinhoff).

Wilder left Germany and went by way of France to America and to Paramount. There, he wrote, or helped to write,
Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife
(38, Ernst Lubitsch);
Ninotchka
(39, Lubitsch);
Midnight
(39, Mitchell Leisen);
Arise, My Love
(40, Leisen);
Hold Back the Dawn
(41, Leisen); and
Ball of Fire
(41, Howard Hawks). He was already working with writer Charles Brackett, just as in later years he was to collaborate with I.A.L. Diamond.

In Germany and in Hollywood, Wilder had written smart romances. Nothing indicated the nagging account of weakness and delusion that preoccupied his own films. For Wilder embarked on a series of ostensibly daring, disenchanted movies, against the grain of American cheerfulness:
Double Indemnity
was a thriller based on the principle that crime springs from human greed and depravity;
The Lost Weekend
was the cinema’s most graphic account of alcoholism;
A Foreign Affair
has shots of a ruined Berlin accompanied by the tune “Isn’t It Romantic?”;
Sunset Boulevard
mocks the maddening glamour within Hollywood;
Ace in the Hole
exposes the unscrupulousness of the sensational press;
Stalag 17
is a prisoner-of-war film that undercuts camaraderie.

But every bitter pill had enough sugar somewhere for the public to be able to swallow it. The “realism,” misanthropy, or balefulness never exceeded a melodramatic approach. The situations are set up, without benefit of characterization. Wilder is a heartless exploiter of public taste who manipulates situation in the name of satire. He prefers dialogue to character, sniping to structure. The ending of
The Lost Weekend
is a dispiriting compromise not just for the way it betrays the rest of the film, the strength of the book on which it is based, and the power of Ray Milland’s performance, but because Wilder was so clumsy that he dealt with the subject in a way that could not avoid Hollywood’s sense of a “happy ending.” Comparison with Preminger shows how meekly Wilder relinquishes his own venom.
A Foreign Affair
soon forsakes its picture of postwar Germany for a sub-Lubitsch love story.
Sunset Boulevard
slyly confronts Swanson and von Stroheim with their past without ever really analyzing or attempting to understand them.
Stalag 17
cheats by having its outsider hero eventually join the gang. Although he believes in the worst of people, Wilder lacked the will to make misanthropy credible.