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Walter Mirisch apprised Billy Wilder of the company's plans to produce its own pictures and to continue its working relationship with Wilder. He agreed to make his next picture, Some Like It Hot, for the Mirisch Company. I. A. L. Diamond and Wilder got the idea for Some Like It Hot from an earlier German film, Fanfaren der Liebe [Fanfares of Love, 1932], which was set in Bavaria. It was about two starving musicians who don a number of disguises to get work; for example, they wear blackface to join an all-black jazz band. Wilder discarded the English title Fanfares of Love and replaced it with Some Like It Hot at Diamond's suggestion. Some Like It Hot was a sensation at the box office as well as a critical triumph. It remains one of the Wilder films that moviegoers recall most fondly. Some critics write it off as a mere crowd pleaser.

Billy Wilder is an energetic, articulate man, which began his career in films many years ago in Berlin by writing film scripts, most notably for a semidocumentary called People on Sunday (1929). After he migrated to Hollywood in the 1930s in the wake of the rise of Hitler, Wilder continued his career as a scriptwriter for such major directors as Ernst Lubitsch. The early years of Wilder is specifically discussed. He became a film apprentice in Berlin. Wilder worked on close to fifty scripts for silent pictures from 1927 to 1929, receiving twenty-five to fifty dollars per script. When Hitler officially became chancellor in January 1933, Wilder realized his days in Berlin were numbered. Wilder was very much aware that, as a Jew, he had no future in Germany. He then opted to emigrate to France and became a Hollywood immigrant. The screenplays described here include Der Teufelsreporter (1929), Menschen am Sonntag (1929), and Mauvaise graine (1933).

Writing in the mid-1950s, film critic Manny Farber praised certain Hollywood directors like Billy Wilder who would “tunnel” beneath the surfaces of the stories they were filming and seek to illuminate, in a shrewd and unsentimental fashion, deeper truths, usually about the unglamorous side of the human condition. Tunneling underneath the plot to reach a deeper meaning is a particularly apt metaphor for Ace in the Hole, which deals with a mine cave-in. It takes place in a rural town on the edge of a wasteland. It was Walter Newman who suggested to Wilder the concept of Ace in the Hole. Wilder chose Stalag 17, a smash hit by Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski. They described the play as a comedy-melodrama about American GIs interned in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp. Wilder preferred to overlook that his homeland was part of the Nazi empire at the time Stalag 17 takes place, so the setting of the film is not identified as Austria. It is clear that Stalag 17 is essentially a whodunit. With this, Wilder had made a successful Broadway play into an equally successful movie.

Samuel Taylor's play Sabrina Fair: A Woman of the World had been submitted to Paramount in typescript months before the New York premiere in November 1953. A reader in the story department turned in an enthusiastic report on the play, and this prompted Billy Wilder to get Paramount to purchase the film rights immediately. Wilder's decision turned out to be a wise one. An overview of the story of this play is presented. Sabrina was hailed by the critics as a charming and hugely entertaining love story; Frederick Hollander's dreamy score and Charles Lang's slick visuals were the icing on the cake. It was also Wilder's last picture with Paramount. Thus, his first project outside Paramount was The Seven Year Itch. There was little risk in choosing this film because it seemed almost guaranteed to be a blockbuster movie. The story is set in New York City during a boiling hot summer. This picture also helped to pave the way for more artistic freedom in the making of Hollywood movies. In addition, it was enthusiastically received by reviewers as a sizzling sex farce beautifully mounted in CinemaScope.

After Billy Wilder had finished Some Like It Hot, he wanted to make another picture with Jack Lemmon. Wilder got together with I. A. L. Diamond to whip up a detailed proposal that he would present to the Mirisch Company and to UA. Wilder took a précis of the scenario to the studio and threw a fast pitch to Walter Mirisch and the UA front office. Wilder and Diamond began working on the screenplay, elaborating Wilder's original concept into a detailed script. Wilder had opted to make The Apartment a category-breaking blend of comedy, romance, and drama. It concerns a loser, an accountant with a night school diploma who is always a half step behind the parade. Looking back on the movie, Wilder was particularly hurt by the epithet “dirty fairy tale” that was attached to The Apartment. He gives this film a wistful, melancholic quality, befitting a story that deals with an ambitious social climber.

Billy Wilder had seen Ferenc Molnar's one-act play Ein, zwei, drei (One, Two, Three) on the stage in Berlin in 1928. Wilder could think of only one actor who could deliver dialogue at the trip-hammer tempo of Max Pallenberg: James Cagney. One, Two, Three has some resonances of Ninotchka, which Wilder coscripted for Lubitsch in 1939. I. A. L. Diamond and Wilder spent eight months writing the script for One, Two, Three.Wilder thought it was a “sporadically good picture”. Nevertheless, because One, Two, Three was not a big moneymaker on its original release, he figured that he had to be careful in selecting his next project. He chose to make a film adaptation ofIrma la Douce (Irma the sweet), a French musical play about a Parisian prostitute. The script for the stage play was by Alexandra Breffort, with songs by Marguerite Monnot. The 1960s, which brought an increasingly liberal climate to America (in contrast to the buttoned-down 1950s), were in full swing. Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, and Irma la Douce all dwelled on sensitive sexual issues, and all three were severely criticized by the minions of morality.

Billy Wilder offended the Catholic Legion of Decency mightily when he made Kiss Me, Stupid. It was definitely not family entertainment, nor could it be retooled into a family film. The Legion of Decency took a dim view of this film. It was also viewed in Europe not as a prurient movie but as a film aimed at thoughtful adults. When one sees Kiss Me, Stupid today, now that the controversy has died down, one can see that it is a knockabout farce and that is all that it ever was. Moreover, Wilder and Diamond developed a scenario called The Fortune Cookie, about Harry Hinkle, a TV cameraman accidentally knocked cold by a football player, Luther “Boom Boom” Jackson, during a game. Harry allows his brother-in-law, “Whiplash Willie” Gingrich, a crooked lawyer, to lure him into filing a fraudulent insurance claim to acquire the fortune he needs to win back his greedy ex-wife. It is the first of three Wilder films that are linked by an exploration of male friendship. Wilder was relieved that he experienced no censorship problems with The Fortune Cookie.

One of Johann Strauss' finest waltzes, “The Emperor Waltz”, would provide the title of Wilder's present film and be featured in the movie's score. Billy Wilder was bracketed with Charles Brackett, his writing partner, in the film colony, and not always to his advantage. The Emperor Waltz was to be a fluffy Viennese musical confection, a project that obviously appealed much more to the Austrian Wilder than to the New England Brackett. Franz Lehar wanted each song in The Emperor Waltz to be an extension, not an interruption, of the plot. The Emperor Waltz has some virtues that are frequently overlooked. One cannot deny that the film entrances the eye. It is also frequently referred to as a financial failure, but it was not. It attracted a fairly large audience and turned a modest profit. Even though Wilder had made a misstep with this, he was still the Paramount director par excellence. In addition the chapter describes A Foreign Affair. Because of the hostile reaction to the movie in official circles, Paramount is said to have discreetly withdrawn A Foreign Affair from distribution.

Leland Hayward brought the project to Billy Wilder, who agreed to direct the picture (The Spirit of St. Louis), coauthor the screenplay, and coproduce the film. It was no secret that James Stewart was lobbying for the role of Charles Lindbergh in The Spirit of St. Louis. This film collected a sheaf of largely positive notices when it premiered at Radio City Music Hall. In addition, this chapter discusses Love in the Afternoon (1957). Wilder updated the time frame of his remake from the 1920s to the present; Barbara Diamond came up with a new title, Love in the Afternoon. Wilder left Diamond to continue working on Love in the Afternoon while he went off to Europe to shoot The Spirit of St. Louis. Most critics welcomed Love in the Afternoon as “a sheer delight”, “a cascade of bubbles and belly laughs”, and—most significant for Wilder— “the type of sophisticated fare Lubitsch would have undertaken with delight”.

When Jennings Lang, a vice president at Universal, by sheer coincidence inquired whether Billy Wilder would like to direct a remake of The Front Page, Wilder accepted enthusiastically. He was drawn to the project in part because male friendship plays an important role in The Front Page, just as it does in The Fortune Cookie and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Furthermore, Wilder's own experience as a journalist would be reflected in the movie. The Front Page evokes the screwball comedies of the 1930s. It is laced with brittle humor and at times approximates the rough-and-tumble spirit of the golden age of screwball—as when the cop cars make a madcap dash through the streets of Chicago, dutifully following up one ridiculous false lead after another as to the whereabouts of Earl Williams. Wilder made another film with Jack Lemmon around this time. This time he turned to Avanti! by Samuel Taylor. It is now thought to be a more sophisticated and tasteful film than it was when it first appeared. This film was the last movie in Wilder's contract with the Mirisch Company and its distributor, UA.

Billy Wilder and Diamond collaborated on the screenplay for Fedora. The response to Fedora was sharply divided: European critics loved it. American reviewers did not cotton to it, and some sneered or laughed inappropriately. It did poorly at the box office after its initial engagements in big cities and did not reach a wide audience elsewhere. Although Fedora received unenthusiastic notices when it appeared, like The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, it has over the years earned a solid critical reputation as an elegant, entertaining film that reaches the lofty realm of tragedy. In the wake of Universal's vetoing Fedora, Wilder was afraid that the major studios had written him off as over the hill. Much to his surprise, Jay Weston, a producer at MGM, invited him to make Buddy Buddy. The film was to be based on a French play by Francis Weber, a boulevard farce titled L'emmerdeur. Wilder's Buddy Buddy is a black comedy about the friendship that gradually develops between a tough Mafia hit man (Walter Matthau) and a woebegone individual (Jack Lemmon) who contemplates suicide after his wife leaves him. This film was also his last picture.

Billy Wilder was convinced that Charles Jackson's novel The Lost Weekend would make an engrossing movie. Wilder phoned Paramount executive Buddy De Sylva and requested that the studio purchase the screen rights to the book. De Sylva put down fifty thousand dollars for The Lost Weekend. After the conference, Wilder commented to a journalist that The Lost Weekend was not going to be the ordinary Hollywood fare. It would be the first mainstream film to take alcoholism seriously. The Lost Weekend was to some degree influenced by the years that Wilder spent in Berlin during the heyday of the expressionist movement, which made a significant impact on German cinema. It is also an intense and intricate story of spiritual meltdown, told with invisible dexterity and emotional acuity. In addition, one of Wilder's chores was to collaborate on a documentary about the concentration camps, to be titled Die Todesmühlen (Death Mills).

In his book on film noir, William Hare repeats the story that one day Billy Wilder could not find his secretary. He was told by one of the women in the office that she was holed up in the ladies' room, reading a novella titled Double Indemnity. Double Indemnity portrayed a decadent, depraved world of violence and duplicity. On September 21, 1943, Paramount sent Joseph Breen a screen treatment of Double Indemnity, a detailed synopsis that Wilder had prepared in conjunction with Charles Brackett. Double Indemnity deals with the great American pastime of cheating an insurance company, and it does so with deadly seriousness. The title of the film refers to the double insurance benefit paid out in the event of accidental death. This film also originally intended to conclude with Walter's execution. In recent years commentators on Double Indemnity have steadily come to recognize it as quintessential film noir.

This chapter gives an analysis on Sunset Boulevard. It begins by describing the story conferences. The film's title refers to the passing of the old Hollywood: It recalls the tragic lives of has-been film stars like Norma Desmond, whose careers in silent pictures were eclipsed by the advent of sound. The decaying swimming pool on Norma's estate, in which John Gilbert swam ten thousand midnights ago, is a relic of the grandeur of Norma's long-lost heyday as a superstar in Hollywood. The stunning finale of Sunset Boulevard makes for one of the greatest moments in all cinema. It is blessed with a superb screenplay and inspired direction, topped off by Gloria Swanson's superlative performance as Norma and Erich von Stroheim's indelible portrayal of Max. Moreover, the movie is sterling for Billy Wilder's consummate craftsmanship in producing well-defined, plausible characters.

In December 1941, Paramount purchased the screen rights to both the short story and the stage play for The Major and the Minor. In the years ahead, Billy Wilder would become known for his ability to revamp old narrative formulas for the screen. The two sources of The Major and the Minor are but the first of many forgotten stories that Wilder revitalized for film. The plot of The Major and the Minor goes into overdrive when Susan accepts Philip's invitation to spend the weekend visiting the exclusive Wallace Military Academy for Boys in High Creek, Indiana, where he is on the faculty. This film is a startlingly assured film, with none of the cheap tricks or showiness of a tyro director desperate for a studio calling card. The chapter also discusses the Five Graves to Cairo (1943). It was hailed as an ingeniously plotted melodrama with uniformly fine performances, a beautiful, dark gem among World War II films. It still holds up as a top-notch espionage thriller with nary a sag.

Witness for the Prosecution began its artistic life as a short story that Agatha Christie published in 1933 in Britain in a volume titled The Hound of Death. The story was published in the United States in 1948 in the collection Witness for the Prosecution. When the story turned into a play, it was a smash hit, running for 646 performances; it won the New York Drama Critics' Circle award for best foreign play. Independent producer Edward Small purchased the screen rights for this story at a high price. Small hired Billy Wilder to cowrite the screenplay and direct the picture. Wilder was interested in filming a Christie mystery because he had read her work over the years. Witness for the Prosecution resembles Double Indemnity in that it possesses the fascination of a hair-raising tale told by the tabloids.

The character of Sherlock Holmes was inspired by Joseph Bell, a physician who taught Conan Doyle in medical school. William Gillette wrote a play, Sherlock Holmes (1899), in which the playwright played Holmes on tour for three decades. Robert Stephens, who would play the title role in Billy Wilder's film, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, also starred in the revival in New York. This film is the second Wilder film that foregrounds male friendship. Wilder called the movie the story of “the friendship between Holmes and Watson when they were young”. When the DVD finally arrived in 2003, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes met with fresh acclaim. It has at last come to occupy a prominent place in the canon of Wilder's work.

When he was preparing Bluebeard's Eighth Wife for filming, Ernst Lubitsch wanted Charles Brackett to write the screenplay. He did not ask the studio for Billy Wilder as well because he did not want to give the impression that he was a German-born director who favored hiring members of the German immigrant colony in Hollywood. But Manny Wolf told Lubitsch that Brackett and Wilder were a team, so Wilder was part of the deal. Wilder had a habit of scribbling ideas into a pocket notebook throughout his career. Wilder collaboration with Ernst Lubitsch including on Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (1938) and Ninotchka (1939). Brackett and Wilder coauthored the screenplay for another comedy in 1939, Midnight, which they wrote just before Ninotchka. It was directed by Mitchell Leisen, for whom the pair would also write Hold Back the Dawn (1941). Independent producer Samuel Goldwyn had asked Brackett and Wilder to script a film for a major Hollywood director, Howard Hawks (His Girl Friday). The resulting film would be Ball of Fire, a daffy screwball romp along the lines of Midnight.

Billy Wilder certainly did his part to enrich American cinema. He learned during his long career in Hollywood that a director had to work hard not just to achieve artistic independence but also to keep it. He challenged the fundamentally conformist cinema of Hollywood, bringing to his films a sophisticated middle European wit and mature view of human nature. Still, Wilder often had difficulty in securing studio backing for a project he had developed on his own. Wilder was philosophical about the ups and downs of filmmaking. The Apartment, Double Indemnity, Some Like It Hot, and Sunset Boulevard were selected as four of the American motion pictures to be preserved in the permanent collection of the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress as culturally, historically, and aesthetically important. He has been recognized by different sectors. Perhaps one of the most touching compliments Wilder received came from British director Stephen Frears (The Grifters): “I identify with Billy Wilder, of course. He was a man who went to Hollywood and made a very, very elaborate range of films; yet he kept his own voice”. Indeed he did.