by Ed Sikov
In September, when elections were held, Germany got a big surprise. The National Socialist Party, which had held only 12 seats in the old Reichstag, had entered the election confident of winning as many as 50 more. The Nazis ended up winning 107. With curious speed, the Nazi Party had suddenly become the second largest party in Germany. Only the Social Democrats held more power. Just as Billie’s screenwriting career was taking off, about 6.5 million Germans decided to vote for the candidates of Adolf Hitler.
Because of the world-altering social, artistic, and political forces under which Wilder became a filmmaker, countless interviewers asked him later to discuss the ways in which he was influenced by life and politics in Berlin. Characteristically, he denied anything trite. For instance, Wilder met Brecht in Berlin, he reported, but wasn’t at all affected by him. Weimar culture in general held no particular appeal for Billie, except for the Bauhaus architecture and design he grew to adore. Wilder was always a newshound, and he maintained strong opinions about world politics throughout his life, but he rarely stuffed them into his movies. If one searches his German filmography for manifest evidence of current events and politics, one searches almost completely in vain; the Nazis play not even a covert role. “If there was any influence on me in those days,” Wilder once said, “it must have come more from American books and plays I read [in translation]. One of the most popular writers was Upton Sinclair. I read him, and Sinclair Lewis, Bret Harte, Mark Twain. I was also influenced by Erich von Stroheim and by Ernst Lubitsch.… I don’t believe I have been influenced by the cynicism of the times or even shown any of it on the screen.”
Still, it’s curious that Menschen am Sonntag’s quiet, understated vision of middle-class anomie gave way to the bizarre inspiration of Wilder’s next signed feature-length screenplay, a thriller called Der Mann, der seinen Morder sucht. The title translates directly as The Man Who Sought His Own Murderer, but The Man Who Tried to Have Himself Killed hits closer to the point. Billie wrote the film with Ludwig Hirschfeld and the Siodmak brothers. It’s the story of a depressive little man whose attempt to shoot himself to death is foiled by the sudden appearance of a burglar. Poor, shnooky Hans Herfort (Heinz Rühmann), having fallen into despair, decides to end it all by shooting himself. In fact, he has already raised the loaded gun to his temple in the first shot of the film—we simply assume he has good reason to do so—at which point he is surprised by the rude arrival of a thief. Hans convinces the intruding criminal, Otto Kuttlapp (Raimund Janitschek), to do the job for him. It’s a prudent business deal for Otto, actually, for an insurance company will have to pay out 15,000 marks to Hans’s beneficiary if Hans is killed, and Otto will only get sentenced to three short years in prison. Otto agrees to become Hans’s beneficiary; all he needs to do to collect the money is to murder him, preferably when he least suspects it.
Paranoia reigns. When Hans hears a champagne bottle pop open in a nightclub he immediately thinks he’s being shot. In the final scenes of the film, as Hans and his girlfriend, Kitty, engage in an epic screaming match (with Hans rushing around the house clutching his head and shouting “Nein! Nein! Nein!”), a genuine killer named Jim attacks the hysterical, bespectacled loser—first with a knife and then with a bomb. Hans and Jim toss the smoking explosive back and forth as Hans and Kitty resolve their quarrel. Then the building blows up. Debris rains down across the screen, and when it clears, Hans and Kitty are wearing wedding outfits amid the rubble. The bombed-out house serves as their chapel while a chorus of gangsters—conducted by the film’s composer, Friedrich Holländer, wielding a knife and a revolver—sings a little ditty under a banner marked “Unity Makes Strength.” In the final moments of the comedy, Holländer pronounces Hans and Kitty husband and wife and joins them together with a pair of handcuffs.
Twentieth-century history might suggest that a proto-film-noir musical-comedy about suicide and a murder contract would have been a big Weimar-era hit, but in fact the opposite was the case. Der Mann, der seinen Morder sucht bombed badly. Erich Pommer appears to have sensed its dicey commercial prospects soon after the film was edited, for he took the unusual step of ordering a preview, which occurred on January 17, 1931. Hoping to salvage the film from what appeared to be a complete disaster, Ufa released it in two versions—one running ninety-eight minutes, the other a mere fifty-two minutes long. (The fifty-two-minute version was retitled Jim, der Mann mit der Narbe, or Jim, the Man with the Scar.)
Wilder, the Siodmaks, and Hirschfeld hadn’t thought up this morbid farce entirely by themselves. They based their script on a play by Ernst Neubach, who himself had been inspired by the Jules Verne story “The Tribulations of a Chinaman in China.” Holländer, who was making quite a name for himself as a songwriter for cabaret and film—he’d just written the songs Marlene Dietrich sang in The Blue Angel—wrote two acidic, cabaret-style numbers for this distressed comedy. Der Mann, der seinen Mörder sucht is literally a dark film; its cinematography is elegantly gloomy, with a few sharp spots of glaring light piercing through an otherwise sooty image. Robert Siodmak said, years after the fact, “We thought it was monstrously funny and split our sides while writing it. Erich Pommer liked it too, but the audience didn’t. It was far ahead of its time.” But actor Heinz Rühmann put it best: “We amused ourselves so much with our own gags that we often had to stop the takes for laughing. When the film got to the cinemas, nobody laughed anymore.”
One reason audiences rejected Der Mann, der seinen Mörder sucht was that Rühmann tended to play brave little German burghers, and audiences simply wouldn’t accept him as a morbid schlemiel who can’t even kill himself properly. On the other hand, the Berlin correspondent for Variety dismissed the film for reasons having little do to with Rühmann. He called the car chase sequence “a bad copy of old American comedies,” though it’s far too nightmarish and distorted to be a contemporary imitation of Hollywood. But Wilder, Hirschfeld, and the Siodmaks had the last laugh, since Der Mann, der seinen Mörder sucht has inspired four (extremely loose) remakes: Rudolph Mate’s D.O.A. (1950), Eddie Davis’s Color Me Dead (1969), Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel’s D.O.A. (1988), and Aki Kaurismäki’s I Hired a Contract Killer (1990).
Der Mann, der seinen Mörder sucht failed, but Billie certainly did not. He worked steadily in this period—and not with Robert Siodmak, for whom he had developed a certain antipathy: “Siodmak and I did not get on very well. I was very suspicious of him. He was a very good director—but not the most trustworthy of persons.” Billie didn’t need Siodmak anymore. In the single month of March 1931, three films made from Wilder’s scripts were released: Ihre Hoheit befiehlt (Her Highness Orders), Seitensprünge (Escapades), and Der falsche Ehemann (The Wrong Husband). Billie wrote Ihre Hoheit befiehlt with two collaborators—Paul Frank and Wilder’s sometime boss, Robert Liebmann. Not uncommonly, Ufa produced two versions of the film simultaneously—one in German, the other in French. The popular Willy Fritsch starred. Fritsch was a Jazz Age romantic comedian, German-style—a “likable, nervy, go-getter type.” Fritsch was accompanied by two leading ladies, one for each language—Käthe von Nagy for the German release, Lilian Harvey for the French. Ihre Hoheit befiehlt is a piece of musical comedy fluff. As Wilder once summed it up, “Little does the handsome soldier know that the little peasant girl at the fair is really a countess, and little does she know that the handsome soldier is really the crown prince.” And that pretty much describes it, though she’s actually a princess not a countess, he’s a soldier not the crown prince, and she knows his identity almost from the start. Ihre Hoheit befiehlt is a charming little film, utterly without pretension to greatness and quite entertaining. Rights to the film were soon bought by Fox and remade in Hollywood as Adorable, thereby giving Billie Wilder his first American screen credit.
Seitensprünge (for which Wilder received only story credit) concerns a married couple (Oskar Sima and Gerda Maurus) who go to a nightclub and meet Carlo and Lupita, a pair of Spanish dancers (Paul Vincenti and Jarmila Marton). Each co
uple tries to figure out what’s wrong with their marriage; fully disappointed at every turn, they go back to each other in the end. Der falsche Ehemann, on the other hand, bears Billie’s name. It was his second script with Paul Frank, and it stars Johannes Riemann in a dual role—Peter, the lethargic inventor of the sleeping tonic “Somnolin,” and Peter’s energetic twin brother, Paul. Peter is facing ruin. His wife goes off with a repulsive violinist, and Somnolin doesn’t work, so Paul intervenes. First, Paul rescues the business by changing the name of Somnolin to “Energin”; now it sells. Then, through a series of convoluted adventures, he convinces Peter’s wife to love him again, and she returns.
Audiences loved it. Der falsche Ehemann takes one ridiculous turn after another, and much of it is unapologetically silly slapstick. At the same time, there’s a distinct sense of world-weariness behind the frantic comedy. Love in Der falsche Ehemann is characterized almost entirely in terms of paranoia, jealousy, and bitterness. When a champagne bottle pops open, for instance, the violinist naturally thinks that he is being shot by the jealous husband. Even the happy ending is sour. Peter reunites with his wife, drinks a healthy dose of Energin, grabs her, shakes her violently and shrieks at her in a rage, whereupon she drops to her knees in a swoon of reignited passion. Peter looks directly at the camera and declares, admiringly, “What a tonic!”
Billie’s next script is one of his best from the period: an adaptation of Erich Kästner’s children’s classic, Emil und die Detektive (Emil and the Detectives). Directed by Gerhard Lamprecht, the film premiered on December 2, 1931. Although it was Billie’s second solo screenwriting credit, he based his script not only on Kästner’s best-selling book but on Kästner’s own screenplay, which the novelist had written in collaboration with Emeric Pressburger. Kästner complained afterward that he and Pressburger made the mistake of finishing their draft too quickly; their efficiency left Robert Liebmann with extra time on his hands—time to hand the screenplay over to Billie for a complete rewrite. In Kästner’s view, Wilder “embellished the story and vulgarized it. There was trouble. There was a fight. There were referees. There were compromises.” A nasty if ordinary argument took place, at which point the film’s producer, Günther von Stapenhorst (in accord with Lamprecht and Liebmann) promised to give screenplay credit not only to Wilder but to Kästner and Pressburger as well. The promise wasn’t kept, and Kästner joined the international ranks of annoyed novelist-screenwriters. Kästner is said never to have forgiven Wilder; Wilder claimed he never even met Kästner. He and Pressburger remained friendly.
Unlike the novel, Billie’s script begins in a classroom with Emil standing at a blackboard. He draws a diagram and explains to his fellow students the design of the movie we are all about to see. Formally but charmingly, he introduces the film’s characters—his own mother and some of the kids he meets on the streets of Berlin, all of whom are sitting proudly, like celebrities, in the classroom. “So, now we will begin,” Emil announces pedantically, and the tale unfolds. The only purely self-conscious scene in Wilder’s career, the classroom prologue was never filmed.
Following the novel closely but not exactly, Emil und die Detektive is the story of a valiant boy from Neustadt (Rolf Wenkhaus) who is sent off to Berlin to visit his grandmother and his cousin “Pony” Hutchen. Emil’s widowed mother (Käthe Haack) gives him 140 marks to give to Grandma and puts him on the train, where, in his compartment, a fellow passenger (Fritz Rasp) kindly offers the child a cigarette. Emil refuses, at which point the stranger politely offers candy. Emil takes it. What Emil doesn’t know is that the candy is laced with a powerful hallucinogenic drug.
This may have been Billie’s addition, one of the points on which Kästner accused him of vulgarizing everything. In the novel, Emil merely falls asleep on the train. In the film, Emil passes out and enjoys a terrifically trippy dream. Beginning with a hilarious special-effects shot of the nefarious candy-proffering stranger—now reduced to a pair of fake, bugged-out eyes peering through a newspaper—the sequence moves on to become a late-Expressionistic montage complete with a cigar, fireworks, a shot of Emil reeling back in terror, superimpositions of smoke and sparks, and a shot of Emil hanging on a balloon and being lifted away. He floats over the town; there’s a tower with a policeman; the policeman reaches out and the tower explodes; Emil falls onto the floor clutching his head in agony. When he wakes up, the money is gone and so is the man with the funny candy.
Thus in Wilder and Lamprecht’s adaptation, the little boy arrives in Berlin not only robbed but violently ill. As a children’s novel, Emil und die Detektive works because its boy-hero is unusually clever and competent despite his age—with the single exception of his deception on the train. There, Emil loses his guard and falls asleep, thereby letting himself get robbed by a stranger. The screenplay’s candy device solves the problem. By forcing the child to take a very strong, very dangerous, and obviously quite illegal drug, the film fixes the novel’s one notable lapse in judgment. Wilder and Lamprecht’s Emil is not an irresponsible boy. Instead, he loses the money only because he’s essentially tortured into doing so.
After drugging the hero, Wilder and Lamprecht return Emil to Kästner’s original plot. In Berlin, Emil spots the thief on a streetcar and follows him to a café. Thanks to Emil’s own criminal past, he’s afraid to call the police. (Emil and his friends have defaced a noble work of public sculpture back home, but in a very minor way—thus the nightmare’s inclusion of the policeman and tower, though one can scarcely ignore the psychoanalytic suggestions of the dream). So instead of finding assistance through law, Emil’s solution comes in the form of a gang of Berlin street kids. They follow the thief into a hotel. Disguised as a porter, Emil gets into the man’s room, but the money doesn’t turn up in his briefcase as Emil had hoped. The next morning, a hundred or so children follow the man to a bank, where he tries to change a hundred-mark bill. Emil can prove that the money is his because he had fixed it to his pocket with a pin, and he points to the hole in the bill. In a fabulous conclusion, the man turns out to be a wanted bank robber, and Emil gets a reward of a thousand marks, which he uses to buy his mother a new hair dryer for her beauty salon.
One cannot ascribe anything about Emil und die Detektive to Wilder alone; one imagines that Gerhard Lamprecht, one of Germany’s most successful directors, had some input as well. But the film does feature certain incidents that reflect Billie’s personal sensibility. For instance, when Emil arrives in Berlin, he meets a street-smart boy who can’t stand the way Emil looks and immediately turns him into a Berliner by unbuttoning Emil’s shirt at the collar and folding the collar out over Emil’s jacket, thereby making the Ausländer less of a rube. When Emil tells his troubles to his new friend, the boy responds by turning himself into a little Billie Wilder: he paces. Violently. The boy even paces himself right off the screen—first to the right, after which he crosses to the left and goes completely out of the image. Only then does he return and agree to help Emil.
The premise of Emil und die Detektive, both the novel and the film, stands on the fact that these street kids, eight to twelve years old, run completely on the loose in Berlin. Moreover, these boys are not above pulling deceits of their own, including, in Wilder’s adaptation, an attempt to dose the thief with the same hallucinogenic drug that was used to such sickening effect on Emil. The thief asks the hotel to awaken him at 8:00 A.M., and, before going to bed, he puts his jacket outside to be cleaned. A not-so-innocent child then rifles through the pockets with no qualms about the legality of the operation, and he finds remnants of the poisoned candy. Emil waits outside the room and spikes the man’s morning coffee with the candy and, for good measure, puts some in his water, too. Much to Emil’s dismay, however, the man only uses the water to gargle, and he doesn’t even touch the coffee.
The novel concludes with a triple moral. When each character has been asked what he or she has learned, Emil responds that you can’t trust anybody, his mother says that you can’t allow children t
o travel alone, and Grandma has the last word: you should only send money through the proper channels—the post office. Billie Wilder’s Emil, on the other hand, ends up by squaring off in a fight with his best friend over a girl—a brazen child who then announces with a flourish that she wants to have both of them at the same time.
By the end of 1931, Billie Wilder could say without any fear of contradiction that he was a big shot. He was finally making good money. He was consistently employed. He knew all the players, and indeed he was one himself. Billie should have been floating on air, but he wasn’t. He didn’t have the temperament. Wilder could be the life of the party, of course, but as Paul Kohner described him, “Already in Berlin he was a man who has suffered and knows everything. Yes, he seemed to know everything about everything. And only twenty-five—it was not to be believed. As we say, he was mit allen Wassern gewaschen, und mit allen Hunden gehetzt.” (He’d been washed in all the waters and chased by all the dogs.) This sense of dissatisfaction might have had to do with his raging ambition, but it was an ambition that could not be sated by mere professional success. His nagging doubts were not about jobs or friends. They were about the way the world worked, or didn’t. Billie Wilder had a sort of heartburn of the soul. He looked at life, and no matter what he did, no matter how many friends he had or how many screenplays he sold, on some level he just couldn’t stomach it.
It was around this time that Billie Wilder saw a rising young British director on the lot at Ufa. Alfred Hitchcock, in his early thirties, was making a name for himself as the methodical director of a spate of breathtakingly unmethodical thrillers. Wilder recalled that Hitchcock was at Ufa to shoot the English-language version of a German film, but it’s more likely that he was preparing to direct Mary, the German-language version of Murder. Whatever the reason for Hitchcock’s trip to Berlin, Wilder made a note of his presence. Here was a man who made the films he wanted to make. Here was a director who made films audiences wanted to see. And Hitchcock was a man whose career was bound by no nationality or language. Billie spoke no English, but then Hitchcock spoke little German, and yet there he was at Ufa, directing a movie with an efficient, careerist passion that Billie strongly admired.
