by Ed Sikov
An intertitle announces, “One Parisian out of eight has a car. Henri Pasquier is now one of the other seven.” Wilder and Esway cut to an expressionistic comedy montage of Henri walking, dejected to the point of a nightmare; superimposed onto his image are spinning steering wheels, rapidly advancing clocks, speeding cars, and Henri’s own close-up, staring forward as if caught in the mind-controlling stare of Dr. Caligari himself. It’s a funny sequence, but a fairly obvious one, nothing a second-tier Ufa director with a glancing familiarity with Metropolis and a taste for pastiche couldn’t have produced. More sophisticated is the way Wilder and Esway handle the moment at which Henri decides to become a car thief. They don’t bother to show it. Henri is standing on the sidewalk, looking absently at his reflection in a store window. In the reflection, a car pulls up at the curb, and a man gets out and heads into the building, at which point Wilder and Esway pan from the window to the car itself just as another car pulls up alongside. Cutting back and forth from Henri to the car keys left in the ignition to the men in the other car, Wilder and Esway elide the actual moment of Henri’s decision to steal the car, preferring instead to present an extreme long shot of Henri driving away from the camera after the fact. Given the absolute wordlessness of the sequence, together with the clarity and impact of its visuals, it’s impossible to believe (as so many critics still do) that Wilder became a director simply to protect his screenplays. As much as Wilder himself claimed to have detested the overwhelming responsibilities of directing it, Mauvaise Graine is the work of a visual stylist, not a wordsmith.
With the camera mounted on the back of the stolen car, Wilder and Esway force their audience to experience this crime as a form of liberation. The long-take shot of Henri picking up the young woman in the park is as fluid and elegantly simple as anything Murnau and Karl Freund achieved in the controlled conditions of a studio. The audience comes as close as possible to experiencing the pickup from Henri’s point of view: the car swings around a curve; we see the woman in the far distance; as she gets closer, she walks toward the car; the car stops and she gets in, and the car takes off again. Wilder and Esway don’t make the obvious cut right away, either. They don’t cut in to conventional, predictable close-ups or medium shots of the two characters, but instead they keep the shot going as the car sails around a traffic circle in a graceful spin of motion.
Thieving isn’t particularly a problem for Wilder. As with Was Frauen träumen, there’s no sense of any real wrongdoing as far as grand larceny is concerned. If anything, auto theft is presented as a comic triumph, a redistribution of wealth from those who cannot fully appreciate their cars to those who do. The gang of thieves into which Henri falls are all winning, likable characters, with the notable exception of the boss of the operation (Michel Duran), whose greatest crime in Wilder’s view is that he treats his employees badly. The gang members, on the other hand, are thoroughly appealing, from the beautiful and clever Jeannette (Darrieux) and her boyish brother, Jean-le-cravatte (Raymond Galle), to the drunken, outrageously attired Zebra (Jean Wall), and the Franco-African mechanic Gaby (G. Heritier). Mauvaise Graine never bothers to question the morality of their livelihood, let alone censure them for it. In fact, Jean-le-cravatte compounds his grand larceny with petty crimes by stealing every tie he sees (hence his nickname), an activity the film treats as harmless fun. The only force of moral reaction comes in the form of Henri’s scowling, killjoy father.
When Henri sends Jean-le-cravatte to Dr. Pasquier’s apartment to collect his belongings, Henri kills time by stealing a convertible coupe. When the gang swipes the car of a ridiculously short man who sets his hat on the dashboard, they leave the poor man’s hat parked in its place at the curb. Breaking the law isn’t the problem. Boredom is. When Jean-le-cravatte and Henri steal yet another car, Jean breathlessly says to his new friend, “Isn’t this incredible? Doesn’t it thrill you? Is your heart palpitating?” “You mean you don’t feel any fear?” Henri asks, and Jean, reiterating Henri’s own terror of settling into bourgeois conformity, responds, “You know, pal, what really scares me is working in an office.”
Mauvaise Graine does work itself around to some vague recognition of the illegality of car theft, but only to the extent that the story needs a climactic scene. Henri does conclude that his devil-may-care life is out of control, but even this revelation occurs not because of a moral awakening but rather because the likable Jean-le-cravatte is shot to death—by the police. The boss, tired of Henri’s egalitarian attitudes toward the gang’s profits (Henri having forced the boss to share more of the loot), sends Henri and Jeannette to the south of France on an errand and sabotages their car, after which Henri and Jeannette decide to begin a new life together abroad. Henri returns to Paris to pick up Jean-le-cravatte, but the police raid the garage and mortally wound Jean. Wilder and Esway handle the raid itself in a style bordering on farce—the Keystone Kops were only nominally less competent—thereby undercutting whatever moral force the law represents. But the directors shift the tone suddenly when Jean is wounded, making the scene in which Henri takes the dying Jean to his father’s office the only harsh scene in the film. Yet even here, Wilder and Esway don’t descend into sentimentality. They block the scene in such a way that Henri stands slightly to the left, the boy’s body lies on a table in the center, and the doctor stands in front of the corpse with his back to the camera. Cutting back and forth between Henri and Dr. Pasquier, Wilder and Esway never include a shot of the dead boy’s face—it’s all between Henri and his father. When Dr. Pasquier sends his son away for good there’s barely a trace of emotion.
Henri’s reunion with Jeannette, filmed in a series of extreme long shots, has a similar affective distance. Jeannette’s reaction to her brother’s death is thoroughly restrained. Wilder and Esway are eager to get the couple onto the ship, toning down the emotional resolution of the narrative in favor of motion—the look of the waves, the size and form of the ship as it sets sail. The camera is still in motion at the end of the film, tilting down from the ship to the rippling waves in the wake of the speedboat in which the camera has been set. We’re moving, too. The camera is even more restless than any of these unsettled characters; it has a drive of its own, distinct from the restlessness of Henri and Jeannette. They remain on the ship we’ve left behind as Wilder and Esway’s camera speeds us out on the water toward nothing in particular.
Mauvaise Graine didn’t open until the summer of 1934, long after Wilder had left Paris. In the meantime, Billie was still killing time at the Ansonia, and it still wasn’t good enough. Having white-knuckled his way through the filming of Mauvaise Graine, he decided that he didn’t have the resilience to be a film director. Writing in cafés and hotel rooms, taking potshots at fools over coffee and cigarettes—these were his talents. Worrying about whether actors would remember his dialogue, whether a sudden cloud would spoil the light, the camera jamming, transportation, sound conditions on the location, a little wind in the microphone—these were not simple irritants. They were hell, and he vowed he would never direct another motion picture again.
He did, however, keep writing scripts and sending them to his upscale Ufa friend Joe May, who had left his transitional Paris villa and moved to Los Angeles to become a producer at Columbia Pictures. One of these screenplays, called Pam-Pam, was the blueprint for a musical, the setup of which had a familiar ring. Pam-Pam was the story of a runaway youth—a girl this time—who lives in an abandoned Broadway theater and joins a gang of criminals—counterfeiters rather than car thieves. Together they put on a show. Billie already had his first Hollywood credit—Fox had remade Ihre Hoheit befiehlt in the spring of 1933 as Adorable with Janet Gaynor. Despite the fact that he was just another German-speaking Jew pacing around a none-too-elegant refugee hotel in Paris, there was still the chance that somebody in Hollywood might recognize his name and see the talent it represented.
Pam-Pam may not have been the most inspired of Wilder’s creations, but it worked—at least to the extent o
f winning him his first Hollywood deal. In December, May cabled Wilder in Paris with the news that the producer Sam Briskin at Columbia was ready to buy Pam-Pam as a story idea. The studio would pay him $150 a week to write the screenplay. More important, Columbia would pay for his ticket—one-way only—from Paris to Los Angeles. Having no particular reason to stay in France, Wilder took the offer. Genia, having remarried earlier that year, was living reasonably comfortably in Vienna with her new husband, a businessman named Siedlisker. The Nazis’ power was expanding, and for Billie, there was no safety in returning to a German-speaking city. The already infamous book burning took place in Berlin in May 1933, with the works of Jewish writers like Heine, Marx, Freud, and Zweig, gay writers like Magnus Hirschfeld, and leftist writers such as Mann, Brecht, Remarque, and Sinclair tossed gleefully in a heap and set ablaze. By mid-October it was a crime even to buy these books in Germany.
As for Billie’s career, the French film establishment wasn’t scrambling to hire him as a screenwriter, and he had no intention of trying to put together another film for himself to write and direct in France. Willie, on the other hand, was in the States (albeit on the East Coast), and he seemed to be making a go of it. Wilder hadn’t seen his brother for twelve years, but at least he would have somebody to meet him on his arrival in a new country. According to Wilder, Hollywood was his goal all along; it had simply been a matter of getting there. Other Austro-German émigrés hadn’t rushed to the United States right away, since they thought they’d return to Germany eventually, if later rather than sooner. Billie, on the other hand, didn’t care if he returned. He obtained a temporary visa, arranged to stay with Willie and his family in a New York suburb, and wrapped up his life in Paris. Hella would not be accompanying him.
On January 22, 1934, Billie Wilder set sail on the Aquitania. He chose a British ship so he could work on his English, having learned little more than a few foul phrases to complement the jazz lyrics that kept buzzing in his brain. He took with him a few American novels he’d bought at an English-language bookstore on the Place de l’Opéra—Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Lewis’s Babbitt, and Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel—and, reportedly, a mere eleven dollars in cash. More valuable, though, was the relentless nervous energy he carried with him wherever he went. He paced his way across the Atlantic.
PART TWO
1934–1941
7. TO HOLLYWOOD
Scene B-8. Interior. Iscovescu’s Room. Iscovescu is pacing the floor restlessly, cane in hand. As he passes the washstand, his eyes fall on something. He stops. A cockroach is crawling down the wall on its way to a haven behind the blotchy mirror. Iscovescu raises his stick.
ISCOVESCU (to the cockroach): Where do you think you are going?! You’re not a citizen, are you? Where’s your quota number?!
He smashes the cockroach with his stick.
—Hold Back the Dawn
It is a fantastic commentary on the inhumanity of our times that for thousands and thousands of people, a piece of paper with a stamp on it is the difference between life and death.” This is the moral judgment of the journalist Dorothy Thompson, writing in the late 1930s. It was too late to save most of these countless thousands by then. Billie Wilder arrived in the United States in 1934 armed with foresight, a few dollars, a six-week job on the other side of the continent, and a piece of paper with a stamp on it. He was lucky to get into the United States when he did. Characteristically, he made the right choice and survived. Others delayed, gambled, settled. They denied the threat, relaxed their guard, and suffered for it.
Willie Wilder, materially in better shape than his younger brother, was living in spare middle-class comfort in Baldwin, New York, one of a string of suburbs that bulge and spread along the south shore of Long Island. Apart from offering his younger brother a few days’ bed and board, Willie also had the fraternal pleasure of introducing Billie to Manhattan, the concrete mirage Genia had been bubbling about all those years—the sheer immensity of the city and the vigorous stability it represented. Dreams, loves, crimes, scams, talents, possibilities: Billie, of course, had seen it all before. As Lotte Lenya recalled of her own introduction to New York, “We had no first impressions, for we had all seen the movies of von Sternberg and von Stroheim.” The difference was that now Billie could actually smell it for himself.
In spite of the Depression, Willie had made a good life for himself in the States, fashioning purses. Willie had a family as well, a wife and son, and his brother saw that the steady hum of daily life in the States could be most appealing, given certain adjustments. (Hollywood, not Baldwin; movies, not purses; lots of women, not a wife.)
For Wilder, the new world represented a triumph of liberal democracy. True, the rich were earnestly attempting to dismantle Roosevelt’s New Deal and thinking up new ways to smash the unions, but then again the rich weren’t Nazis and the United States wasn’t likely to turn fascist, at least not literally. There were certainly stray swastika-scrawlers lurking around Yorkville and the other German neighborhoods of greater New York, murmuring of the Fatherland’s new dawn, but generally they knew enough to keep a fairly low profile. Jews, meanwhile, were everywhere. It was just like Berlin, except that here nobody had to run for their lives. On the streets of New York, in theaters and stores, in the business world, even in the circle of advisors to the president, American Jews were thriving. They were famous for their control of the American film industry: Mayer and Thalberg at MGM; Cohn at Columbia; the Warner brothers; Zukor at Paramount; the amazing Goldfish, now Goldwyn, one of the two driving forces behind United Artists’ independent productions; Nicholas Schenck, the other driving force….
On the other hand, Hollywood’s top directors weren’t Jewish, Lubitsch being a key exception (and he had already earned an international reputation by the time he got to Hollywood). There weren’t too many Jewish stars, either—the Marx Brothers, Paul Muni, Al Jolson. But behind the scenes, there were as many Jewish writers in Hollywood as there had been at Ufa. Some of Hollywood’s most successful screenwriters were Jews: Ben Hecht, Samson Raphaelson, Herman Mankiewicz, S. J. Perelman, Morrie Ryskind, Sidney Buchman, Jules Furthman, George S. Kaufman. Billie was eager to become one himself. What he didn’t already know about Hollywood screenwriting he could learn. And he could bluff his way into anything.
He had a very long train trip to think about it. None of his earlier migrations could compare. Krakόw is 200 miles from Vienna, and Vienna is 320 miles from Berlin. From Berlin to Paris is roughly 550 miles. But from New York to Los Angeles by train is well over 2,500 miles. The Twentieth Century took him to Chicago—when he got to work at Columbia Pictures he’d hear about the John Barrymore comedy they were making about that train—and the Chief took him the rest of the way to California. It took fifty-five hours from Chicago on the Chief, which already had a reputation as “a rolling boudoir for film celebrities.” The route took him straight through the heart of the American West—Dodge City, Zuni, Canyon Diablo, Pisgah—speeding through flat, corny plains and empty, dusty deserts until he reached Los Angeles.
Joe May himself met Billie downtown and took him back to his house in the Hollywood Hills. The Mays were no longer on quite such a high financial horse. They arranged with Billie the terms of his room and board—it would be seventy-five dollars a week, half of Billie’s salary.
He immediately found that his daily routine was far from glamorous, and it offered more than its share of humiliation. Scriptwriting in a foreign language was lonely, exasperating work, especially for a writer who worked best and most comfortably in collaboration. Moreover, Columbia was still a second-rate studio, albeit a large and successful one. Its fortunes began to rise dramatically even during the few weeks Wilder was there, owing to the phenomenal success of the studio’s new comedy, It Happened One Night, which had just been released. But Columbia’s head, Harry Cohn, was an infamous penny-pincher, crass even by Hollywood standards. Cohn had recently redecorated his office to resemble that of the cartoonish Italia
n dictator, Benito Mussolini. He already had the matching temper.
Columbia didn’t maintain a stable of stars, writers, and directors as the bigger studios tended to do. Instead, Cohn struck deals to borrow stars from elsewhere—for It Happened One Night, Clark Gable came from MGM and Claudette Colbert from Paramount. Cohn hired most of his writers on a film-by-film basis as well. Columbia wasn’t alone in this practice. In November of 1933, MGM copied the miserly Cohn and began hiring writers on a per-project basis and firing them as soon as their work was done, and the trade papers predicted (wrongly, as it happened) that staff writers would eventually be eliminated entirely. It was for this reason, among others, that Hollywood writers began leaving the producerdominated Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1933 and joining the more radical and rambunctious Screen Writers Guild. Hollywood’s producers were enraged, including the otherwise benign Irving Thalberg. Darryl Zanuck, taking it further than most others, was quoted as saying, “If those guys set up a picket line and try to shut down my studio, I’ll mount a machine gun on the roof and mow them down.” This is the community into which Billie Wilder walked in 1934.
