27 Days With Billy Wilder And Me

Billy Wilder’s twenty-sixth movie, Fedora, starring William Holden and Marthe Keller, was released in 1978. Billy was 72 years old.

It was hard to find this movie. It’s out of print in the U.S. Or it was never on DVD in the first place. Either way, don’t expect to pick one up at your local Best Buy.

The DVD I’m watching is an import, Region 2 from Spain. So I am forced to watch it through my computer’s DVD player (because my Blu-ray player and my DVD player are Region 1), connected to by hi-def TV via a snake-like coil of cables. Even when I was able to make the connection, I had to futz with the subtitles and audio. Apparently, the default is Spanish. So I turned off the Spanish, clicked on English dubbing, and clicked off the subtitles, English or otherwise.

I can tell immediately that this movie isn’t going to be any good. The sound is tinny, the picture is washed out, and the acting is overwrought. (Part of that could be the fault of the DVD transfer. But not all of it.)

Above all, the dialogue is stilted. And I find that oddest of all. Billy Wilder with Charles Brackett was first-rate. With I.A.L. Diamond, sublime. Yet, all of Wilder’s movies post The Apartment are incredibly poor, especially in the writing. There’s just no pizazz.

Unfortunately, that holds true for Fedora as well. Even though this was written by Wilder and Diamond, based on the story by Tom Tryon, it’s coarse. And it looks like a second-place winner in a film-school competition. Its camera angles and staging say “art film student.” But its lack of a unique, compelling story says “I only got a C on my project.”

Yet, this isn’t a budding filmmaker. This is Billy Wilder! He has more Oscars than I have eyelets in my tennis shoe.

Principle Cast:
Barry ‘Dutch’ Detweiler………………………………….William Holden (1918–1981)
Fedora / Antonia Sobryanski……………………………Marthe Keller (1945- )
Countess Fedora Sobryanski…………………………….Hildegard Knef (1925–2002)
Doctor Vando…………………………………………………..José Ferrer (1912–1992)

So what’s the problem? Why is each movie since The Apartment worse than the one before?

Fedeora is the story of an aging, reclusive film star who wants to make another movie, but who can’t escape those who watch over her — her guardians/caretakers/captors. So the director/producer (Detweiler) who seeks to coax her out of retirement has to figure out if Fedora is telling the truth, or if her doctor (Ferrer) is. When Fedora turns up dead, the plot thickens…and true identities are revealed.

This is a dreary film. In many ways, it resembles both Sunset Boulevard (which also starred William Holden) and, at least in the first half, Suddenly, Last Summer, the 1959 movies starring Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift. But it lacks the razor-sharp wit of the former, and the riveting beauty of the latter’s star.

At best, this is a TV Movie of the Week.