One of my favourite stories about Billy Wilder goes like this. One day, late in his career, he arrived at a Hollywood studio to pitch a new idea to a producer. The producer turned out to be a young man who clearly didn’t know much about classic cinema. He told Billy that he wasn’t familiar with his work and could he perhaps run through a few of his films for him.
Billy looked at the man and said, “Fine, after you . . .”
I’m betting that whatever this guy had produced it couldn’t compare with Billy’s dazzling line-up of classic films.
Billy Wilder was born in 1906 in Sucha Beskidzka, a town now in Poland but then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Billy was born Samuel but his mother had been to America and seen Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. She enjoyed it so much she decided to nickname her son Billy. The family later moved to Vienna, where his father Max tried his hand at various business ventures, including being part-owner of a hotel-restaurant.
The young Wilder developed a taste for sharp observation early on. He worked as a newspaper reporter in Vienna and was very keen on jazz. His articles about bandleader Paul Whiteman led to an invitation to follow the band to Berlin and Billy decided to stay on as a freelance reporter. Berlin in the 1920s was alive with ideas, cabaret, and cinema and Wilder soaked it all in. He began to mingle with people from the German film industry and soon moved into screenwriting.
Wilder received screen credit for 13 films produced in Germany between 1929 and 1933, but his promising career in Berlin was cut short. In 1933, the Nazis came to power. That year his father died and Wilder arranged for him to be buried in a Jewish cemetery in Berlin. With Hitler consolidating power and Jews being targeted, Wilder realised he had no future in Germany. After the Reichstag fire, he fled to Paris. There, he continued screenwriting and even co-directed his first film, Mauvaise Graine (1934). Shortly afterwards, he sold a script to Columbia Studios in Hollywood, and with that invitation he sailed for America.
Breaking into Hollywood
Wilder’s early days in Hollywood weren’t easy. His English was poor and he shared an apartment with fellow émigré Peter Lorre and made ends meet by hustling for work.
What Wilder did have though, was persistence and wit. He began writing screenplays with Charles Brackett, a more established writer with fluent English. The Wilder-Brackett partnership became one of the most productive in Hollywood, blending Brackett’s sophistication with Wilder’s bite. Together they worked on hits such as Ninotchka (1939), a satirical comedy famously marketed with the tagline: “Garbo Laughs!”
That success cemented Wilder’s reputation and he began to move from writing into directing. He felt screenwriters were too often mistreated by directors and the only way to protect his work was to get behind the camera himself.
Wilder the Director
Wilder’s breakthrough as a director came with Double Indemnity (1944), a dark tale of lust, greed and murder. Co-written with Raymond Chandler, the film became a defining example of film noir. Wilder used shadows, venetian blinds and Los Angeles locations to give the story a hard-edged realism. It was controversial at the time—Barbara Stanwyck plotting insurance fraud and murder was considered scandalous—but it became a critical and commercial success.
From there, the hits kept coming. Wilder had an uncanny ability to move between genres: crime thrillers, social dramas, romantic comedies and biting satires. His motto was “If you’re going to tell the truth, be funny or they’ll kill you.”
In The Lost Weekend (1945), Wilder tackled alcoholism with unflinching honesty. The film, starring Ray Milland, was one of the first Hollywood movies to show addiction as a serious disease rather than a comic weakness. It won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.
Then came Sunset Boulevard (1950), perhaps Wilder’s masterpiece and my personal favourite of Wilder’s films. The film begins with a dead man floating in a swimming pool, narrating his own murder—a narrative device that was bold, even shocking at the time. Gloria Swanson’s portrayal of fading silent film star Norma Desmond gave us one of cinema’s most haunting lines. Writer Joe Gillis played by William Holden is trying to get away from two guys who want to repossess his car. To evade them he drives into what he thinks is an abandoned mansion. He is surprised to find it occupied by the once famous silent film star Norma Desmond played by Gloria Swanson. He recognises her and comments “You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big.” Norma replies, “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.” The movie was both a scathing satire of Hollywood and a deeply human tragedy. It’s also interesting from a lot of angles; we see the famous Schwab’s drug store, once a Hollywood icon but now gone. Director Cecil B DeMille plays himself and when we see Joe and Norma spending an evening watching her old films, they are actually Gloria Swanson’s old films and one was directed by none other than Erich Von Stroheim who plays Norma’s butler and former husband.
Comedy with an Edge
Although Wilder made some of the darkest films in Hollywood, he was equally skilled at comedy. In fact, many of his comedies remain among the most beloved of all time. Some Like It Hot (1959) paired Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis as musicians on the run, disguising themselves as women in an all-female band. Add Marilyn Monroe to the mix and you had comedy gold. The film was outrageous for its time and famously ends with Joe E. Brown’s immortal line, “Nobody’s perfect.”
Marilyn tested both Wilder and her co stars as she was notoriously late and struggled with her lines. One infamous scene required 47 takes and all Monroe had to say was ‘it’s me, Sugar’. Wilder wasn’t happy because Marilyn wanted to change scenes and dialogue which he didn’t want to do. The final result though was a classic comedy.
The film’s closing line, “Well, nobody’s perfect”, is ranked 78th on The Hollywood Reporter list of Hollywood’s 100 Favourite Movie Lines and Wilder’s tombstone pays homage to the line with the inscription, “I’m a writer, but then, nobody’s perfect”.
Two years later, Wilder directed The Apartment (1960), a film that managed to be both romantic and cynical. Jack Lemmon plays an office worker who lets his bosses use his apartment for their affairs, only to fall for Shirley MacLaine’s elevator operator. The film mixes laughter with melancholy, revealing Wilder’s genius for blending tones. It won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay.
Wilder also directed Sabrina (1954), with Audrey Hepburn caught between Humphrey Bogart and William Holden, and The Seven Year Itch (1955), which gave us the iconic image of Monroe’s skirt billowing over a subway grate. He seemed to have a knack for capturing cultural moments while keeping his characters grounded and relatable.
Wilder’s Style and Legacy
What made Billy Wilder so special? Partly it was his range. Few directors could move from the bleak cynicism of Ace in the Hole (1951), a savage attack on media exploitation, to the screwball energy of Some Like It Hot. He didn’t stick to one style or genre; instead, he reshaped them.
His dialogue sparkled with wit, but underneath there was always truth. Wilder had an outsider’s eye—he never forgot that he was an immigrant looking at America with both fascination and scepticism. His characters often chase the American dream but collide with its hypocrisies and disappointments.
Wilder also had a reputation for precision. He was meticulous with scripts, often refusing improvisation. “You have to have a dream so you can get up in the morning,” he once said, “but dreams don’t last long.” His films carried that same bittersweet edge.
By the end of his career, Wilder had won six Oscars and left behind a body of work that filmmakers still study. When asked how he wanted to be remembered, he reportedly quipped: “I’m a writer, but then nobody’s perfect.
The Final Word
Billy Wilder died in 2002 at the age of 95. He had outlived most of his contemporaries and watched Hollywood change beyond recognition. Yet his films remain fresh. Watch Sunset Boulevard today, or Some Like It Hot; both are hugely entertaining.
So, when that young producer asked Wilder to list his films, he was showing his ignorance of a screen legend. His legacy speaks louder than any pitch meeting. And the truth is, even if “nobody’s perfect,” Billy Wilder came pretty close.
Rooting around in a secondhand shop in St Annes recently I picked up a hardback copy of Winston Churchill’s book My Early Life. It’s a thoroughly wonderful book written in Churchill’s inimitable style. He says in the introduction he has written a book about a vanished age and indeed he has. Churchill was born in 1974 at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire. He was the son of Lord Randolph Churchill who was in turn the son of the 7th Duke of Marlborough. His mother was an American, Jennie Jerome, the daughter of an American businessman. She married Lord Randolph and became Lady Churchill.
Looking back, I must have seen the film version before I read the book. Young Winston was directed by Richard Attenborough and is a wonderful adaptation of the book. When Winston first attends school, which of course was boarding school, his headmaster was played by Robert Hardy and he directs Winston to learn some Latin. Winston doesn’t do very well and the headmaster glares down at him and informs him that if he misbehaves, he will be punished, which to a great extent was Churchill’s overall view of school. Later he comments about exams ‘they always contrived to question me about things I didn’t know. I would much rather they asked me about things I did know.
The charge was depicted in the film Young Winston and in his book Churchill ponders about fate and a problem with his shoulder which necessitated using his revolver rather than his sword during the charge, reflecting that if he had been using his sword he might well have been killed in the latter stages when he was surrounded by the enemy.
One of things I particularly liked about Young Winston was the music. I bought the soundtrack album in 1985. The music for the film was in the main composed by Sir Alfred Ralston. He was brought into the film by director Attenborough as the two had worked together on a previous film, ‘Oh what a Lovely War’. The soundtrack features music by Edward Elgar, notably the Pomp and Circumstance March no 4 as well as Nimrod from the Enigma Variations.
Churchill ended up in a POW camp but resolved to escape despite also claiming to the Boers that he was a correspondent and should not have been detained. With the help of a group of Lancashire miners, Winston stowed away on a goods train and made his way back to the British lines.
Goldfinger is probably one of the best books in the Bond series and only the second 007 book that I ever read. (I’ll tell you about the first one later). I was at school at the time and for one of our assignments in English, we were asked to bring in a book which contained a really good description of a character. I chose Goldfinger as in it, Ian Fleming describes Goldfinger as a man who appeared to have been made using bits of other peoples’ bodies. This must have been in the mid-1960s and although the character of James Bond was pretty well known, the films had not begun to permeate down to the television screen.
This is an interesting story and the resulting film has perhaps become the quintessential Bond film even more so than Goldfinger. The story is about a criminal underworld organisation (SPECTRE) that steals an aircraft with nuclear weapons and holds the west to ransom threatening to explode the bombs.
In this book the secret service find that Blofeld, the head of SPECTRE, is trying to assume the identity of the Comte Balthazar de Bleuville. Bond poses as Sir Hilary Bray of the College of Arms in order to meet with Blofeld. Interestingly, Sir Hilary gives Bond a quick resumé of Bond’s family history including the Bond family motto ‘the world is not enough’ which was used by the film producers for the title of a later 007 film unrelated to Fleming’s books.
This book follows on from the previous one and we find James Bond depressed and disillusioned with his job after the death of Tracy. M considers sacking Bond but instead sends him on a diplomatic mission to meet the head of the Japanese secret service. The British want access to Russian documents which the Japanese are currently decoding. The Japanese decide to offer this information to Bond if he will assassinate a British resident who has created a garden of death, a garden full of poisonous plants which are attracting many Japanese citizens who want to commit suicide. Bond realises that this man is Blofeld and decides to keep this quiet until after he has killed him.
Casino Royale is the first book in the 007 series and it’s a pretty interesting and original one too. ‘Le Chiffre’, a gambler and also a member of SMERSH, a murderous department of the KGB is engaged in a desperate effort to win a great deal of money at the casinos of Royale Les Eaux in France. Le Chiffre is desperate because he has used SMERSH funds for his personal use and his spymaster bosses will not be pleased if they find out. Britain’s secret service happens to find out about this and sends Bond to France to make sure Le Chiffre doesn’t recoup those funds as of course as we all know, James Bond 007 is a bit of an expert with the cards.
This was the second Bond book to be published and the action takes place in the USA and the Caribbean, which Fleming loved and bought a house there which he named Goldeneye. Live and Let Die and in fact the whole book series were recently reissued with all the politically incorrect stuff removed which makes me wonder whether there was in fact anything left to publish after that process was complete. The book was published in 1953 and comes complete with all the prejudices and sexual and racial intolerances of the era. In one segment when Bond visits Harlem, Fleming tries to reproduces the accents and slang terms of the black people of Harlem and for me it’s not one of Fleming’s best books. In the film version, Roger Moore took over the licence to kill and the result was a very tongue in cheek version of James Bond. Sorry but Roger Moore as Bond just wasn’t for me. The film did feature a great theme song from Paul McCartney which was really a little underused in the film. Another feature of the film was a power boat chase along the Bayous of Florida which was a lot of fun but not entirely serious.
This was the third entry into the 007 series and the action takes place mostly in Dover. Millionaire Hugo Drax wants England to enter the space race and so he spends his own money on a rocket named the Moonraker which he intends to donate to the British government. It turns out that Drax is actually a nazi who wants to avenge defeat in the second world war by arranging for the rocket to destroy London. I read recently that Fleming wrote the book while staying in a cottage situated down by the famous chalk cliffs of Dover which was once owned by Noel Coward and later Fleming himself. It’s not a bad read at all and starts off with M asking Bond a favour as he suspects Drax to be cheating at cards and he wants Bond to see if he can sort things out as at the time, this was the mid-1950s, cheating at cards in London high society could really be a big scandal.
Fleming wrote this book at Goldeye, his house in Jamaica, after doing a great deal of research about diamond smuggling. Bond’s mission is to investigate a diamond smuggling ring and he does this by impersonating a diamond smuggler called Peter Franks. Franks leads Bond to an American woman called Tiffany Case who he begins to fall for. He tracks the smuggling ring to the American Spang brothers, leaders of the Spangled Mob, a criminal gang. The finale takes place in the Spangs’ restored western town, Spectreville.
British Secret Service. To do this they persuade a cypher clerk, Tatiana Romanova, to pretend to defect to the west with a Spektor cypher machine. She claims she will only to defect to Bond, having fallen for him after reading his KGB file.
Prior to the writing of this book, a firearms expert called Major Boothroyd wrote to Fleming explaining that an agent like Bond would never be armed with a Baretta as it was more of a ladies gun. Boothroyd recommended a Walther PPK. Fleming was so impressed he included the new gun in Dr No and also added a new character named Boothroyd as the armourer of the secret service.
A long time ago I decided that I would set myself the task of reading the entire Hamish Macbeth series of books. There are 34 books in the series, all written by author M.C. Beaton which is in fact a pen name for Marion Chesney. Marion actually wrote many books under various pseudonyms including Ann Fairfax, Jennie Tremaine, Helen Crampton, Charlotte Ward and Sarah Chester. After Marion’s death in 2019 further Hamish Macbeth novels have appeared penned by writer R.W. Green.
I mentioned a while ago about my 
I published a post quite a while ago about the month of January. January of course is cold and believe me, I hate the cold so I thought I’d get a lot of cold and chilly feelings off my chest by writing about my least favourite time of the year. Today I’m going to go the opposite way and write about the month of July, generally the warmest month of the year. In fact the warmest month ever recorded was 
My brother Colin died almost two months ago and even now I find it hard to believe. Going home a couple of weeks ago I picked up two pizza bases from the shops. I bought two without thinking because I’d usually make Colin and me a couple of small pizzas for when he came round for one of our regular bi-weekly chats.
