Billy Wilder

In his Oscar acceptance speech, "The Artist" director Michel Hazanavicius said he wanted to thank three people: "Billy Wilder, Billy Wilder and Billy Wilder. " Backstage, Hazanavicius was asked why he felt compelled to thank Wilder, the Oscar-winning director of such classics as "The Lost Weekend," "Double Indemnity" and "The Apartment," three times. "I thanked Billy Wilder three times," he replied, "because I had to keep it short. " Hazanavicius said he would have thanked his accomplished forebear 1,000 times if he could have, referring to the Austrian-born Wilder as "the perfect director" and "the soul of Hollywood.

In his Oscar acceptance speech, "The Artist" director Michel Hazanavicius said he wanted to thank three people: "Billy Wilder, Billy Wilder and Billy Wilder. " Backstage, Hazanavicius was asked why he felt compelled to thank Wilder, the Oscar-winning director of such classics as "The Lost Weekend," "Double Indemnity" and "The Apartment," three times. "I thanked Billy Wilder three times," he replied, "because I had to keep it short. " Hazanavicius said he would have thanked his accomplished forebear 1,000 times if he could have, referring to the Austrian-born Wilder as "the perfect director" and "the soul of Hollywood.

WE WENT TO the Charles Theatre to see Kissing Jessica Stein, a movie about a young woman who can't find a decent man and so attempts romance with the only gender that's left. The story was pretty good. But it was no Billy Wilder. When Wilder crossed genders in Some Like It Hot, he created not just a comedy about sexual confusion but a literate movie with adult sensibilities just below the surface. "Well, nobody's perfect," Joe E. Brown declares to Jack Lemmon in the famous closing line when he's told Lemmon's a guy. The heart insists on wanting what it wants.

When Billy Wilder's comedies clicked, whole groups of stars could settle into unexpectedly risible constellations - as they did in his most purely entertaining movie, the gangbusters Roaring Twenties farce, "Some Like It Hot." Wilder had worked with Monroe before 1959, but in "Some Like It Hot," he took her dizzy-blonde persona and ran with it. When Monroe's Sugar Kane, a ukulele-strumming singer in an all-girl band, isn't cooing or tippling, she's falling for male tenor-sax players.

Fans of the late Billy Wilder are in for a serious treat this summer, as a handful of his greatest films will be given the big-screen treatment here in Baltimore. Tomorrow at the Charles, Ace in the Hole (aka The Big Carnival) will be shown at noon, with admission set at only $5. One of Wilder's most cynical films (as well as one of his most rousing), it stars Kirk Douglas as an opportunistic newspaper reporter who sees his chance for glory come when a man gets trapped inside a mine. Not only does Douglas' character cover the heck out of the story, he soon realizes that the longer the man stays trapped, the longer he can benefit from the poor guy's misfortune.

The jaunty little man in the Tyrolean hat could do it all. With Some Like It Hot, he wrote and directed one of history's funniest films. With Double Indemnity, he wrote and directed the film noir against which all other film noir is measured. With Sunset Boulevard, he wrote and directed a brutal indictment of Hollywood myopia that was also one of the tautest, leanest, most evocative tragedies ever put on film. Billy Wilder, the closest thing to a Renaissance man behind the camera that Hollywood has produced, died Wednesday of pneumonia at his home in Beverly Hills.

* Walter B. Newman,who wrote the screenplays for "The Man With the Golden Arm" and "Cat Ballou," died of lung cancer Thursday at his home in Sherman Oaks, Calif. The 77-year-old New York City native began writing radio dramas, notably "The Halls of Ivy," with Ronald Coleman, and "Columbia Workshop." He was also a co-writer of the pilot episode for the radio series "Gunsmoke," which established the characters that were later popular in the television series of the same name. In 1951, he wrote his first screenplay, "Ace in the Hole," with Billy Wilder, who directed the film, which was later known by the title "The Big Carnival."

ACE IN THE HOLE -- The Criterion Collection / $39.95 A prescient slam at sensational journalism gets the classic treatment it deserves in Tuesday's Criterion Collection release of Billy Wilder's 1951 Ace in the Hole. Kirk Douglas stars as Chuck Tatum, an exiled New York reporter who rides his typewriter like a hot rod while seeking a way back into the big time. Rusticating in New Mexico, he gets a sensational scoop: The collapsing rock and sand of a sacred Indian burial cavern have trapped a local treasure-hunter.

We'll always have Paris," Mister Rick told Ilsa in Casablanca. The line cemented Americans' continuing affair with the City of Light as the perfect setting for romance and intrigue. And this delightfully dangerous liaison has never gone out of fashion, no matter how much our public figures deride France as a soft-sister democracy. In the appealingly amorous dramedy Broken English, opening today at the Charles, a heroine with the classic movie name Nora Wilder undertakes what has become the quintessential quest for a metropolis also known as the City of Love.

Men of a certain generation could say of her that she was Marilyn, their Marilyn. She stood at the center of an unabashed adolescent fantasy, a dream of ecstasy so pure it would somehow never leave their consciousness: not just the pulchritude, not just the little girl voice, not just the penumbra of blondness, not just those two red pumpkin lips and, behind them, the tidy rows of pearly-perfect teeth. To see her was to moan a little, to squirm a bit, perchance to dream.And she will not go away, appearing before us once again in slow and languid strokes on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of her troubling death.

We'll always have Paris," Mister Rick told Ilsa in Casablanca. The line cemented Americans' continuing affair with the City of Light as the perfect setting for romance and intrigue. And this delightfully dangerous liaison has never gone out of fashion, no matter how much our public figures deride France as a soft-sister democracy. In the appealingly amorous dramedy Broken English, opening today at the Charles, a heroine with the classic movie name Nora Wilder undertakes what has become the quintessential quest for a metropolis also known as the City of Love.

ACE IN THE HOLE -- The Criterion Collection / $39.95 A prescient slam at sensational journalism gets the classic treatment it deserves in Tuesday's Criterion Collection release of Billy Wilder's 1951 Ace in the Hole. Kirk Douglas stars as Chuck Tatum, an exiled New York reporter who rides his typewriter like a hot rod while seeking a way back into the big time. Rusticating in New Mexico, he gets a sensational scoop: The collapsing rock and sand of a sacred Indian burial cavern have trapped a local treasure-hunter.

In 1965, Repulsion (playing tomorrow at noon and Thursday at 9 p.m. at the Charles) was greeted as Roman Polanski's riposte to Hitchcock's Psycho -- a brilliant, grisly potboiler that gave the 32-year-old Polish filmmaker commercial entree to the West. Four decades later, it's evident that Polanski was always drawn to existential horror and that his lucid moviemaking owes as much to Hollywood's master writer-directors as to visual maestros like Hitchcock. After Repulsion premiered, Polanski told Cahiers du Cinema, "I like to shut myself up. I remember: when I was twelve, fourteen, I liked atmospheres that came from ... what do I know?

Fans of the late Billy Wilder are in for a serious treat this summer, as a handful of his greatest films will be given the big-screen treatment here in Baltimore. Tomorrow at the Charles, Ace in the Hole (aka The Big Carnival) will be shown at noon, with admission set at only $5. One of Wilder's most cynical films (as well as one of his most rousing), it stars Kirk Douglas as an opportunistic newspaper reporter who sees his chance for glory come when a man gets trapped inside a mine. Not only does Douglas' character cover the heck out of the story, he soon realizes that the longer the man stays trapped, the longer he can benefit from the poor guy's misfortune.

WE WENT TO the Charles Theatre to see Kissing Jessica Stein, a movie about a young woman who can't find a decent man and so attempts romance with the only gender that's left. The story was pretty good. But it was no Billy Wilder. When Wilder crossed genders in Some Like It Hot, he created not just a comedy about sexual confusion but a literate movie with adult sensibilities just below the surface. "Well, nobody's perfect," Joe E. Brown declares to Jack Lemmon in the famous closing line when he's told Lemmon's a guy. The heart insists on wanting what it wants.

The jaunty little man in the Tyrolean hat could do it all. With Some Like It Hot, he wrote and directed one of history's funniest films. With Double Indemnity, he wrote and directed the film noir against which all other film noir is measured. With Sunset Boulevard, he wrote and directed a brutal indictment of Hollywood myopia that was also one of the tautest, leanest, most evocative tragedies ever put on film. Billy Wilder, the closest thing to a Renaissance man behind the camera that Hollywood has produced, died Wednesday of pneumonia at his home in Beverly Hills.

His voice was a foghorn, he walked with the kind of slouch your mother always warned you about, his face looked like it never quite woke up. His picture deserved to be in the dictionary, right next to the word "rumpled." His perennial co-star, Jack Lemmon, once said of Walter Matthau, "He walks like a child's windup toy." Matthau, who died of heart failure last Saturday at age 79, fit no one's description of a movie star, but he was one. Not only that, he was one of those movie stars whose name always seems to have the word "beloved" somewhere nearby.

The lost treasure of American movies is charm. No one can define it, no one can capture it if it isn't there to be captured, but you either have it or you don't, and fewer and fewer American movies do. And as the largely charmless "Sabrina" plays out, it becomes clear that Greg Kinnear has it and Harrison Ford does not.For Ford, the news isn't necessary catastrophic. This stern gentleman has made and will continue to make a healthy living as a graceful action star; a convincing dramatic heavyweight; even, if the occasion demands, a clown.

His voice was a foghorn, he walked with the kind of slouch your mother always warned you about, his face looked like it never quite woke up. His picture deserved to be in the dictionary, right next to the word "rumpled." His perennial co-star, Jack Lemmon, once said of Walter Matthau, "He walks like a child's windup toy." Matthau, who died of heart failure last Saturday at age 79, fit no one's description of a movie star, but he was one. Not only that, he was one of those movie stars whose name always seems to have the word "beloved" somewhere nearby.

The lost treasure of American movies is charm. No one can define it, no one can capture it if it isn't there to be captured, but you either have it or you don't, and fewer and fewer American movies do. And as the largely charmless "Sabrina" plays out, it becomes clear that Greg Kinnear has it and Harrison Ford does not.For Ford, the news isn't necessary catastrophic. This stern gentleman has made and will continue to make a healthy living as a graceful action star; a convincing dramatic heavyweight; even, if the occasion demands, a clown.