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What do you get when you throw Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler on the same film? You get lines like “How could I have known that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle?” and one of the most compelling film noirs ever to grace the screen.

Set in Los Angeles, Walter Neff is a niaeve insurance sales man who calls on the wrong house. When he makes his call to the Dietrichson residence to try to talk Mr. Dietrichson into renewing his auto policy he encounters Mrs. Dietrichson and becomes enamored, soon the two create a lovers plot to murder Mr. Dietrichson and scam Walter’s company, by taking out accident insurance and utilizing the double indemnity clause on it, getting paid twice the normal policy amount after Dietrichson’s death. However, murder is no easy game and before long the coconspirators find themselves embroiled in a plot they can’t see an escape from and begin to do anything to keep from ending up in a gas chamber for their crime.

Double Indemnity is one of the finest films Billy Wilder, or anyone in the cast ever made. This film is pitch perfect from the ghostly opening credits to the very end and delivers every twist, turn and foul move with the deft and confidence only a premiere director like Wilder could deliver.

This film speaks to Wilder’s skill because no single major character in this film is remotely sympathetic, and yet you end up caring about their fate. Walter Neff is a good guy gone bad for a dame, a sin he can’t be forgiven for, and from the moment you see Phyllis Dietrichson walk into frame you know that she is Eve’s sin wrapped up with a bow. No one is innocent in this film.

I believe I’ve said it before, but part of where the magic of a Billy Wilder film lies is the timelessness of his stories. Even though this film is set in post-war Los Angles, the script could be taken, set in any major city in a contemporary setting and could work nearly verbatim as a modern picture. Wilder made stories whose plots didn’t revolve on technology, politics or personalities specific to his era; he made stories that were based in universal human emotions – love, greed, lust, wealth and relationships – the rest was incidental.

It’s said by Wilder himself that Chandler had problems adapting to screenplay writing. However, I cannot emphasize enough that the dialogue in this screenplay drips of the tongues of the actors in a way only the writing of Raymond Chandler could. It is lush, fast and complicated forcing the viewer to pay as much attention to the nuances of what the characters are saying as they are to the actions the characters are performing.

Double Indemnity stands high on the list of films I want to aspire to. If I could capture the artistic verve that Wilder & Chandler put into this film, I could put a story on screen that audiences wouldn’t be able to rip their eyes away from. That my friends is a lofty directorial goal.

Director: Billy Wilder
Writers: Billy Wilder & Raymond Chandler
Walter Neff: Fred MacMurray
Phyllis Dietrichson: Barbara Stanwyck
Barton Keyes: Edward G. Robinson
Lola Dietrichson: Jean Heather
Mr. Dietrichson: Tom Powers

Walter Neff: That was all there was to it.Nothing had slipped, nothing had been overlooked.There was nothing to give us away. And yet, Keyes, as I was walking down the street to the drugstore, suddenly, it came over me that everything would go wrong. It sounds crazy Keyes, but it's true, so help me, I couldn't hear my own footsteps. It was the walk of a dead man.

I am adamant that Billy Wilder is one of the best director’s to have ever lived. He has a filmography that would make Spielberg jealous: Stalag 17, Sabrina, The Apartment, Some Like It Hot, Love in the Afternoon, Ace in the Hole, Irma La Douce, Sunset Blvd. and a myriad of other films that I know you’ve heard of. Luckily for me, I found a little documentary on Netflix called Billy Wilder Speaks.

In this case, the documentary is exactly what the name might imply. The filmmakers piggybacked onto a series of interviews Wilder was doing for a book and filmed them with the proviso that they not do anything with the footage until Wilder was dead; Wilder was traditionally pretty secluded and thought the footage would embarrass him if released while he was alive. I have to say I think this was a beautiful yet simple film that gave me the best present I could have asked for – a trip into Billy Wilder’s thoughts.

For just over an hour the film is a series of conversations with Wilder in both English and German, talking about his life, his films and why he made the works he did. Perhaps the tidbit that made me feel the best was when Wilder told of how the day before he was to start his directorial debut The Major & the Minor he went to Ernst Lubitsch his friend and mentor and admitted to him he was scared out of his mind; Lubitsch turned right back at Wilder and said that even though he’d made over seventy films he was still terrified on the first day of every one of them.

This is the kind of candid talk you can’t get from a press conference or an interview and it was wonderful for me to hear it out of the mouth of one of the filmmakers I respect the most.

I’m sure Billy Wilder Speaks is not for everyone, but for those that it will appeal to it’s a gem. I only wish I could find my Cameron Crowe book Conversations with Wilder so that I could really make a weekend of immersing myself in Wilder’s mind.

Directors: Gisela Grischow & Volker Schlondorff

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is unlike any Sherlock Holmes story I’ve ever seen, but I should expect nothing less from Billy Wilder. This incarnation of Holmes is about the Holmes we do not see, the Holmes Waston and the people he works the cases of see; this is Holmes complete with bumps, bruises, faux pas, brilliant moments and confounding mysteries.

This time Sherlock takes a case that appears to be rather mundane, an amnesiac woman washes onto his doorstep and once she regains her memory it appears that she is looking for her missing husband. Watson & Sherlock take the case and track it all the way to Scotland and the Loch Ness monster only to find out that the case is nothing that it seems.

What I love about Billy Wilder is that his films are vastly unique from anything else you’ll ever watch. I was hooked on this one from the opening titles; Wilder enjoys building subtext and meaning into everything that he does and this starts right in the titles. For the titles Watson’s bag is opened presumably after his death, and he has left a letter explaining a case that he never wrote about; as the letter is read the items in Watson’s case are examined and the wonderful thing that is done is that every object has a dual purpose, it appears to be one thing but is actually something else – until a syringe is pulled out. The double meaning of this item is actually what the rest of the film is about.

Wilder paints Holmes as a complex, tortured and brilliant man. A man who would rather shun society than deign to appear in the trivial goings on of day to day life. Honestly, he’s a bit of a prick, but somehow this makes him human.

I loved this version of Sherlock Holmes, but it only excites me for what’s coming this Christmas – the return of Holmes to the big screen in with Robert Downey Jr. and Guy Ritchie.

Director: Billy Wilder
Writers: Billy Wilder & IAL Diamond
Sherlock Holmes: Robert Stephens
Dr. Watson: Colin Blakely
Gabrielle: Genevieve Page
Mycroft Holmes: Christopher Lee

Holmes: Some of us are cursed with memories like flypaper. Stuck there is a staggering amount of miscellaneous data, most of it useless.

It is no secret that Billy Wilder is my favorite director, but I can say that of all his films Sabrina is not one of my favorites.

In the film, Sabrina Fairchild is the daughter of the chauffer to the powerful Larabee family; growing up adjacent to the Larabee house has made young Sabrina become infatuated with the youngest Larabee son, David. The problem is that David doesn’t even know Sabrina exists, he is far too caught up in chasing after the daughters of the socialites in his circle. Sabrina’s father decides the best course of action to get Sabrina over David is to send her to cooking school in Paris; while in Paris Sabrina is absolutely miserable, until she meets a friend that helps her begin to mature into the sophisticated Parisian woman she can be. Upon graduation Sabrina returns to the Larabee estate and decides to use her newfound feminine charms to win the newly engaged David. In order to keep David from ruining his engagement (and therefore the plastics deal the Larabee’s are working towards) older brother Linus does his best to occupy Sabrina’s time.

I can’t name anything large or specific that makes Sabrina mark low on my list of Billy Wilder films. One of the key elements for me is that it tonally just feels very different from all of his previous films; Sabrina was made after some of his best - Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Sunset Blvd. and Ace in the Hole - and Sabrina is just borderline bland next to those.

I also have to say that I don’t know if I enjoy Humphrey Bogart in the role of Linus. Call me ageist but to me he is just too old to be playing Hepburn’s love interest. The tow also don’t seem to be performing towards each other; Hepburn is interacting with Bogart, but Bogart doesn’t seem to be responding to her.

I still enjoy this movie and think Wilder is a film god, I just think he made such astronomically great movies that this one just being “good” seems sub-par.

Director: Billy Wilder
Writer: Billy Wilder, Samuel Taylor & Ernest Lehman
Linus Larabee: Humphrey Bogart
Sabrina Fairchild: Audrey Hepburn
David Larabee: William Holden

Aside from being a Wilder obsessed person I had to see Some Like It Hot because it’s consistently considered as one of the top films of all time, it also has one of the most famous last scenes in film history.

Probably the most famous of all of Wilder’s films Some Like It Hot revolves around Joe & Jerry, poor musicians trying to make a living in Chicago in 1929. Initially, the men are employed at a speak easy and narrowly escape a police raid, the next day they have a second stroke of bad luck when they witness one of Chicago’s most notorious mobsters take out 7 people. Knowing they are hunted by the mob Joe and Jerry escape with a band gig all the way to sunny Florida, the catch is that it’s an all girl band.

Perhaps what is the best selling point of this movie is the wit and sizzle that Wilder manages to get out of every line, exaggerated look and comic double-take that Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon deliver. This is a comedy that is a melting pot of perfect elements; Some Like It Hot is the perfect mixture of drama, comedy, and gender confusion.

Almost everyone that knows anything about the history of film knows the last line, the last reaction of Some Like It Hot - Jack Lemmon reveals to his beau that he is in fact a man and the response is merely “Well, nobody’s perfect.” It’s considered one of the best moments in cinema, I saw it before film school, I studied about it while in school, and have watched numerous AFI specials where it is brought up. I really didn’t think that after all that saturation I would find the end of the movie funny; I was so surprised at how largely I reacted to the final scene – especially the final line.

I kid you not, if you think you don’t want to see Some Like It Hot because you know the joke already just bring yourself to watch the film. I can almost guarantee that you will be laughing through the entire film and the end will grab you like you’ve never seen the joke before.

Director: Billy Wilder
Writers: Billy Wilder & I.A.L. Diamond
Osgood: Joe E. Brown
Joe: Tony Curtis
Jerry: Jack Lemmon
Sugar: Marilyn Monroe

Jerry: Will you look at that! Look how she moves! It's like Jell-O on springs. Must have some sort of built-in motor or something. I tell you, it's a whole different sex!

The Lost Weekend is a tale of the power and destruction of alcoholism, as told through the powerful talents of director Billy Wilder. This film won Oscars for best picture, actor, director and screenplay in 1945, it won the grand prize at Cannes, and the Golden Globe – this is a film that was lauded and applauded by all when it came out and I have to say it was well deserved.

While The Lost Weekend is definitely alcoholism through the lens of 1945 it is nonetheless a biting and harrowing look at what people didn’t consider a disease, but something to hide, a family scandal. This was an era that still remembered prohibition so the last thing anyone wanted to admit was that they or a loved one was addicted to alcohol, and the best part is that Wilder and his actors refuse to shy away from this taboo. For 1945 this film is dark, deep, realistic and I am sure highly controversial – but it still holds power today.

I am highly in debt to the films of Billy Wilder as he serves as one of my chief sources of inspiration, and The Lost Weekend was new to me. Wilder is truly a genius in terms of finding the controversial subjects and making them into meaningful movies that transcend time; he excels at getting to the core of his characters situations and this makes his movies work in any decade not just the decade in which they were released.

Director: Billy Wilder
Writer: Charles Brackett & Billy Wilder
Don Birnam: Ray Milland
Helen St. James: Jane Wyman
Wick Birnam: Phillip Terry
Nat: Howard Da Silva
Bim: Frank Faylen

Don Birnam: Don't wipe it away, Nat. Let me have my little vicious circle. You know, the circle is the perfect geometric figure. No end, no beginning.