BILLY Wilder, who died in 2002, was an interesting mix of maverick and conformist during his long career in Tinseltown.
Although an outsider – he was born in Vienna, spent his young adulthood as a newspaper reporter in Berlin, fled the Nazi régime in the late 1920s for Paris and ended up in America in 1934 – once in Hollywood, he quickly became accepted as one of the creative in-crowd.
He had an appealing European charm, a devilish sense of humour, was popular with women and had a disarming way with words. It's no surprise that he was soon a much in-demand screenwriter.
Wilder's position as a film industry insider who was also, and always would be, an outsider because of his immigrant status, allowed him to take a forthright view on American life, values and society, and, in the case of Sunset Boulevard (1950), for example, specifically on the industry in which he worked.
This took a certain amount of courage, and the film, though critically acclaimed, was not well received by the great and the good of Hollywood. Louis B Mayer famously told Wilder at the premiere: "You have disgraced the industry that made you and fed you. You should be tarred and feathered and run out of Hollywood."
Wilder responded with a blunt epithet, refusing to be fazed by the incident.
Wilder had utter self-belief, perhaps born out of his difficult childhood and young adulthood, fleeing Nazism, losing his close family to the Holocaust, and having to fend for himself in a new country without a penny to his name.
His better-known movies reveal a filmmaker who was difficult to pigeonhole, one who had a diverse talent and who refused to be constrained by genre, or to submit to one particular style. Neither was he afraid to ruffle a few feathers, and an overview of his career suggests that in a quiet, understated way, he was quite a subversive figure.
Double Indemnity (1944) is now regarded as a seminal film noir. Its bleak atmosphere and the fact that the central characters are an amoral, self-seeking pair whose mutual sexual attraction and materialism lead them to commit murder, was quite a change to the cosy domestic movies that Hollywood churned out in the early 1940s.
His follow-up film, The Lost Weekend (1945) was no less controversial, in that it dealt frankly with the problem of alcoholism and was the first film to depict the condition as an illness rather than a self-inflicted indulgence.
Wilder had already upset Hollywood with Sunset Boulevard, portraying it as morally corrupt and self-deluding; but he also upset the newspaper business, with his depiction of the worst excesses of tabloid journalism in Ace in the Hole (1951); and even the US army with Stalag 17 (1953), a black comedy set in a prisoner-of-war camp in which US soldiers are shown to be less than heroic.
He was no stranger to controversy, then, and refused to play safe. As an emigré with Left-wing political beliefs, he may have been well-advised to keep his head under the parapet, especially during the McCarthy witchhunt era of the 1950s. But he stood up to be counted by signing petitions objecting to the blacklisting, and he refused to name names.
Towards the end of the 1950s, Wilder made, arguably, the two most popular films of his long career: Some Like it Hot (1959) and The Apartment (1960). Both, though on the surface lighthearted comedies, have a subversive streak.
In Some Like it Hot, the two leading actors (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) spend most of their time dressed as women which, in 1959, was quite a radical move. The film got rave reviews from the outset, with critics focusing on the slapstick, care-free, knockabout humour of the piece.
The more controversial ideas that the film plays with – cross-dressing, gender inversion and even the possibility of the presence of homosexual desire – although thoroughly embedded in the script and performances, appear to have remained subliminal.
Similarly in The Apartment, with its bittersweet tale of office worker CC Baxter (Jack Lemmon) who unwittingly at first, but then knowingly, becomes, in effect, a pimp (or something approaching it) by loaning his apartment to philandering colleagues for their adulterous liaisons in return for a boost up the career ladder, Wilder was ruthless in his portrayal of the cynicism of corporate America.
Despite the positive ending, with Baxter being redeemed by his love for colleague Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), the film contains an unequivocally critical message that the blind pursuit of the twin promises of the American dream – money and status – can, and often does, lead to a loss of humanity.
Wilder's cinematic legacy is unparalleled: many of his movies can be considered landmark films, and he was an acute observer of humanity with all its frailties; but it is for his sharp wit that he is probably most appreciated and affectionately remembered.
There are almost too many amusing Wilder anecdotes to choose from, but this one illustrates both the huge international influence that Wilder still had over young filmmakers many years after he had stopped making movies himself; it is also a fine example of his dry, succinct humour.
At the 1994 Academy Awards ceremony, the young Spanish director, Fernando Trueba, whose comedy, Belle Epoque, won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, accepted his award, saying: "I would like to believe in God so that I could thank him, but I just believe in Billy Wilder. So thank you, Billy Wilder."
Early next morning, the phone in Trueba's office rang. When he answered, the voice at the other end said simply: "It's God."