Billy Goad

Billy Wilder represents some of the best of what the Hollywood system has produced. Smart, but commercial. Whether or not it's high art, I leave to you.

Wilder himself was a cultured man, but, allegedly, wasn't thrilled when European art films started gaining currency in the U.S. around fifty years ago. In fact, he sometimes mocked what he considered their pretentiousness and lack of storytelling.

Considering two recent deaths, I found this passage in Ed Sikov's biography of Billy Wilder interesting:

At least as much of a goading spur was the fact that Michelangelo Antonioni's ponderous L'Avventura had been a huge art house hit on both sides of the Atlantic the previous year, and American art house critics were still falling all over themselves spreading the gospel of serious cinema. For Wilder, Bergman was bad enough. Now there was Antonioni, whose films were even more nose picking. In response, Billy wanted not only to make yet another enormously successful and crowd-pleasing comedy, but to make the most raucous farce he could think up. He was compelled to make the absolute antithesis of L'Avventura, if only to prove a point to himself.

Incidentally, this is when he'd just made The Apartment (and Some Like It Hot before that) and was about to make One, Two, Three.