Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

2.1.1 Billy Wilder
Billy Wilder played a prominent role in making the transition between the studio
system and the rise of independent producers-directors. Born in the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, his career stretches back to the time when he collaborated on several scripts made
in Germany, including the semi-documentary Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday)
(1929) which traced the rather confusing adventures of working Berliners on their days off
and which still remains an important piece in the Weimar cinema. Shortly after the Nazis
assumed power in Europe, Wilder fled to France and eventually ended up in America. As
he gradually gained some fluency in English, he started to work for various Hollywood
studios, writing scripts and contributing to screenplays for Howards Hawks’s Ball of Fire
(1941), for instance, or Hold Back the Dawn, directed by Mitchell Leisen and also released
in 1941. These scripts approach the subject of unsuspecting men who are enticed by pretty
and clever women, and bear the distinctive mark of future noir productions. In 1942,
Wilder directed his first film The Major and the Minor, a comedy which stared Ginger
Rogers and Ray Milland.
A couple of years later, he directed one of the seminal noir films which he co-wrote
with Raymond Chandler, Double Indemnity, which provides an essential portrait of the
femme fatale. As mentioned in the chapter on censorship, the film is also a milestone in
Wilder’s fight against Hollywood censorship. Moreover, in this particular film, Wilder
establishes many of the conventions of film noir, namely the noir elements that serve as
décors in many other films, like the venetian blinds (with their symbolic representation),
lighting and voiceover narration, but at the same time, the film bears the signature of a
director who knows how to combine the innovative stylistic elements with those of an
imaginative narrative.
One year later, in 1945, the Austrian director released The Lost Weekend, a bleak
and realistic look at the problem of alcoholism. During five days (and a lost weekend), the
camera pictures the life of a chronic and tortured alcoholic, Don Birnam (Ray Milland), a
noirish protagonist who is bedevilled and shadowed by ghosts from his past. The schizoid
motif is presented to us through a self-divided protagonist who explains that “There are
two Don Birnams: Don the drunk and Don the writer – I’ve tried to break away from that
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