In a previous post (“It Is To Laugh” from August 5,) I promised you, dear readers, some praises on Hollywood’s two greatest (IMHO) comedic film directors; Billy Wilder and Mel Brooks. “But wait,” movie buffs might argue, “what about….Chaplin, Howard Hawks, Blake Edwards, Judd Apatow, Kevin Smith(!) et al?” Agreed, the list goes on and on, but for this entry I ask you to put aside personal preferences, as they would likely ignite more debate than who played the best Bond (obvi, Connery for cool, Craig for the rough stuff.)

Before we begin with Mr. Wilder and his comedies, with eventual designs on 1959’s Some Like It Hot, let’s review some of his unforgettable dramas and tragedies: Double Indemnity, the noir-standard bearer; Sunset Boulevard and its fateful May-December affair; and all-to-close-to-home, The Lost Weekend, where Ray Milland spirals downward from promising writer to hospitalized, hallucinating dipsomaniac. I first saw this gut-wrenching film long before suffering my own consequences from alcohol abuse, not knowing it was Wilder-directed, and that later epiphany only raised my regard for the man’s genius. More on these in a future post, pinky swear.

Of course, we mustn’t ignore Wilder’s breakthrough screenwriting credit, the classic Ninotchka (1939) starring Greta Garbo (in a rare comedic role), co-written and directed by the groundbreaking auteur Ernst Lubitsch (he was one of the first film makers to embrace sound technology.) Imagine the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup (1933) with a Soviet slant. (For more on Lubitsch’s cinematic impact, please click here.)

Mr. Wilder’s cavalcade of humorous hits, written (with one exception) and directed by him, ran from the 1954 rom-com Sabrina (introducing ingenue Audrey Hepburn, seven years prior to her star-turn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s), to 1974’s The Front Page, a second remake of Ben Hecht’s 1928 Broadway hit, the first being Hawks’ His Girl Friday (1940.) (BTW the more Hecht’s name comes up in my comedic writer research, the more I think he needs his own future post, don’t you agree?)

A short list of Wilder’s other classics, especially those made between 1955 and 1963 — The Seven Year Itch, The Apartment, and Irma La Douce — display an empathy for those most human of foibles like romance, angst and come-uppance, and these scripts happily melt into kismet-frosted parables that never stumble over fluff.

The Seven Year Itch stars Tom Ewell as a married Manhattanite who, with the wife and kids safely ensconced in a Connecticut summer, is driven to wild fantasies when wide-eyed Marilyn Monroe moves in upstairs. (Yes, this is the film with the iconic upblown-skirt-over-the-subway-grate scene that sent pubescent boys into amatory fervor and cemented Ms. Monroe’s sex-bomb status.) Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine take over the lead roles in The Apartment, a clever bedroom farce where Lemmon’s ladder-climbing young executive chooses (at first) to loan out his pied-a-terre key so his boss’ (Fred MacMurray, still devious from Double Indemnity) can tryst with MacLaine. The two stars return in Irma La Douce, set in mid-century Paris, with Lemmon’s gendarme giving up his badge and baton to reform MacLaine’s Irma (‘The Sweet’) away from the world’s oldest profession.

All three of these films share a common happy ending, where the main and sometimes star-crossed characters finally realize not all that glitters is gold, and come to learn that trying to be someone you’re not usually leads back to the person you really are, which in the first place is who you really needed to be.

Wilder’s string of witty and insightful comedies broke into the 1960s and ’70s with slightly more daring plotlines, reflecting the looser habits of those times. Films like Kiss Me Stupid, The Fortune Cookie (notable for the first of many pairings between Lemmon and Walter Matthau,) The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes and 1972’s Avanti! (a nod to the Italian romantic capers of that era) retain Wilder’s blend of romance and coquettish slapstick, but lack the smooth demeanor of his earlier, more cosmopolitan offerings.

To keep your interest (and mine) I’ll sign off for now, dear readers, and save the really good stuff for our next post on Some Like It Hot, considered by many cinephiles as the greatest comedy ever put on celluloid. Just as an amuse bouche, here’s “something Wilder” from that film to whet your whistle; can you name the character who said it and where?

“So the one-legged jockey says, ‘Don’t worry about me, baby, I ride side saddle!’ “