Hollywood giants
Mark Steyn
At the Oscars back in the Eighties, Dudley Moore said, 'It took me 20 years to become a household name. Even in my own household.' Three household names died last week — Dud. Milton Berle, Billy Wilder. They were all funny, though they didn't have much in common. Dudley Moore named Milton Berle as one of his comedic heroes, but it would be hard to detect Uncle Miltie's influence in. say, Pete'n'Dud or Arthur.
Berle was as old as Hollywood: in 1914, as a jobbing child actor, he had bit parts in The Perils of Pauline and Tillie's Punctured Romance. He ended his screen career 70 years later with a cameo in Broadway Danny Rose (1984), Woody Allen's sweet comic valentine to showbusiness losers: Berle played himself, holding court in the audience at the Waldorf as up on stage Danny's client, a cheesy Italiano lounge singer, works hard to land a spot on Uncle Miltie's TV special with his 'Great Crooners Of The Past Who Are Deceased' med ley. In between those seven-decade bookends, Berle had a small part in the original Mark of Zorro (1920), with Doug Fairbanks Sr; wrote the hit song 'Sam, You Made The Pants Too Long' (after 'Lord, You Made The Night Too Long'), later sung by Barbra Streisand; became America's Mister Television; and was unusually subdued among Ethel Merman, Phil Silvers, TerryThomas, Mickey Rooney, Jimmy Durante, Buster Keaton and a zillion others in the all-star It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963).
Not everyone cared for his style. There were those who thought he'd parlayed small-time burlesque vulgarities into the big time. Cole Porter put him on a laundrylist of undesirables, rhyming 'Milton Berle' with 'castor erl', and in another lyric, sung by a crass Hollywood exec:
Now I've bought a play that was tough to get Called Romeo and Juliet But if the title was Boy Loves Girl What a helluva picture for Milton Berle!
Did I say 'Berle had a small part'? Perish the thought. Uncle Miltie was celebrated as the man with the biggest penis in Hollywood, though unlike Errol Flynn he couldn't play the piano with it. Padding about town, he'd run into guys who wanted to challenge his claim to the title. Milton would unbutton his fly, but only take out 'just enough to win'. Among friends, he liked to take his daily nap on the Friars Club massage table so that other members could admire him in all his glory. Truly, he was a giant.
Dudley Moore was a sadder case, despite being one of the few Brits to become a bona fide Hollywood star — not a guy who does Merchant-Ivory or Ken Loach's savage indictments of Thatcher's Britain, but a fellow who stumbles through romantic comedies and gets the girl. He once played me a piano piece he'd written called `Brogan', after the production-line cutie he was married to that week. I thought back to that moment in Ten, when, slumped in middle-aged introspection, Dud's character noodles 'Laura', Dave Raksin's great noirfilm theme, on the piano and wonders why they don't write tunes like that any more, or lyrics (Johnny Mercer subsequently put words to it). 'Brogan' isn't perhaps quite as universal a title as 'Laura', but I suggested to Dud he should get someone to do a lyric for his composition. He laughed. 'I'm not sure whether the tune will last. Or the marriage.' I think of his film career mainly in musical terms — his hep score for Bedazzled (1967), and the extravagant concert pianist's intro to 'Santa Claus Is Coming To Town' in Arthur.
Billy Wilder spent the last 20 years being hailed as a giant while simultaneously having every new project stymied by jerk execs who thought he was over. Wilder's hits aren't just hits but those big, mythic landmarks that are the reason we keep going to movies — in the hope that we'll find another: Double Indemnity (1944), The Lost Weekend (1945), Sunset Boulevard (1950), Some Like It Hot (1959), The Apartment (1960). The second tier isn't bad, either: A Foreign Affair (1948), with Jean Arthur, and 'Isn't It Romantic?' playing over the ruins of post-war Berlin, Ace in the Hole (1950), with Kirk Douglas as a desperate reporter impeding a mine rescue to boost his own fortunes; The Seven-Year Itch (1955), with Marilyn Monroe's dress billowing over the subway grate — a rare sensual image from a director best known for tart lines.
In Vienna, he was a journalist who turned to screenwriting in the flourishing German film industry. Arriving in Hollywood in the Thirties, he wrote, with Charles Brackett, for Lubitsch (Ninotchka) and then began directing after tiring of their scripts getting screwed by studio hacks. He was always a writer first, an ideas man who came up with the premise for The Apartment after seeing Brief Encounter and finding himself wondering about the fellow who lends his flat to Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard. 'The interesting character is the friend,' he said, 'who returns to his home and finds the bed still warm; he who has no mistress.' Wilder had great situations — a forgotten silent star lost in the past, two boys in a girl band — and a taste for moral complexity; he served them with great lines — 'You used to be big.' I am big, it's the pictures that got small' — and, if necessary, a narrator. When he had to choose between the look and the script, he stuck with the script: hence, the absurd moment in Double Indemnity when Barbara Stanwyck hides behind an apartment door that opens outwards into the corridor; no such front door can be found in any apartment. But Wilder lived long enough to see the noir style he helped to popularise in Indemnity decline into empty visual pastiche, and a director who values words and ideas is not to be disdained. He could be sour and overly cautious, but on form and with the right cast there was none better.
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