Master of the shrug

Long long ago, they used to say that the difference between the Hohenzollerns and the Habsburgs was this. In Berlin, the situation was always serious, but not hopeless. In Vienna, on the other hand, the situation was invariably hopeless, but not serious.

It should never be forgotten that Billy Wilder, that most adorable of film directors, was in origin, and at heart always remained, Viennese. That is the case, despite his long and wonderful career in America, and despite the fact that what, for me, is his best film, One, Two, Three, is a Berlin movie. The subject of the ZmigrZs from Germany and Austria to Hollywood is a fascinating one, and has inspired what ought to be a classic book, Salka Viertel’s The Kindness of Strangers. Some film directors who emigrated to America lost their spark, like Murnau; others, like Douglas (nZ Detlef) Sirk, turned themselves into quite different sorts of directors. Wilder has a marvellous sort of continuity, and in all his work you can see that Viennese spirit; hopeless, but not serious. Anything can be dismissed, in the end, with a shrug; but the reason every native Berliner is passionate about One, Two, Three, that fine comedy about the city divided by the cold war, is that Wilder clearly understands exactly what he is shrugging off, from beginning to end. Politely complimenting Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, he casually mentions that he himself might have taken it on; if Spielberg efficiently confirms what you felt already about the German Holocaust, Wilder would have done something astonishing.

This book has the bad luck to be published at the same time as another book of the same title, an excellent and entertaining collection of Anthony Lane’s film reviews (see p. 50). If you find that you’ve bought the wrong one, however, I wouldn’t complain in either case.