27 Days With Billy Wilder And Me

Billy Wilder’s twenty-seventh movie, Buddy Buddy, starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, was released in 1981. Billy was 75 years old.

With Buddy Buddy, Billy Wilder’s directorial career ended not with a whimper, but with a wretch.

Buddy Buddy is the story of a hitman (Matthau) trying to do one last job before retiring. A distraught man (Lemmon) — whose wife (Prentiss) is fooling around with the head (Kinski) of a sex clinic — continues to inadvertently cross paths with the hit man, disrupting his schedule, confounding his concentration, and making a mess of his life.

It’s hard to make a movie about a hit man and have it be a comedy. Grosse Pointe Blank pulled it off, but that’s because of John Cusack and Dan Akroyd. Plus, there’s an actual story (and quite a few laughs) in Grosse Pointe Blank. But there are neither in Buddy Buddy.

Principle Cast:
Victor Clooney…………………………………………….Jack Lemmon (1925–2001)
Trabucco……………………………………………………Walter Matthau (1920–2000)
Celia Clooney………………………………………………Paula Prentiss (1938- )
Dr. Hugo Zuckerbrot……………………………………Klaus Kinski (1926-1991)

Buddy Buddy was written by Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, and based on the story and play by Francis Veber.

My wife said this after watching Buddy Buddy: “My opinion of Billy Wilder has changed.”

She did not refer only to the mirthless Lemmon-Matthau film, but to every movie since The Apartment (with the possible, slight, exceptions of Irma la Douce and The Fortune Cookie). And she’s right. Billy Wilder’s output after the Oscar-winning The Apartment was increasingly sloppy. It’s almost like a different man created the post-1960 movies, somebody who got really cynical. Or bitter. The heart that was part of a film like The Apartment was missing in everything following it.

What a sad way to spend the last 20 years of one’s career (roughly 1961-1981), making one bad movie after another.

Still, this is Billy Wilder who, next to Preston Sturges and Werner Herzog, is my favorite director.

So I’ll cut him some slack.