Billy Wilder on Assignment: Dispatches from Weimar Berlin and Interwar Vienna ed. by Noah Isenberg (review)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:

• Billy Wilder on Assignment: Dispatches from Weimar Berlin and Interwar Vienna ed. by Noah Isenberg
• Laura A. Detre

Noah Isenberg, ed., Billy Wilder on Assignment: Dispatches from Weimar Berlin and Interwar Vienna. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2021. 212 pp.

If one were to list the most prominent American filmmakers of the twentieth century, Billy Wilder's name would undoubtedly have to be included. The director of such films as Sabrina and The Apartment, Wilder became closely associated with witty dialog and topics that, while perhaps deeply serious, could be approached with a mixture of pathos and levity. Wilder's connection to fellow filmmaker Ernst Lubitsch is well known, and the younger director often credited Lubitsch for forming his style, but Wilder had a career as a writer that predated his work on the Lubitsch film Ninotchka. Noah Isenberg's volume Billy Wilder on Assignment offers a deeper dive into that part of Wilder's career and is a fascinating look at the evolving style of this remarkable writer.

This book is a collection of Wilder's journalistic writings, divided into three categories: feuilletons on life in Central Europe, essays on famous individuals, and theatrical reviews. The introduction explains that the purpose of the book is to give the reader insights into Wilder's life and interests before he became a famous American movie director. Isenberg worked closely with translator Shelley Frisch to bring Wilder's writing to life for an Englishreading audience. As Frisch says in her translator's notes, "Wilder's prose is, well, … wilder than I usually get to render in my translations" (194). Frisch hits on the most important aspect of their work in this quotation, which is that they have worked hard to choose texts that show the reader who Billy Wilder was as a journalist and to retain the character of Wilder's writing in their translations. This was a big challenge, but Isenberg and Frisch have been largely successful in this task.

One of the most evocative essays that Isenberg and Frisch included in their book is entitled "When It's Eighty-four Degrees," a vignette of life on [End Page 131] a sultry summer day in Berlin. While we may balk at the idea that eighty-four degrees is a temperature that would induce the kinds of feelings Wilder documented, anyone who has spent a summer in Central Europe will recognize it from his description. His description of the oppressive heat, eventually broken by an evening thunderstorm, is detailed and humorous, and it is not a huge stretch of the imagination to envision this whole brief essay as a scene from one of Wilder's American films. We see here the writer who will eventually put similar words in the mouths of William Holden and Jack Lemmon.

In a similarly prescient vein, in 1929 Wilder wrote for the German art magazine Der Querschnitt a piece called "Stroheim, the Man We Love to Hate." This short essay explains how Erich von Stroheim came to work in the film industry and pokes fun at his reputation for making expensive, somewhat esoteric films. This text does not go out of its way to flatter Stroheim and suggests in not-so-subtle ways that the famed director might be overrated. The irony should not be lost on readers today that Stroheim would appear in a significant role in Sunset Boulevard, one of Wilder's most popular and enduring films. Undoubtedly that contrast is why Isenberg and Frisch chose to include this particular essay in their collection, and it is fun to read Wilder's early thoughts on the noted filmmaker.

The texts in this book's third chapter are generally quite short, the early-twentieth-century version of a thumbs up/thumbs down type of review, but as this was a remarkable period in the development of the film industry, Wilder reviewed many movies that are still memorable today. Included in this collection is his review of Stroheim's film Greed, which Wilder finds difficult to watch but describes as well made and worth seeing because of its important topic. Wilder also reviewed stage productions, including The Threepenny Opera, which was playing at the Theater...