Billy Wilder on Assignment by Noah Isenberg (top 100 novels of all time TXT) 📕

in the lead role. And he also has a compelling sense of humor. Ruth Elder, the aviatrix, does not do badly at all in her introduction to film. There was hearty applause.

B. Z., August 13, 1929

Männer ohne Beruf (Men without Work, 1929)

AT THE UFA PALACE AM ZOO

Harry Piel goes after traffickers of girls! A multitalented fellow who makes mincemeat out of the bad guys, hounding them through the crooked alleys and hideouts of Marseille, and the result is great fun.

Robert Liebmann proves to be an excellent guide through the labyrinth of convoluted pathways of an interesting, gripping detective adventure rich in humorous incidents. And Harry, an accomplished actor, knows just how to set the scene for these kinds of things, with verve and wit, captivatingly and entertainingly.

As an actor, Piel [also the director] is as endearing as ever. Dary Holm, acting alongside him, is quite striking, and the large additional cast, most interesting among them the jovial Albert Paulig and the talented Edith Meinhard, works well in their supporting roles. The success was strong and genuine.

B. Z., August 14, 1929

Laubenkolonie [aka Die lustigen Musikanten] (The Merry Musicians, 1930)

AT THE PRIMUS PALACE

An amusing sound film. The milieu is Berlin, not always on the mark, but seen with humor and performed entertainingly. Franz Rauch and Max Obal, who also directed it with zest and gusto, have taken a clear-eyed look at community gardening plots and captured some charming encounters. A nice, unsentimental love story and an elderly widower’s unpalatable excursion into a second marriage to a cabaret singer hold together the slightly divergent series of scenes.

The audience caught on well to the charming slapstick, and their amusement was enhanced by the actors’ clear enthusiasm. Fritz Kampers once again plays a tough, stalwart country boy; Camilla Spira, who is seen in film far too infrequently, a sweet, likable girl. Hermann Picha and Erika Glässner, the mismatched married couple, and Julius Falkenstein and Hans Hermann Schaufuss add an element of humor, sometimes of their own creation when the scene didn’t provide any.

B. Z., October 25, 1930

Susanne macht Ordnung (Susie Cleans Up, 1930)

AT THE ATRIUM

A farce, with a little singing, a little dancing, and a good bit of humor: contented faces, robust applause, a success that feels particularly fulfilling because there were two “first-timers” shown to fine advantage with this premiere. The writer-director, Eugen Thiele, and his co-author, Wolfgang Wilhelm, did not come up with a terribly original plot, but they enliven it with a refreshing, incisive situational comedy.

Thiele moves along at the rapid clip with which such inconsequential things, intended solely for entertainment, have to be filmed, and the cast follows him eagerly and enthusiastically. At the head is Szöke Szakall, attorney for extremely difficult cases, who has had an excellent day. In the same vein there is a set of unwitting fathers—Truus Van Aalten is on a very spirited quest—the humorous Kurt Lilien and Martin Kettner, while the real father, Albert Paulig, stays discreetly in the background, and Max Ehrlich’s unflappable composure works nicely as he pulls the strings in a little game of intrigue. The role of lover is well served by Franz Lederer.

B. Z., November 21, 1930

 Translator’s Note

When Noah Isenberg approached me with a plan to bring together the early journalism of Billy Wilder, I couldn’t say yes fast enough. Who doesn’t love Billy Wilder? Surely we all like it hot, Wilder-style. Osgood Fielding III may have declared that “nobody’s perfect,” but Billy Wilder’s filmmaking comes awfully close to perfection.

I’d never read Wilder’s early journalism, but once Noah supplied me with the two books on which this compilation draws, all composed in the 1920s, I was entranced all over again by Wilder’s powers of observation that shed light and laughter on the human condition. Wilder’s “outsize gift of gab,” as Noah aptly describes it, is in full evidence here. Wilder’s humor is sly, subtle, and oblique, giving rise less to belly laughs than to ongoing chuckles.

Noah had already pored over the collections of Wilder’s journalism, then I joined in the fun. What a cornucopia awaited us! We sought out a selection that would introduce readers to Wilder’s reflections on current films, the latest cultural and fashion trends, fickle weather patterns, his own plans to shoot a film, and his encounters with celebrities—Ernst Lubitsch, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Asta Nielsen, Paul Whiteman, the Tiller Girls—as well as a host of quirky “ordinary people,” such as the lucky (real or imagined) individual who earned his living by smiling uninterruptedly. Wilder’s range is vast: we learn how the smell of matches has evolved, how efforts to modernize cafés wind up erasing our collective memories, how a business tycoon can’t manage to see a dentist, how the Prince of Wales suffers from an absurdly privileged ennui, how the art of telling lies ought to figure in the school curriculum.… And we learn, in two pieces about Wilder’s work as a dancer for hire, how that humble job opened the door to his pursuit of journalism.

His essays engage and quicken our senses, as Wilder’s “eager nostrils” chase down scents or as he brings musical life to inanimate objects, such as in this passage from “Renovation, an Ode to the Coffeehouse,” which infuses the atmosphere of a café with the tones of what Wilder calls the “molecular miracle” of “metaphysical ensoulment”:

Coffeehouses have something in common with well-played violins. They resonate, reverberate, and impart distinct timbres. The many years of the regular guests’ clamor have stored their filaments and atoms in a singular way, and the woodwork, paneling, and even pieces of furniture pulse marvelously to the tunes of the visitors’ life rhythms. Malice and venomous thoughts of a decade on the blackened walls have settled in as a sweetly radiant finish, as the finest patina. Every sound, emanating from the faintest quiver, the most unremarkable brains, comes through and runs endlessly, in mysterious waves, across all the molecules of the magnificently played sound body, day after day …

Wilder’s prose is, well … wilder