Dudley Moore/Milton Berle/Billy Wilder
“I think the dark outlook is an American one.” –Billy Wilder explaining why so many immigrant filmmakers made dark films.
The Gods Of Comedy certainly are crying tears of sorrow the last couple of days. Three legends of comedy have died yesterday. I don’t know a whole lot about any of them, but I would be totally remiss if I didn’t write something about each of them. DUDLEY MOORE
April 19, 1935-March 27, 2002
When Dudley was born he was already stuck in a rather tragic situation. He was born with a club foot and his growth was stunted. His mother never really showed him the attention that he needed so he used comedy to get that attention and to escape.
It all came to good use when he met Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, and Alan Bennett at Oxford where he was studying music. The four of them formed the legendary comedy troupe Beyond The Fringe. Although the troupe eventually drifted apart, Moore and Cook kept things going in two man shows and, eventually, the big screen. They both made their film debuts in The Wrong Box in 1966. This is when he married his first wife, Suzy Kendall. Their marriage only lasted two years.
After The Wrong Box, Dud and Pete (as they called their two man show) starred in the classic Bedazzled in 1967. Dudley was cast as a hapless cook who fell in love with a seemingly unobtainable girl. The Devil (Peter) came to help him out in exchange for his soul. (The movie is the basis for the recent movie of the same name with Brendan Fraser and Elizabeth Hurley.)
After making a few duds (including his first solo flick, 30 Is A Dangerous Age, Cynthia in 1968 also starring his wife, Suzy) he finally got another role that got him noticed. (But not before marrying Tuesday Weld in 1975, lucky devil. The couple had a son name Patrick in 1976.) 1978′s Foul Play starring Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase was a huge hit and he apparently got most of the laughs. (I haven’t seen it yet, but it’s near the top of my list now.) This helped him get the role in Blake Edward’s classic 10 the next year. (Another one I haven’t seen. Dammit.) That’s the one that finally broke him.
1980 brought the end of another marriage and his biggest hit, Arthur, for which he got a nomination for Best Actor at the Oscars. He was perfectly cast as a drunk millionaire who falls in love with a down in the dumps Liza Minelli. He didn’t win that Oscar, but his co-star, Sir John Gielgud, did. He played Arthur’s dryly sarcastic butler who damn near stole the show.
The rest of the 80s proved to be one cinematic disappointment after another for Dudley. He starred in a lot of movies, but none of them were very noteworthy. Even Best Defense in 1984, which supposedly co-starred Eddie Murphy, fell flat. (Probably because Murphy was in it for about 15 minutes and didn’t have anything to do with the rest of the movie.)
In 1988, Dudley revisited his Arthur character for Arthur 2: On The Rocks. It switched the places of Arthur and his lady love, but nothing happened. No one wanted to know what happened to the characters after the first movie. But Dud did get married again. This time to Brogan Lane, his make-up artist on Arthur 2. That marriage lasted until 1991.
The 90s didn’t help him too much, either. He was in a few more duds (Crazy People in 90, Blame It On The Bellboy in 92, etc.) and two mis-fires of tv shows. One in 93 called “Dudley” and one in 94 called “Daddy’s Girls.” This is when he married Nicole Rothschild. Unfortunately, that marriage didn’t last, but they did have a son named Nicholas in 95.
In his later years Dudley was touring as a musician and a parodist and was having some success at that, but nothing brought him back to the heights that he once had. In 1999 he was diagnosed with progressive supranuclear palsy, a very rare disease with no cure. It affected his ability to talk and, therefore, pretty much ended his career. In fact, Barbara Streisand fired him from the lead role in her The Mirror Has Two Faces because of his new disability. (That bitch.)
But, even though he almost became a joke in the 90s, he will always be remembered as a pioneer of British sketch comedy with Beyond The Fringe and from 10 and Arthur. With those three things he will always be a beloved member of the comic world.
MILTON BERLE
July 12, 1908-March 27, 2002
Milton Berle (born Mendel Berlinger) never really got anywhere in the film industry, but that didn’t really matter. His real place in history was on the small screen.
But he did start out on the big screen. His first roles as a child were in The Perils Of Pauline and Charlie Chaplin’s Tillie’s Punctured Romance (both 1914). As the years went by, Milton got more work and became a star on stage (even landing a lead in the Ziegfeld Follies) and then got his big break in Hollywood in New Faces of 1937.
But 1928 is when he got his real break in the role that he would forever be known for. He was the first person to ever be broadcast on a new form of communication called television. Sure, it was just an experiment at the time, but it was a turning point in his career. Twenty years later he would change the world by being the first real star of the small screen.
Texaco Star Theatre was the first of the big comedy/variety shows to hit the tube and it became a runaway hit. In fact, Berle is often credited with selling more tvs than any salesman of the time. His face was seen on one third of the sets in use. That’s something that not even Jennifer Aniston can say. (Of course there were a lot fewer sets back then, but that’s nit-picking.)
Uncle Miltie would come on the stage in a different costume every week, sometimes even in drag. (“Don’t laugh, lady. Now you know how you look in the morning.”) He would berate the audience and the guests, but always in a way that was non-threatening and, most of all, funny. And he would never back down from being the butt of a joke. His humor was low, but not so low as to keep the high-brow from loving it.
His show lasted until 1956 when he finally started to lose ratings to sitcoms like I Love Lucy. But he never gave up. He had three more shows (including one where he did comic bits between calling bowling tournaments) that didn’t do so well. But no one ever forgot about Mr. Television.
With more movies throughout his life (including It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World in 1963 and The Muppet Movie in 1979) and a whole bunch of guest shots and stand-up performances, he never let anyone forget about him. He even published three books: two autobiographies and one collection of jokes. (He was often called The Thief Of Bad Gags because he stole jokes from everyone, no matter how good or bad they were. “I laughed so hard I nearly dropped my pencil.”)
But it’s his television work that everyone will remember. He will always be Uncle Miltie and Mr. Television to an entire generation of tv watchers.
BILLY WILDER
June 22, 1906-March 27, 2002
Born in Sucha, Austria-Hungary, which is now in Poland, Billy wanted to be a lawyer. After finding out that that profession wasn’t for him, he decided that maybe being a reporter was a better job for him. He was a reporter in Vienna and then Berlin for a few years before he got the call to be in the movie business. He wrote co-wrote the screenplays of many of their early films.
When Hitler rose to power, though, Billy figured that it was time to leave. In 1934 he went to Paris where he co-directed Mauvaise Graine. Then it was on to Hollywood.
After a while he finally learned English (thanks to roommate Peter Lorre) and started to write for Paramount in 1937. They stuck him with Charles Brackett after they collaborated well on Ernst Lubitsch’s Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife in 1938. (Lubitsch was a personal hero of Wilder’s, so this was a GREAT job for him.)
Wilder and Brackett wrote many great comedies together including Midnight (1939), Ninotchka (1939), Arise, My Love (1940), and Ball Of Fire (1941). Both Ninotchka and Ball Of Fire were nominated for Oscars for writing.
After a while, Wilder started to complain that the directors of his screenplays weren’t doing it right. So he started to petition the studio to let him direct his own films. Eventually they let him and his debut film from 1942, The Major And The Minor, was a minor success.
In 1944, though, he finally hit paydirt with his collaboration with Raymond Chandler, Double Indemnity. It’s a classic piece of film noir that showed us all that Fred MacMurray wasn’t always a great dad.
The next year he won Oscars for Best Director and Best Screenplay (along with Best Picture for Brackett and Best Actor for Ray Milland) for The Lost Weekend, a dark picture of an alcoholic couple.
With a few more successes under his belt in 1950 he scored one of his biggest hits with Sunset Blvd. His last collaboration with Brackett is a scathing satire of Hollywood and the way they treat writers. Head of MGM, Louis B. Myer, asked why he would bite the hand that feeds him (“Go fuck yourself” was Wilder’s response), but Billy got a Best Screenplay Oscar out of the film, as he should have.
After the failure of The Big Carnival in 1951 (his first film without Brackett) he went on to do some hugely successful films like Stalag 17 (1953), Sabrina (1954), The Seven Year Itch (1955 and his first with Marilyn Monroe), The Spirit Of St. Louis (1957), Witness For The Prosecution (1957) and Some Like It Hot (1959). All classics. After Some Like It Hot, Wilder vowed to never work with Monroe again saying, “I have discussed this with my doctor and my psychiatrist and they tell me I’m too old and too rich to go through this again.”
In 1960 he did it again. The Apartment (starring Fred MacMurray, Shirley MacClaine and Jack Lemmon who said that he would like to go through his whole life only doing Billy’s movies–which happened quite a bit after this) won him Best Director, Screenplay and Producer. The next person to do that was James Cameron when Titanic took those three awards. (And watch for a Marilyn Monroe-esque character in it. The Apartment, that is. Not Titanic.)
This is also the time that he came up with an idea to do another Marx Brothers movie. It was going to be called A Day At The United Nations. Unfortunately, Chico died in 1961 before they could really start working on it.
Wilder worked all through the 60s and 70s, but with little fanfare and more sporadically. His biggest successes would be his films with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau (The Fortune Cookie in 1966, The Front Page in 1974 and Buddy Buddy (Wilder’s last film) in 1981).
In his later years Billy used his stature as a legend of Hollywood to comment on what was going on in his old hometown. (He told Billy Bob Thornton that he was too ugly to be a star and got him to write Sling Blade.) He also ran up quite a tab at art museums collecting rare paintings. His collection is famous worldwide. And then there’s the whole clothes horse thing. His collection of sweaters is pretty famous, too.
In 1993, Wilder wanted to make a comeback with Schindler’s List. It would have been his most personal project, he said. But Spielberg wanted to do it himself, so Billy was out one comeback.
Cameron Crowe put together a book of interviews in 1999 with Billy’s help. Conversations with Wilder
Billy Wilder was a true Hollywood legend and he will be sorely missed. Even though he hadn’t made a movie in 20 years, he was still on everyone’s mind and was an elder statesman in the eyes of all filmmakers. It’s too bad that he never made his comeback, but with his body of work he will always be remembered as one of the greats.
Dudley, Milton and Billy, we’ll miss you. Hope you can keep ‘em laughing wherever you are.
