ACE IN THE HOLE 1951 The great, lost, bilious entry in Wilder's oeuvre, Ace (a.k.a. The Big Carnival) is downright prescient in its portrait of a vicious reporter (Kirk Douglas) who will sell out anyone for a story. "I don't pray," says nominal heroine Jan Sterling. "Kneeling bags my nylons." Why isn't this on video?
STALAG 17 1953 It was the original inspiration for TV's Hogan's Heroes, but Wilder took it quite a bit deeper by spinning his POWs' lives into a daily grind of boredom, anger, humor, and terror. William Holden won an Oscar as the bitter, is-he-or-isn't-he-a-rat Sergeant Sefton.
SABRINA 1954 Wilder wanted Cary Grant but got Humphrey Bogart as the businessman who woos chauffeur's daughter Audrey Hepburn away from his playboy brother Holden. Filming was torturous--cowriter Ernest Lehman had a nervous breakdown, and Bogie and Billy detested each other--but, what do you know, the film itself's a beaut.
THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH 1955 Married man Tom Ewell goes ah-ooh-ga over bombshell neighbor Marilyn Monroe. Perhaps the weakest "classic" on the resume--it plays like a bad Playboy cartoon from the mid-'50s--Itch at least gave pop culture that iconic shot of Marilyn over the subway grate. Too bad the studio wouldn't let Wilder hire the actor he wanted for the lead--an unknown named Walter Matthau.
LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON 1957 This one's divisive: Crowe thinks it's one of Wilder's best, others find the romance between aging roue Gary Cooper and girlish Parisienne Audrey Hepburn just plain creepy. It's actually the director's nostalgic tip of the hat to European (a)morals and his filmmaking mentor Lubitsch.
WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION 1957 "I wanted to do a Hitchcock picture," the director admitted about this courtroom thriller. The result is truer to original source Agatha Christie than to Wilder--it was the author's own favorite Christie movie, according to Wilder--but it's still a nifty, duplicitous piece of work.
SOME LIKE IT HOT 1959 An astonishingly precise inquisition into the fluidity of gender, Marilyn Monroe's single most cohesive performance, Cary Grant's only appearance in a Wilder film (albeit by way of Tony Curtis), and possibly the greatest comedy ever made in America. Nobody's perfect, but this movie is.
THE APARTMENT 1960 Continuing his late-inning streak, Wilder won a second directing Oscar for this heartbreakingly funny moral fable about a corporate shnook (Jack Lemmon, never better) who lends his flat out for his bosses' whoopie. It's an early premonition of our modern cubicle politics, and it stings like hell.
ONE, TWO, THREE 1961 "The general idea was, let's make the fastest picture in the world." And how: Wilder allowed Jimmy Cagney to go out the way he came in--in overdrive--as a manic Coca-Cola executive in divided Berlin. Abrasive but amazing.
THE FORTUNE COOKIE 1966 Wilder finally got to hire that actor named Matthau--who promptly won an Oscar as a lawyer noodging injured brother-in-law Lemmon into a lawsuit. The director's jokey cynicism gets the better of him here, but Matthau's a joy.
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