October 12, 1969

Wilder -- 'Yes, We Have No Naked Girls'

LONDON -- It took six weeks for me to get to see Billy Wilder. But what the hell? Earl Wilson, they say, came 3,000 miles and only got five minutes. Finally The Call: an endless list of directions telling how to get there. An hour from London. In a graveyard. Where else? And lo, through the yew trees and across the cables is the mordant Mr. Wilder, tweed trilby hat rakishly over one eye, peering down through hornrims at four schoolboys in gray shorts and caps kneeling at two freshly dug graves. But wait. A close look reveals that they're not schoolboys: they're four wizened midgets. "And please don't give the name of the church," says the publicity man. "After all, it's consecrated ground and we had difficulty getting permission to use it."

"Difficulty? Why?" asks Wilder, craning his head round at an angle. "We have no naked girls here." His accent is a pleasant Viennese-American. "No marijuana. No orgies. Just four midgets praying: you can't get any humbler than that."

Stanley Holloway, Eliza's dad in "My Fair Lady," stands nearby as a gravedigger. "I'm getting buried in the morning," sings Wilder, half to his collaborator, scriptwriter I. A. L. "Izzy" Diamond, who's sitting quietly in a chair in the long grass behind some tombstones. Diamond smiles a slight and secret smile. "Of course," he says, "Holloway thought we wanted him for the gravedigger in 'Hamlet.'"

But Wilder isn't doing "Hamlet." Not this time anytime anyway. He's in the 19th week of producing and directing "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes." A swirling Victorian copperplate subtitle on the publicity handout calls it "an account of some hitherto suppressed and thoroughly fascinating adventures of the greatest detective of all time as revealed by his friend John H. Watson, late Indian Army." Suppressed, that is, until Wilder and Diamond, the team that produced "Some Like It Hot," "The Apartment" and "The Fortune Cookie," confected them from several years of head scratching and typewriter pounding. Wilder describes their film as "more 'The Odd Couple' than Conan Doyle." If you're unwise enough to ask "Why Sherlock Holmes?" you'll probably get the answer, "Why not?" But it's clear that Holmes occupies a prominent place in Wilder's affections. "To me he's wildly romantic--elegant, all that Baker Street setting, great sharpness, precision and imagination. One of the great minds of the twentieth century. This film isn't camp. It's a valentine to Sherlock."

The sun beats down on the graveyard. It's supposed to be a day of overpowering gloom, but the sky is azure and any welcome clouds quickly disappear. So the crew, the midgets, Diamond and Wilder all wait. Wilder actually sits down, an unusual event in itself. Most of the time he's pacing like a caged cat, puffing on a cigarette, gazing at the ground. If you happen to listen to him talk and you're sitting down yourself, you end up with a bad case of tennis neck. But now he seems relaxed. "We can't work because the shots we did yesterday would not match this Capri sky. You make mistakes like that, they haunt you forever. In this business, we never bury our dead. We bring out the corpses and show them on television to make a little more money." He is quiet for a moment, pondering the dates on an adjacent tombstone. "The people around here died so old. They can't have had anything to do with the movie industry." The sound man asks if he can record the words of Committal--ashes to ashes, dust to dust. "Be my guest," says Wilder. "Maybe we should all kneel while you take it."

I ask what the scene is all about. A twinkle appears behind the thick glasses. "This is the forth of four stories 'discovered' in 221B Baker Street in a tin box. The fourth movement of our symphony. But they're not exactly separate movements. You've seen 'La Dolce Vita,' well, that's like a lot of separate stories running together." Which is about all you can gather because Wilder believes in keeping the plot a secret, "particularly from United Artists. That way they can't fire you before it's finished." Or he tells portions of it so fast, with such twists, that your head is still spinning when he finishes and smiles, "See? Simple isn't it?"

Robert Stephens, from "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" and Olivier's British National Theater, plays Holmes. "I'd never seen Stephens except for 20 minutes in the bar of the Connaught Hotel," says Wilder, "but I thought 'What's good enough for Larry Olivier is good enough for me.'" Colin Blakely, also from the National Theater, is Watson. Neither Stephens nor Blakely knows how the plot ends. "Neither do we," says Diamond quietly. "I'll let you in on a secret," mutters Wilder. "We really do. We just haven't written it down yet."

One or two things are clear, but they tend to provoke more confusion. The plot involves Loch Ness. "Sure we have a monster, but he's not like that Japanese Godzilla fellow." Queen Victoria makes an appearance. Genevieve Page, the madame from "Belle de Jour," plays a Belgian lady who's seen riding a tandem with Holmes. And Stephens had to learn to stroke for a crew of eight on the Thames at Oxford. "Panavision is very good for rowing scenes," remarks Wilder. "Also for dachshunds. Though not for the Eiffel tower."

The intrepid pair also visit the ballet. A famous ballerina (Tamara Toumanova) suggests to Holmes that with his brains and her body they could make the perfect baby. He declines, saying that his friend Watson wouldn't approve. Word spreads that Holmes and Watson are more than just good friends and the male dancers close in. . . . Later Watson is seen with six ballerinas and a rose behind his ear doing the dance of the little swans from "Swan Lake." "Colin," Wilder tells Blakely, "I want you to act like Laughton and to dance like Nureyev." Afterward--"Colin, why did you act like Nureyev and dance like Laughton?"

Stephens, who collapsed from physical exhaustion in the middle of the shooting schedule, is unstinting in his praise of Wilder. "Fantastic. He's always good-humored, immensely knowledgeable. He never ever seems to get tired and he's 63." Genevieve Page says, "He's the best director any of us has ever worked with. He's always the first on the set, and if everyone is sheltering from the rain, he's the one who'll be first out there waiting for it to stop. We lost our Loch Ness monster, but he didn't seem to worry too much, even though he's the producer as well as the director. He was more concerned to go over and comfort the man who had made it and who was upset about its disappearing. And he knows exactly what he wants. He doesn't over-shoot. When he's finished cutting, he says there should be nothing left on the cutting floor but chewing gum wrappers and tears."

Wilder, who's usually noted for his cynicism, this week finds himself among people from all fields of art, science and politics in the English Sunday Times list of "A Thousand Makers of the Twentieth Century," and, to my pleased surprise, the winner of six Oscars confesses himself pleased by it. "The day of the director and the writer is here at last and that's marvelous." But it may have been his normal bleakness of outlook that made his last two pictures, "Kiss Me Stupid" and "The Fortune Cookie," unpalatable to many audiences. "I don't know," Wilder says, "with 'Kiss Me Stupid' there was a phenomenal outcry. They said it was the dirtiest movie ever made. Condemned in Life magazine. Suggestions that my citizenship papers should be taken away. But pictures have gone much further today. Comparatively, 'Kiss Me Stupid" was nothing. There was just the same kind of outcry when I made 'Ace in the Hole' in 1951. I like to mix a little vinegar in the cocktail. I suppose the audience thought they'd come to see another kind of picture and felt they'd been cheated.

"'The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes' is not a comedy and it's not serious," says Wilder. "It should keep audiences in the theater for around three hours."

Isn't there a risk in making such expensive pictures when a low-budget movie like "Easy Rider" can be so successful? "Yes, there's always a risk, but for every one of those low- budget pictures that works, 50 go down the drain. The man with real courage is the one who decides he wants to remake 'The Desert Song.' You know, at one time everyone thought that what we call the cinema of mama and papa was dead. Then along came 'The Sound of Music.' And 'Dr. Zhivago.' Before 'Zhivago,' the dissolve had almost disappeared from movies. And then David Lean started dissolving endlessly from snow to daffodils and it was new to a new audience. If you say to your audience, 'Come on, let's play a game,' and you explain it, they'll play, no matter what it is. They're very young now, most of them, but they're also very bright."

"The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes" is at least a little bit pre-sold by the character of Holmes. "You know the oil is there, if only you can tap it. On the other hand, if you're not sure there's any oil there in the first place, you may only strike you know what. But it's like the thing we have in the picture about 'with your brains and my body we must make a beautiful baby.' It could still turn out to be mongoloid."

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