Billy Wilder was born Samuel Wilder in 1906 in Austria-Hungary, nicknamed 'Billie' by his mother after Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows, and died in 2002 in California with a gravestone quoting his own most famous line: 'I'm a writer but then nobody's perfect.' The inscription is a joke, but the joke is also the man — sardonic, self-aware, and quietly certain of his own worth. The BFI Southbank's retrospective Almost Perfect, running from 19 October to 31 December, makes the cumulative case more forcefully than any individual film can. Wilder's range is the first thing that stuns you: Double Indemnity, the zenith of film noir; Some Like It Hot, routinely voted the greatest comedy ever made; Sunset Boulevard, the definitive film about Hollywood's own mythologies; The Apartment, which many critics — with good reason — call his masterwork and one of the greatest films ever made. That is four films that would each define another director's entire legacy. The biographical context matters more than it usually does with a filmmaker of this calibre. Wilder fled Berlin when Hitler came to power — 'It seemed like the wise thing for a Jew to do,' he said, with characteristic understatement — and was working on Double Indemnity while his family perished in the camps. An alternative ending, still locked in the Paramount vaults, has Fred MacMurray's Walter executed in a gas chamber. The Holocaust doesn't just hang over the film; it is structurally embedded in it. The fatalism of film noir as a genre owes a great deal to the émigré directors who shaped it — Wilder, Robert Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer — men who had watched civilization collapse and brought that knowledge to their stories about American greed and betrayal. Wilder was formed as a writer before he was a director, working as a journalist and taxi dancer in Berlin, then as a screenwriter during the silent era, collaborating on People on Sunday with Siodmak and Ulmer. In Hollywood, he partnered with Charles Brackett and wrote for Hawks, Leisen, and above all Ernst Lubitsch, his hero, whose influence he formalized with the sign above his desk: 'What would Lubitsch do?' The question is not rhetorical — it is a working method, a reminder that wit and economy and trust in the audience were not optional but structural. His final years were difficult. The last few films suggest a man genuinely out of time — Fedora concerns an ageing star dismissing the New Hollywood kids with beards, and it isn't hard to read it autobiographically. But even late Wilder has a second life: Fedora inspired Jonathan Coe's 2020 novel Mr Wilder & Me, which is now being adapted for the screen by Christopher Hampton with Stephen Frears directing, though funding has proved elusive. The story Wilder told about the waterfall — lying in an Austrian spa after all the success and the awards, unable to think of anything except the broken toilet from his Berlin years — is not a complaint. It is the diagnosis of a man who understood that the artist's relationship to his material is never resolved, only managed. The BFI retrospective is an opportunity to watch these films in sequence and feel the through-line: the exile's eye for American hypocrisy, the screenwriter's ear for the line that lands, the survivor's refusal to let the audience off easy. Wilder was an egotist, as the article notes, but he earned every gram of it. The consoling American official in Mexicali who stamped his passport and told him to 'write some good ones' got exactly what he asked for.
