Billy Wilder's 1978 Flop Fedora Is a Sorry Footnote to Sunset Boulevard
For a long time, when I thought about the goddamn injustice of Hollywood, the image my mind centered on was a seventy and eighty-something Billy Wilder, his mind still razor-sharp, his wit still a volcanic force, coming into his office each day eager to make films and succeeding only occasionally, and after a certain point not at all.
I could not bear the idea that the man who gave the world One, Two, Three and Ace in the Hole and Some Like It Hot and so many other ferociously smart, verbal masterpieces had difficulty getting films made while Hollywood spent a bizarre number of years under the illusion that if they just threw money at Joe Eszterhas of all people, those millions would be returned to them a thousandfold in both art and commerce in a karmic bonanza of epic proportions.
My heart broke for Wilder, who I wished had the kind of late-career renaissance of someone like Clint Eastwood, who stayed in the game, cranking out a film a year even after his mind had gone to the point where he thought having an animated conversation with a chair in front of tens of millions of confused and concerned people was a good idea.
In a perfect world, Wilder’s last two decades would be like Robert Altman’s, or Martin Scorsese’s, or Steven Spielberg’s. Each has fought Hollywood’s boundless hunger for youth and novelty and remained at the very top of their game, continually working with the biggest and greatest actors, actresses and craftsmen of their times. Yet if you actually look at Wilder’s filmography, his last couple of movies suggest that those evil studio executives I’ve spent a lot of time hating in abstract may have been onto something if they thought a new Billy Wilder movie might be a dodgy proposition in the era of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.
1978’s Fedora radiates promise in abstract. It’s a cousin/companion/follow-up to Sunset Boulevard once again starring, and narrated by a hard-boiled, cynical Hollywood survivor played by William Holden. Also like Wilder and Holden’s classic 1950 noir, Fedora centers on the way show-business devours its own, transforming eager starlets and ambitious actresses into half-demons of ego and vanity run amok and men into desperate parasites willing to do anything to stay in a rigged and corrupt game.
Aging is both the text and the subtext of Fedora. Holden had an unparalleled way with Wilder’s words. The film is never on stronger, surer footing than when he’s talking, which makes it all the more unfortunate that he spends nearly all of the film’s third act having the film’s convoluted yet unsurprising mystery revealed to him through a series of flashbacks narrated by different characters.
By the time the film came along, decades of hard living had taken a toll on Holden. He looked more than a little on the grizzled side, like a man who had lived, a man with stories but also a man with a whole lot of wrinkles and demons. This fits the part, as the lead character is a droll, dry-witted hustler of a certain age and a certain era who begins the film just barely holding on. By the late seventies, the days of disco and punk, Holden and Wilder were on an unmistakable decline. They were two men out of time, legends, undeniably but also men past their enviable primes.
In one of his final performances before a tragic early drinking-related death put an appropriately melancholy end to a remarkable if troubled life and career, Holden stars as Barry "Dutch" Detweiler, a has-been producer pinning long-shot hopes of a comeback on tracking down a curiously ageless Greta Garbo-like recluse named Fedora on a mysterious European island and convincing her to star in yet another adaptation of Anna Karena.
On the island, our intrepid hero is given the runaround by Fedora’s creepy, gothic entourage of weirdoes, parasites and hangers-on, including a sour-faced cosmetic surgeon played by an amusingly earringed Miguel Ferrer and Countess Sobryanski (Hildegard Knef), a mean old woman who looks and acts a little like Ma Bates if she’d been dead for several years but was somehow still just as talkative and feisty. She looks like a mannequin of a demented old biddy so when it is revealed that she is not who she appears to be it doesn’t have much of an impact, since everyone Dutch encounters seems like a phony and a fake and an obvious villain. Fedora isn’t a Whodunnit, or even a Whoisit (identity being central to the film’s’ muddled mystery) so much as a Whocares?
Fedora depicts herself as a victim tormented and abused by a sinister cabal of leeches. The sinister vibe of the off-brand Addams Family that surrounds her backs up her paranoia and fear. This is another instance where the film’s similarities to Sunset Boulevard do not work in its favor. Ferrer is fun as a sour man making the most of a dreadful situation but Erich von Stroheim as Sunset Boulevard’s Max Von Mayerling he is not.
Wilder wanted Marlene Dietrich for the role of Countess Sobryanski and Faye Dunaway for the title character but instead got Hildegard Knef and Martha Keller. If your response was “Who?” that would be warranted. The roles are both monumentally challenging. The script calls for performances that are charismatic and enigmatic, iconic yet simpatico. Instead both actresses fumble their way through the film, further brought down by lumbering dialogue and atrocious post-dubbing. Despite being made by one of the true masters, Fedora has dubbing only slightly more polished and professional than mid-period Godzilla movies.
Wilder needed someone of the stature of a Marlene Dietrich or Gloria Swanson, a true legend of the screen equipped to inhabit such an outsized role. Instead he got performances so inert and stiff that they feel trapped in amber, lifeless, a haunted house version of madness, all moans and wails and outsized suffering.
I’ve devoted a surprising amount of mental energy to retroactively wishing that the old but eager Billy Wilder had gotten to make more films. So I suppose it’s a little hypocritical that my overwhelming reaction to Fedora was that it really should not have been made. It should have come to a natural end when they didn’t get someone like Dietrich for it, or when they saw how terrible the dubbing was. But they soldiered on and completed the film all the same because that’s what professionals do, even when they’re off their game and age is clearly catching up with them.
Wilder and Holden give it their all, but even they could not breathe life and color into a moribund script nor transcend Keller and Knef’s dreadful overacting. So while in theory I wish the elder Wilder an endless series of green lights as retribution for Hollywood throwing away the old in its rapturous worship of the young (which also, perhaps not coincidentally, is the film’s theme), this particular project should have been tossed in the old circular file and abandoned before it ever had a chance to waste the extraordinary talents of two giants nearing the end of their own cinematic journey just as assuredly as Fedora’s title character is rapidly approaching hers.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Failure.
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