Book Review: Billy Wilder on Assignment

Learn about the classic film director through his journalism

Billy Wilder’s movies include Sabrina, The Lost Weekend, Stalag 17, Love in the Afternoon, The Spirit of St. Louis, Witness for the Prosecution and Double Indemnity. This year’s new book on the fabled director, Billy Wilder on Assignment: Dispatches from Weimar Berlin and Interwar Vienna, rewards those who love the movies. An editor’s introduction to Billy Wilder’s journalism explains why the book breaks Wilder’s work into three parts—features, portraits and review—and the collection is followed by an index and a translator’s note. All of this puts Wilder’s early writing into wider context.

Don’t read Wilder’s assigned writing for great journalism. These are light newspaper features which inform and enlighten the reader about his biography, his future filmmaking and his philosophy. Articles are edited by Noah Isenberg, a film scholar (who kindly signed my edition earlier this year when we met on his university campus in Texas), and translated by Shelley Frisch. The result, Billy Wilder…