A Foreign Affair: Billy Wilder's American Films

by Gerd Gemünden

Overview

With six Academy Awards, four entries on the American Film Institute’s list of 100 greatest American movies, and more titles on the National Historic Register of classic films deemed worthy of preservation than any other director, Billy Wilder counts as one of the most accomplished filmmakers ever to work in Hollywood. Yet how American is Billy Wilder, the Jewish émigré from Central Europe? This book underscores this complex issue, unpacking underlying contradictions where previous commentators routinely smoothed them out. Wilder emerges as an artist with roots in sensationalist journalism and the world of entertainment as well as with an awareness of literary culture and the avant-garde, features that lead to productive and often highly original confrontations between high and low.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780857450661
Publisher:	Berghahn Books, Incorporated
Publication date:	04/01/2008
Series:	Film Europa , #5
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	206
Sales rank:	570,713
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Gerd Gemünden is Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities and Professor of German Studies, Film Studies, and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Framed Visions: Popular Culture, Americanization and the Contemporary German and Austrian Imagination (1998) and editor of volumes on Wim Wenders, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Douglas Sirk, as well as an anthology of critical writings on Marlene Dietrich.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction

Chapter 1. An Accented Cinema
Chapter 2. The Insurance Man Always Rings Twice: Double Indemnity (1944)
Chapter 3. In the Ruins of Berlins: A Foreign Affair (1948)
Chapter 4. Ghosting Hollywood: Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Fedora (1978)
Chapter 5. All Dressed Up and Running Wild: Some Like It Hot (1959)
Chapter 6. Being a Mensch in the Administered World: The Apartment (1960)
Chapter 7. In the Closet of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)

Chronology
Filmography
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"...provides a hugely readable, insightful examination of Billy Wilder's American films as the product of transnational cultural exchange."  ·  Monatshefte

"Gemunden's vital decoding of Wilder's translation of himself into the American vernacular offers stimulating new material and perspectives that will no doubt shape Wilder scholarship to come."  ·  Austrian Studies Newsletter

"Billy Wilder is hard to trump, because everything one writes about him is only half as entertaining as his great sense of humor. Gerd Gemunden, however, achieves a small miracle: his A Foreign Affair is a highly readable yet serious critical study that reveals Wilder, the alleged cynic, as the moralist he really was."  ·  Volker Schlondorff

EBOOK COMMENTARY

“…provides a hugely readable, insightful examination of Billy Wilder’s American films as the product of transnational cultural exchange.”  ·  Monatshefte

"Gemünden’s vital decoding of Wilder’s translation of himself into the American vernacular offers stimulating new material and perspectives that will no doubt shape Wilder scholarship to come."  ·  Austrian Studies Newsletter

"Billy Wilder is hard to trump, because everything one writes about him is only half as entertaining as his great sense of humor. Gerd Gemünden, however, achieves a small miracle: his A Foreign Affair is a highly readable yet serious critical study that reveals Wilder, the alleged cynic, as the moralist he really was."  ·  Volker Schlöndorff

From the Publisher