Damn this movie addiction. Damn them all to Hell!

Great, even in my rebellion against movies I can’t help but quote them.

Last night I was in a fog of exhaustion and illness. My wife and the kids went to bed early. Rather than start my night fighting with sleep combined with sinus pain, I went downstairs to watch TV.

Normally, there isn’t anything on, so I thought the flickering lights would soothe me off to sleep. Wouldn’t you know it, TCM was playing a tribute to the late Billy Wilder. Within seconds, I was hooked.

Cinema lost one of the true unsung greats last week when Wilder died. Though he hadn’t made a film in decades, his brand of writing and versatile direction has been echoing through film ever since he began writing films in the thirties.

His wordplay, whether for strong drama or screwball comedy was brilliant. He had a sense of meter that few writers will ever understand. Though written rather unpoetically, Wilder’s words were beautiful, harsh and startling at times. The words he chose were the words we would choose ourselves. His characters were as flawed and inarticulate as we are, and yet these awkward speeches and dialogues would beat their way into a poetic form unlike any other.

Particularly strong was the movie that sucked me in yesterday, Some Like It Hot. Wilder took his everyman alter-ego Jack Lemmon and city-bred, sensitive tough guy Tony Curtis and transformed them into men, dressed as women who were on the lam. A simple story that shouldn’t have made it past ten minutes. Yet, when you place these young men, trying to pass themselves off as women, directly across from the raw sexuality of Marilyn Monroe . . . they don’t have a chance.

Few films can make you laugh like this one. But they followed with The Apartment, a film of such bitter-sweetness that you cannot help but cringe and laugh at the same time. On one level, the film is the painful story of a man (Lemmon again) who allows himself to be taken advantage of by his superiors in the name of getting ahead. He loans out his apartment for his boss’ marital infidelities.

But at its core is a lovely love story between a lowly secretary and a beaten down man. That the secretary is sleeping with their married boss and its Lemmon’s apartment that is used for the secret rendezvous doesn’t matter. Both characters not only forgive the others flaws, they love them. Accept them.

Without Billy Wilder we wouldn’t have Cameron Crowe or Nora Ephron or even Rob Reiner. Names that we all know who owe a great debt to the wit and wizardry of Billy Wilder.