Dir: Billy Wilder
Star: Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Paula Prentiss, Klaus Kinski

Wilder’s reputation is as one of the most brilliant of Hollywood film-makers. This stands mostly on his work in the comedy field, where his filmography includes undeniable classics, such as Some Like It Hot and The Apartment, starring Lemmon; he had worked with Lemmon and Matthau together before, on both The Front Page and The Fortune Cookie. But by the point this was released, Wilder was fifteen years removed from an Oscar nomination, and as the final movie directed by such a renowned figure, it’s strikingly underwhelming. It feels like an anachronism, a film made in and for an earlier era, when there was something daring about a mere mention of female sexuality.

Trabucco (Matthau) is an assassin who has been hired to knock off three witnesses in an upcoming organized crime trial. The first two are blown up and poisoned with little trouble, but the third is held in protective custody until his appearance in court. Trabucco checks into a hotel opposite the courthouse, with a view of the steps, to await his target’s arrival. However, in the room next door is Victor Clooney (Lemmon), a neurotic TV executive who is estranged from his wife, Celia (Prentiss). When she rejects his attempts to reconcile, Victor attempts suicide; desperate to prevent the attention of hotel staff and, as a result, the authorities, Trabucco agrees to take responsibility for Clooney. 

In short order, Clooney climbs onto the window-ledge, and will only come back in if Trabucco agrees to drive him to the clinic where Celia is staying. For she has fallen head over heels for noted European sex guru, Dr. Hugo Zuckerbrot (Kinski), and his innovative therapeutic techniques. When Victor can’t convince Celia to leave the clinic, he heads back to the hotel. Fearing what damage the scandal resulting from a suicide might do to his reputation, Dr. Zuckerbrot and Celia follow, only for Trabucco to be injected erroneously with a sedative intended for Clooney. It’s time for Victor to pay back his friend, by carrying out the hit, which the professional is currently not capable of completing.

This was a remake of a successful French-Italian film, L’emmerdeur, released in America as A Pain in the A–. It was originally made in 1973, with Lino Ventura playing the hitman, Belgian singer Jacques Brel as the suicidal neighbor and Jean-Pierre Darras in the role of the doctor. [The film was remade in its home country in 2008, to no greater success; there was also a Bollywood version, Bumboo, in 2012]  Yet the script, written by Wilder and long-time collaborator I. A. L. Diamond, somehow manages to feel even more retro, such as the comedic hippie into whom Trabucco and Clooney bump on their way to the clinic.

While  comedy hit-men can work – I like both Grosse Pointe Blank and In Bruges, for example – all told, it’s a poor choice of topic for Wilder’s style, and would likely have been better handled by someone whose talents lent themselves more towards black comedy. For example, I can’t help thinking this could have made a great Fawlty Towers episode. It would sit somewhere between “The Psychiatrist” and “The Germans”, with Basil roaming the hotel, trying to convince Sybil an assassination was about to take place. 

By this point, and despite previous success and acclaim, Wilder has become an afterthought to contemporary Hollywood, perceived by the studios as an out-of-touch dinosaur. He made Buddy Buddy, simply because he was given the opportunity, saying later, “I hadn’t been working enough, and I was anxious to get back on the horse and do what I do – write, direct. This wasn’t a picture I would have chosen.”  In Wilder’s defense, the idea of a sniper holing up in a hotel-room resonates differently in the post-Mandalay Bay era, and has not aged well. Lemmon and Matthau have the easy chemistry together you would expect

Though it wasn’t long into shooting before the director came to believe the hit-man should have been more of of a straight-man. “It didn’t work to have two comics together,” Wilder said. “I needed someone serious like Clint Eastwood.” The problems weren’t limited to the casting, the director admitting, “Wilder the writer let Wilder the director down.” That Matthau’s character telling Lemmon’s to “Fuck off,” is the movie’s most memorable moment, exemplifies the issues here. It’s the same cheap exploitation of an icon for shock value, carried out on Julie Andrews the same year in S.O.B.

As the quote from Kinski on the left shows, he didn’t look back on the experience with fondness, except for the check. According to the IMDb, he passed on appearing as Major Arnold Toht, in Raiders of the Lost Ark to appear in this, based entirely on the size of the payday he’d receive [although his autobiography indicates Venom was the beneficiary]. In subsequent years, he would reportedly deny entirely having been involved with the film, and his lack of interest is frequently apparent. The Chicago Reader in its review called his presence “a brilliant idea gone spectacularly wrong,” and it’s difficult to argue with that conclusion.

Comedy has never exactly been a genre you’d link with Kinski, and it’s odd to see him in a broad farce, with jokes about premature ejaculation. Of course, there’s no reason he had to stick to intense dramas; some of the most memorable comedic performances have come from unexpected places [I’m thinking of Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder, for example, Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie or Ed Norton in Death to Smoochy] However, just as the subject matter doesn’t yell “A Film by Billy Wilder,” I strongly suspect it would take a director with a particular… approach to unleash Kinski’s inner clown. I can’t say I have any real idea who that might be, and am certainly open to suggestions.