When the legendary film director Billy Wilder was asked about his memories of 1950s Hollywood, his answer was quick, sharp, and owed more than a little to the opening line of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. “It was the best of times,” he said. “It was also the worst of times.”
Wilder surely knew whereof he spoke: after all, he bookended the decade with two imperishable mainstays of the all-time greats lists — 1950’s Sunset Boulevard and 1959’s Some Like It Hot. But if you took a look at some of the other movies released during that storied period — Roman Holiday (1953), On the Waterfront (1954), Singin’ in the Rain (1952), 12 Angry Men (1957) or Vertigo (1958) — you could be forgiven for thinking, Well, where’s the beef ? Weren’t those 10 years a golden roll-call of stone-cold classics populated by a pantheon of immortals (Brando, Hepburn, Monroe, Kelly, Stewart, Grant, Fonda) unmatched before or since? Well, yes and no, according to Wilder. “Studios!” he exclaimed. “You couldn’t make pictures with ’em, you couldn’t make pictures without ’em. And they were always running scared of something — their talent, their rivals, their own shadows. But in the 1950s that bloomed into full-scale paranoia.”
It got personal, in Wilder’s case. While he was writing the script for , he pretended he was adapting a (non-existent) short story called ‘A Can of Beans’ in order
