A man tries to rise in his company by letting its executives use his apartment for trysts, but complications and a romance of his own ensue.

Quote:
Immediately following the success of Some Like It Hot, Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond wished to make another film with Jack Lemmon. Wilder had originally planned to cast Paul Douglas as Jeff Sheldrake; however, after he died unexpectedly, Fred MacMurray was cast.

The initial concept for the film came from Brief Encounter by Noël Coward, in which Celia Johnson has an affair with Trevor Howard in his friend’s apartment. However, due to the Hays Production Code, Wilder was unable to make a film about adultery in the 1940s. Wilder and Diamond also based the film partially on a Hollywood scandal in which high-powered agent Jennings Lang was shot by producer Walter Wanger for having an affair with Wanger’s wife, actress Joan Bennett. During the affair, Lang used a low-level employee’s apartment. Another element of the plot was based on the experience of one of Diamond’s friends, who returned home after breaking up with his girlfriend to find that she had committed suicide in his bed.

Although Wilder generally required his actors to adhere exactly to the script, he allowed Jack Lemmon to improvise in two scenes: in one scene he squirted a bottle of nose drops across the room, and in another he sang while making a meal of spaghetti (which he strains through the grid of a tennis racket). In another scene, where Lemmon was supposed to mime being punched, he failed to move correctly and was accidentally knocked down. Wilder chose to use the shot of the genuine punch in the film. Lemmon also caught a cold when one scene on a park bench was filmed in sub-zero weather.

Art director Alexandre Trauner used forced perspective to create the set of a large insurance company office. The set appeared to be a very long room full of desks and workers; however, successively smaller people and desks were placed to the back of the room ending up with children. He designed the set of Baxter’s apartment to appear smaller and shabbier than the spacious apartments that usually appeared in films of the day. He used items from thrift stores and even some of Wilder’s own furniture for the set.

The.Apartment.1960.576p.Bluray.x264.DD.5.1-1R0N.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	2 h 4 min
Size: 	3.56 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x436 
Aspect ratio:  	2.35:1
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	3 689 kb/s
BPP: 	0.345
Audio
#1:  	English 1.0ch AAC LC @ 175 kb/s (Mono - Original Audio)
#2:  	English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s (Stereo - Commentary)

https://nitro.download/view/91BB726CBE9B6D3/The.Apartment.1960.576p.Bluray.x264.DD.5.1-1R0N.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Billy Wilder – The Apartment (1960) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

PLOT: A middle-aged playboy becomes fascinated by the daughter of a private detective who has been hired to entrap him with the wife of a client.

Love.in.the.Afternoon.1957.576p.BluRay.AAC.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	2 h 9 min
Size: 	3.51 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x576 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	3 638 kb/s
BPP: 	0.257
Audio
#1:  	English 2.0ch AAC LC @ 224 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/5FC001B59DE585D/Love.in.the.Afternoon.1957.576p.BluRay.AAC.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English, Portuguese

The post Billy Wilder – Love in the Afternoon (1957) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Has dialogue ever been more perfectly hard-boiled? Has a femme fatale ever been as deliciously wicked as Barbara Stanwyck? And has 1940s Los Angeles ever looked so seductively sordid? Working with cowriter Raymond Chandler, director Billy Wilder launched himself onto the Hollywood A-list with this epitome of film-noir fatalism from James M. Cain’s pulp novel. When slick salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) walks into the swank home of dissatisfied housewife Phyllis Dietrichson (Stanwyck), he intends to sell insurance, but he winds up becoming entangled with her in a far more sinister way. Featuring scene-stealing supporting work from Edward G. Robinson and the chiaroscuro of cinematographer John F. Seitz, Double Indemnity is one of the most entertainingly perverse stories ever told and the standard by which all noir must be measured.

2.64GB | 1h 47m | 790×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/D2A9A774646B0B9/Double.Indemnity.1944.BDRIP.Criterion.4K.576p.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:English

The post Billy Wilder – Double Indemnity [Criterion 4K] (1944) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis:
It’s World War II, and British soldier John Bramble (Franchot Tone) is the lone survivor of a brutal battle in Egypt. After wandering through the desert, Bramble finds a remote hotel. There, in order to stay alive, he assumes a false identity. When the famed German general Rommel (Erich von Stroheim), aka the Desert Fox, arrives at the hotel, Bramble realizes he’s being taken for a German spy. Can this lowly British soldier turn the tide in the war and foil Germany’s plans in North Africa?

2.42GB | 1h 36m | 778×576 | mkv

https://nitroflare.com/view/610242E50707151/Five.Graves.to.Cairo.(1943).BluRay.576p.aac.x264-KG.mkv
or
https://nitroflare.com/view/9A65DFE85A6C271/Five.Graves.to.Cairo.(1943).BluRay.576p.aac.x264-KG.part1.rar
https://nitroflare.com/view/1DB2E8BF2C4B3C7/Five.Graves.to.Cairo.(1943).BluRay.576p.aac.x264-KG.part2.rar
https://nitroflare.com/view/6C4835864448192/Five.Graves.to.Cairo.(1943).BluRay.576p.aac.x264-KG.part3.rar

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English SDH

The post Billy Wilder – Five Graves to Cairo (1943) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis:
Susan Applegate, tired of New York after one year and 25 jobs, decides to return to Iowa. Trouble is, when she saved money for the train fare home, she didn’t allow for inflation. So the audacious Susan disguises herself as a 12-year-old (!) and travels for half fare. Found out by the conductors, she hides out in the compartment of Major Philip Kirby, a military school instructor. The growing attraction between Susan and Kirby is complicated by his conniving fiancee…and by the myopic Kirby continuing to think “Su-Su” is only 12!

2.74GB | 1h 40m | 790×576 | mkv

https://nitroflare.com/view/DAB4D9D3D27D6E8/The_Major_and_the_Minor_(1942)_–_Billy_Wilder.mkv
or
https://nitroflare.com/view/50364673BF6D3D2/The_Major_and_the_Minor_(1942)_–_Billy_Wilder.part1.rar
https://nitroflare.com/view/BC9098257AE5EF5/The_Major_and_the_Minor_(1942)_–_Billy_Wilder.part2.rar
https://nitroflare.com/view/B63B6894182983E/The_Major_and_the_Minor_(1942)_–_Billy_Wilder.part3.rar

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English (muxed)

The post Billy Wilder – The Major and the Minor (1942) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Phoebe Frost (Jean Arthur), an upright Iowa Republican member of Congress, travels to Berlin to look into reports of corruption among the occupying American forces. She enlists an Army captain (John Lund) in her crusade and finds herself falling for him, unaware that he’s the man romantically involved with a German cabaret singer (Marlene Dietrich) who can lead army investigators to a high-level Nazi war criminal. The post-war public was not ready to accept such a witty expose of American and German hypocrisy during its original release but A FOREIGN AFFAIR is now considered one of Wilder’s most underrated and iconic films. The black and white cinematography by Charles Lang and the screenplay by Wilder, Charles Brackett and Richard L. Breen received Oscar® nominations.

3.56GB | 1h 58mn | 784×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/4AA08DD447C2AF8/Billy_Wilder_-_(1948)_A_Foreign_Affair.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Billy Wilder – A Foreign Affair (1948) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Billy Wilder’s 1974 remake of the Ben Hecht – Charles MacArthur play The Front Page, famously adapted 34 years before, by Howard Hawks as His Girl Friday, is widely regarded as that point in time when Wilder’s art went into rapid decline, that the picture demonstrated that the director of Sunset Boulevard, Ace in the Hole, and The Apartment had lost his confidence, that he had become out of step with the times and could no longer connect with the tastes of a changing movie-going audience. In fact The Front Page is a reasonably successful adaptation, darkly cynical like most of Wilder’s best work. Wilder and collaborator I.A.L. Diamond rewrote about 60% of the dialogue** yet the spirit of the original play is retained. The picture was apparently even moderately successful, grossing $15 million domestically against a $4 million budget.
The well-worn story, set in 1929 Chicago, traces Chicago Examiner Editor Walter Burns’ (Walter Matthau) efforts to win back his ace reporter, Hildy Johnson (Jack Lemmon). Engaged to movie theater organist Peggy Grant (Susan Sarandon, in an early role), Hildy resigns from the paper the day before convicted anarchist Earl Williams (Austin Pendleton) is schedule to be hanged, amidst an ultra-competitive media circus where Hildy’s talents are vital to the Examiner’s circulation. Though Hildy wants to leave the exciting but all-consuming life of a newsman, a job that has already destroyed his first marriage, Walter selfishly wants Hildy for himself, and the tug-of-war between Walter and Peggy, with Hildy slowly being sucked back into the newsman’s milieu, like an addict succumbing to his addiction, is structured not unlike a romantic triangle.

Though not up to the level of Hawks’ film, Wilder’s version of The Front Page is perfectly good for what it is, which is essentially a straightforward movie adaptation of the play. It’s faithful in spirit if not dialogue almost to a fault, and Wilder seems to have decided early on that a recreation approach that stays true to late-1920s/early ’30s play-speak was best and, for some exteriors, films much of it in an exaggerated manner (the use of fast motion, for example), recalling early ’30s gangster movies and two-reel comedies.

The end result is like the cynicism of Ace in the Hole (which also has a newsman greedily manipulating a news event) coupled with the ensemble period comedy of the much-overrated The Sting which, significantly, had been an enormous success for Universal the year before this went into production. (One wonders what impact, if any, the Watergate scandal might also have had in green-lighting this production. Of course, Wilder doesn’t exactly paint Hildy and Walter as 1929 equivalents of Woodward and Bernstein, either.) The hypocrisy of virtually every character, from the newsmen who blithely make up copy and ignore the facts, to the corrupt mayor (Harold Gould), government-appointed, crackpot psychiatrist (Martin Gabel) and sheriff (Vincent Gardenia) are not lost in Wilder and Diamond’s screenplay.

The picture was criticized for its frequent, very ’70s overindulgence of profanity, but its use by chain-smoking, streetwise reporters hardly seems unreasonable. It is hard to defend the puzzling gay stereotyping however, which comes in the form of David Wayne’s fussy, mincing reporter, Roy Bensinger. Beyond the very odd casting of Wayne, who around this time specialized playing long-married curmudgeon types (as opposed, say, to the more overtly gay Edward Everett Horton, who played the part in the 1931 film version), the best jokes here lack the subtlety of the weakest ones in Some Like it Hot and are more smutty than funny.

Lemmon and Matthau, in their third film together (not counting Kotch, which Lemmon directed), are as entertaining as ever, with much natural chemistry, and they’re supported by a dream cast of great character actors: Allen Garfield, Charles Durning, Herb Edelman, Cliff Osmond, Dick O’Neill. Austin Pendleton stands out as demonized convict; a medical examination scene with Gardenia and Gabel is the only scene that had this critic laughing out loud.

Much less successful is the casting of Carol Burnett in the essentially straight dramatic role of Mollie Malloy. Despite her huge success in television variety shows, she never quite meshed in films; there’s always a disconnected air of unreality in her film work, and in a critical part Burnett isn’t remotely acceptable.

2.30GB | 1 h 44 min | 1024×440 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/0C5A1ACC62B3CA8/Billy_Wilder_-_(1974)_The_Front_Page.mkv

Language(s):English+commentary
Subtitles:English

The post Billy Wilder – The Front Page (1974) first appeared on Cinema of the World.