Hollywood may have loved Billy Wilder, but Billy Wilder did not like Hollywood. As the filmmaker behind the most cynical and iconic film about filmmaking, Sunset Boulevard, Wilder showed a surprising disdain for the way the industry that made him famous worked. While he rarely returned to the same subject twice in his long career, Wilder did return to Hollywood, so to speak, 18 years after Sunset Boulevard with the shockingly underrated Fedora.
Like Sunset Boulevard, Fedora also stars William Holden, albeit a much, much older Holden. By 1978, Holden was among Hollywood's elder statesman, but had proven that he could still pack a punch with words and actions in Sidney Lumet's Network. Therefore, Fedora was the perfect material to reunite Wilder with Holden for the first time since Sabrina.
The film starts at a funeral, where Hollywood icon Fedora (Marthe Keller) is laying in an open casket, with tourists taking pictures and fans in tears. The narrator is Barry “Dutch” Detweiler (Holden), who tells us that Fedora has not worked in a film in years, retreating at the height of her career like Greta Garbo did. However, Fedora has mysteriously stayed young all these years. Dutch blames himself for Fedora's death, assuming that his constant pushing to get her to star in a modern Anna Karenina led her to commit suicide. But there is much more to the story than Dutch knows.
Surprisingly, Fedora isn't set all in the mind of Dutch, which is one of its faults. Unlike the concise and direct Sunset Boulevard, Fedora's second half is more like Clue. Wilder and his too-frequent co-writer I.A.L. Diamond bring Dutch's flashback up to the point the film started an hour into the movie...and there's still another hour to go. So, rather than tell us how Fedora got in the casket from one character's perspective, the story is abruptly split in three. Portions of the story are told by her doctor, Vando (Jose Ferrer); the servant Miss Balfour (Frances Sternhagen) and Countess Sobryanski (Hildegard Knef). Indeed, Holden's role is whittled down to merely standing and asking questions by that point in the film.
But that second hour is still a surprising shift for Wilder, especially when you consider his later works. Fedora sticks out like a sore thumb among the other post-The Apartment movies, which are all comedies. However, Wilder and Diamond (who worked on every post-Apartment movie with Wilder) tried their hand one last time at a straight drama. Sure, there's some humor in it, but Fedora is built more like the great films Wilder made in the late '40s and early '50s. You get the sense that if Wilder could have convinced some financiers to let him make it in black and white, he would have.
What also sets Fedora apart from Wilder's other later films is that Jack Lemmon is nowhere to be found. Instead, he goes back to Holden, who appears to be having fun working with Wilder again. Jose Ferrer also adds to the gravitas of the film and there's a couple of neat cameos from Henry Fonda and Michael York. But I do believe that if Wilder had been able to pay for better actresses, the film overall would have worked better. It's not that Marthe Keller is terrible, it's just that she doesn't stick in your mind long after seeing the film.
If it is possible for a film to be more cynical that Sunset Boulevard, Fedora achieves that with ease. While Sunset Boulevard attacks Hollywood's short-term memory, Fedora attacks a more obvious problem and one the industry still faces: an obsession with youth. We're still arguing over the lack of roles for older women in major films, and that is central to Fedora's plot. In fact, the only reason why Hollywood falls all over for Fedora is because she looks so young and is a known name. And that's the exact same reason why Dutch wants to talk to her, too. It's not like he's a hero. After all, he's hoping to get her to play Anna Karenina, a role meant for a younger woman. Her obsession to stay so young is ultimately what costs her.
Fedora is like an old master trying to see if he can get one last great work out of his favorite themes. Sadly, it's nowhere near as good as Sunset Boulevard, but that wasn't Wilder's intentions. He turned over a different leaf, exposing another problem in the Hollywood system. It's just a shame that so few listened to what he had to say this time.
On Home Video: Fedora was recently released on Blu-ray and DVD by Olive Films.
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