Favorite Billy Wilder films

Stalag 17 
Witness for the Prosecution 
Sunset Boulevard 
Sabrina

I like all the usual suspects but one I love that often gets forgotten is The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)

Also I have a very soft spot for the much maligned Buddy, Buddy (1981) .

I first fell in love with comical irony while watching The Seven Year Itch (1955) years after it was made.

So, let me pick that one for now.
To me it was Billy Liar (1963) and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947) all rolled into one--and on steroids. 
Imagine an editor of cheap pulp fiction paper-back novels imagining that the sexy woman upstairs is falling in love with him while his wife is up in Maine.

Tom MacKenzie (Sonny Tufts): What blonde in the kitchen?

Richard Sherman (Tom Ewell): Wouldn't you like to know! Maybe it's Marilyn Monroe!

To add another trick of Wilder's writing-- In Sabrina (1954) we have Linus Larrabee (Bogy) is ordering two tickets for the Broadway show, The Seven Year Itch from his limo.

Oh, I don't know about the latter film, Matt.
IMHO, Jimmy Stewart was too old to play Charles Lindbergh.

Yep, he was nearly twice as old as Lucky Lindy was when making that historic flight -- but what younger actor could have commanded our attention for two hours all alone in that cramped cockpit?

By the same token, what was 6 feet 2 inch Peter O'Toole doing portraying diminutive (5'4") T.E. Lawrence? It would have been more accurate with Alan Ladd in the role.

OK, what about it? If you mean height, Cagney was small in physical stature as well -- but sure stood tall on screen.

(and I was being facetious about O'Toole -- he made a terrific 'Lawrence')

The point I was making was that age or height considerations are secondary to performance -- and Stewart was an excellent Lindbergh.

Many thanks for this thread, spiderwort—I’m a huge Billy Wilder fan, one of my very favorite writer-directors. There’s so much that intrigues me about Wilder, but one point that may not receive as much notice as it should is how faithfully Wilder carries on in the Lubitschean tradition. Sarris noted that Wilder is Lubitsch-turned-sour, but Lubitsch never denied sourness or cynicism in the world; he simply saw more to life than a superficial cynicism.

Curiously, Wilder is much the same way, though it took him longer to discover it: a much-vaunted Wilderian cynicism pervades the early films, and reaches its zenith (or nadir?) with Ace in the Hole—but then we see his very next picture, Stalag 17, and how a sense of hope comes through. Sarris criticized William Holden’s little wave in Stalag 17; “Wilder is too cynical to believe in his own cynicism,” he wrote, but it’s more that Wilder is too intelligent to believe in his own cynicism.

Certainly, Wilder returned to pure cynicism at times (The Apartment most notably), but only in the ‘50s could he have made the romantic, if not wholly successful, efforts of Sabrina and Love in the Afternoon, and only in the ‘70s could he have made The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, a graceful, autumnal symphony that ultimately shows cynicism as too facile to deal with the real problems of life and love. It’s an extraordinary journey over an extraordinary career—beginning with Lubitschean romanticism, turning to sourness after turning from the writer’s cubicle to the director’s chair, returning to where he began in the late stages of his life. In Wilder’s end was his beginning, a point that makes his oeuvre so very satisfying.

Anyhoo, enough with auteurist musings… Favorite Wilder flicks. While I have warmed up to Sunset Boulevard (early on, I was also cold to it), speaking of “not warming up to,” I immensely admire Double Indemnity and love parts of it, especially any scene with Eddie G., but prefer many other Wilder films. To put it another way, if Some Like It Hot is on TCM, I’ll turn to it right away; if Double Indemnity is on, I may consider watching something else.

Five Graves to Cairo gets overlooked at times, but it’s immensely clever, and Stroheim is brilliant as Rommel. Wilder should get more credit for making the play on which it was based immensely cinematic without “opening it up” too much. Sunset Boulevard is a brilliant portrait of obsession and decadence, and its intermingling of genres (as I once wrote of David Mamet, in many ways Wilder’s successor, Wilder creates his own genre) is masterly. Ace in the Hole is almost unbearable to watch, relentlessly glum (like The Lost Weekend), but it’s absolutely brilliant, and Douglas is at his best. Some Like It Hot is justly celebrated as wonderful and hilarious, though I have a real fondness for One, Two, Three, where Jimmy Cagney manages to make an unsympathetic character likeable. And, of course, the elegiac Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, which may be the best Sherlock Holmes film, considered as a film, ever made.

Apologies for the wall of text, but many thanks again for this topic, Spider.

Tele is 'he who gets slapped'!

Wait a minute -- Tele is right!

Slap is rescinded.

Take back that slap.