Billy Wilder

The director who made a farce about two musicians hiding inside a women's band also opened a film with a screenwriter floating face down in a swimming pool, and did both inside a decade. Billy Wilder was Austrian and then American, worked in Hollywood across five decades, and collected seven Academy Awards, a BAFTA, two Golden Globes and the Palme d'Or on the way.

What he was good at was contempt with a laugh inside it. Double Indemnity treats adultery and murder as a sales transaction between professionals. The Lost Weekend spends its running time inside an alcoholic's week and does not blink. Ace in the Hole watches a reporter keep a trapped man trapped because the story is better that way. The Apartment is a romantic comedy conducted around a corporate key ring, and it is one of the few films of its era that is genuinely angry about what offices do to people. Even Some Like It Hot, the most purely enjoyable thing he made, runs on the assumption that everybody is lying about who they are.

The writing is why it lasts. Wilder wrote as well as directed, and the dialogue is built to be spoken fast, which is why his films feel modern next to their contemporaries. The late run is thinner: Irma la Douce and The Fortune Cookie are minor beside what came before, The Front Page was a remake he did not need to make, and Buddy Buddy closed the career quietly in 1981. Nobody holds those against him, which is the privilege of having already made four or five of the best films of the studio era.