FEDORA 1978

Spoiler Alert. This is a critical essay, not a review; plot points are referenced for analysis. 

"Have They forgotten what a star looks like?" - Norma Desmond Sunset Boulevard (1950)

The very same thought occurred to me while watching Billy Wilder's penultimate film Fedora. A they-don't-make-'em-like-they-used-to, post-Golden Age eulogy for the Hollywood of yesteryear. Set in such glamorous locales as France, Greece, and Los Angeles, Fedora nevertheless has the nondescript, pared-down, underpopulated look of a made-for-TV movie when what it cries out for is the lacquered sheen and cast-of-thousands excess of the days of the big studios. Why? Because it's a heartfelt, elegiac rumination on the immortality of silver-screen legends and the myth-making magic of the Hollywood star system. One that's undermined at every turn by its obvious budget limitations and the conspicuously low-wattage luminance of its own "This will have to make do" compromise of a cast.

William Holden as Barry "Dutch" Detweiler

Marthe Keller as Fedora

Hildegard Knef as Countess Sobryanski

Jose Ferrer as Dr. Emmanuel Vando

Frances Sternhagen as Miss Balfour

In 1976, actor-turned-author Thomas Tryon (he wrote the bestseller The Other and was the wooden, lantern-jawed presence in The Cardinal and I Married a Monster from Outer Space) published Crowned Heads, a collection of four loosely-connected roman à clef novellas set in Hollywood. The screen rights were swiftly snapped up, and early reports suggested Tryon's gossipy interlinked tales of Tinseltown (the novel's four stories share common characters) were ideal material for a TV miniseries. Sometime later, trade papers announced that the most popular of the short stories, Fedora, about a Garbo-esque movie queen whose ageless beauty is the source of a bizarre mystery, was to be made into a feature film by multi-Academy Award-winning director/writer Billy Wilder (Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend).

Tryon's mystery-shrouded Hollywood Gothic offered Wilder (whose most recent series of films had all been comedies) an opportunity to return to melodramatic form: à la Sunset Boulevard (1950). Fedora's industry-insider angle appeared to be an ideal match for the director's distinct brand of perceptive cynicism and dark wit. When it was further disclosed that Wilder was to reunite with longtime script collaborator I.A.L. Diamond (Some Like It Hot, The Apartment) and Sunset Boulevard star William Holden (in what would be their fourth picture together), the potential of the proposed film adaptation sounded even more promising.

Henry Fonda appears as himself in a cameo bit involving personally delivering an Honorary Oscar to Fedora on her remote island. Billed simply as President of the Academy (a position he never held in real life), Fonda was cast after Gregory Peck declined. 

But Hollywood, as we all know (ironically, via Wilder's own Sunset Boulevard), has a short memory. When it came to finding a studio willing to produce Fedora, the distinguished career and track record of the 70-something director mattered considerably less to industry higher-ups than the fact that Wilder's last three releases (The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes -1970, Avanti! - 1972, and The Front Page - 1974) had all tanked miserably at the box office.

Wilder and Diamond reworked Tryon's novella in ways that intentionally evoked and referenced Sunset Boulevard, so securing the services of William Holden as narrator and leading man was a major coup. But progress on the project was hampered considerably when Wilder hit a major snag in the casting of the all-important lead role of the elusive, eternally youthful Fedora, and her companion, the mysterious Countess Sobryanski. 

Fedora inquires of a young stagehand if he's gay (albeit, not so politely). The previous year,
Marthe Keller asked Al Pacino the same question--just as offensively--in Bobby Deerfield

Wilder's initial casting choices of Faye Dunaway and Marlene Dietrich, later Vanessa Redgrave and her mother, actress Rachel Kempson, all turned the film down due to concerns with the screenplay. These delays forced Fedora into development hell—the property being handed from one studio to the next, rewrite to rewrite—before all the major studios eventually bailed. This led Wilder to make his film overseas with French-German tax shelter money, casting Fedora with actors who, happily, didn't strain the film's budget, but neither did they generate much in the way of pre-release marquee enthusiasm.

In yet another second-choice slot, longtime TV game show panelist Arlene Francis
 stepped into the bit part  intended for Barbara Walters

Fedora, a film told in flashback spanning thirty years and set in exotic locales and meant to depict the opulent lifestyle of individuals whose money affords the luxury of running away from time, was originally budgeted at $4 million but shot to over $6 million due to production problems. Even with this spike in finances, Wilder knew, given the scope of the story, that his film had the budget of a B-picture. For a sense of 1977-1978 budget scale: an intimate movie like Annie Hall, shot on location with no (then) big names in the cast, cost $4 million. The average cost of major studio releases like The Boys From Brazil was $12 million, and the modestly-scaled Heaven Can Wait came in at $15 million.

Hindsight suggests that Wilder, unable to make Fedora the way it should have been made, would have been wise to let the project go. As it was, faced with compromise at every turn, Fedora proved to be an ill-fated production plagued with delays and setbacks from the start. 

Fear of going over budget prohibited Wilder from having rehearsals (worse, it shows). And at one point, he rather ungallantly referred to his leading lady as "Not much of an actress." Keller's inability to play the dual roles of Fedora and the Countess (ostensibly due to the old-age makeup proving too painful for the actress, insiders saying she wasn't up to the challenge) occasioned the casting of Hildegard Knef...her engagement putting a minor strain on the budget, but throwing one of the film's major plot concepts (duality) out the window. 

The original editor was fired after two months of shooting, the cast didn't get along, and the unintelligibly thick accents of both Keller and Knef necessitated the post-production looping of both voices. I'm not sure whom we're actually listening to on the current Blu-ray release, but the hollow disembodied voices–especially the dreadful one used for Fedora's little daughter–wreak havoc with the film's two pivotal performances.

Marthe Keller certainly has the beauty and regal cheekbones of a classic Hollywood star,
she simply lacked the effortless hauteur

When completed, Fedora started out well, what with a huge Cannes premiere and considerable press fanfare focusing on Billy Wilder's "comeback." But then advance buzz fizzled out rather swiftly. The film was besieged by such poor preview response and bad word-of-mouth that it sat on the shelf for a year while its producers searched for a distributor. Trying too hard to please too many potential buyers, Fedora was tinkered and fiddled with to the tune of losing some 12-minutes of its original footage and sizable chunks of its lush Miklos Rozsa score (Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Madame Bovary).

With a high degree of anticipation (I loved the Thomas Tryon novel, was infatuated with Marthe Keller, and was a big fan of Billy Wilder), I finally saw Fedora when, after what felt like years of bad advance publicity, it played briefly in Westwood in the Spring of 1979…before disappearing without a trace. 

Cast as himself, the beauteous Michael York exudes so much macho mojo he literally drives Fedora to madness for want of him. It may seem like a stretch to accept that an actress who'd worked with the greats would be taken with so mild-mannered a leading man, but I recall in the '70s Bette Davis citing the transcendently bland Robert Wagner as one of her favorites.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

The story: Desperate over being put out to pasture by New Hollywood's current breed of bearded young upstarts, 59-year-old movie producer Barry Detweiler (William Holden) hopes to resuscitate his flagging career by coaxing reclusive screen goddess Fedora (just one name, like Cher, Charo, or Dagmar) out of retirement to star in The Snows of Yesteryear, a film that would mark the 4^th American adaptation of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina ("This time we can do it right!"). 

Star Search

Tracking Fedora (Marthe Keller) down to her island compound off the shore of Corfu, Detweiler finds the aged star just as beautiful as when they last worked together thirty years earlier (and shared a seaside tryst). But he grows concerned when the eccentrically vainglorious actress (forever in gloves, enormous shades, and wide-brimmed hat) appears to be both emotionally unstable and peculiarly cowed by her motley retinue: the autocratic, wheelchair-bound Polish Countess Sobryanski; starchy personal secretary Miss Balfour; and dipsomaniacal age-retardation gerontologist Dr. Vando.

Detweiler's fears are confirmed when Fedora confides to him that she is being held on the island against her will and is prevented from returning to films. But alas, his efforts to aid in her escape only set into motion a series of cataclysmic events leading to ultimate tragedy and the unearthing of a dark, fiercely-guarded secret.

The Countess, surrounded by her ever-present space heaters 

I won't lie and say I wasn't disappointed when Fedora's ended (the underwhelming effect of the entire film given the coup de grace stroke of having Michael York's name misspelled in the credits). I enjoyed it, for the film's central mystery is compellingly weird enough to sustain interest (although given the extreme lengths the bizarre characters go to protect their secret, the ultimate reveal can't help but have an air of "Is that all there is?" to it). Plus it was nice to see William Holden reprising his Joe Gillis bit again. But as movies go, Fedora struck me as a bit of a puzzler. 

I left the theater that day with the impression that Fedora was an admirably ambitious effort on Billy Wilder's part that somehow got away from him. Sunset Boulevard embraced its themes and delivered an outlandish tale shrouded in a baroque style that recalled the melodramatic excesses of the silent era. Fedora, a melancholy paean to the Hollywood of yesteryear and the days of the studio system, is strangely lacking in atmosphere for so macabre a story. The obvious budgetary restrictions and the flat, characterless cinematography, are visually at odds with the film's nostalgia-laced themes. 

Oscar Winners
Jose Ferrer for Cyrano de Bergerac (1950)
 William Holden (under Billy Wilder's direction) for Stalag 17 (1954)

Most damning of all is how disconcerting it is to watch an entire film devoted to heralding the magisterial splendor of the immortal goddesses of the silver screen, yet fails to generate much heat with its leading lady. Fedora cries out for a dynamic, larger-than-life screen presence...someone along the lines of Faye Dunaway (I can't think of another contemporary actress who better radiates classic movie star style). The conspicuous lack of a genuine star presence at the center of the film torpedoes the credibility of an already preposterous story that needs all the verisimilitude it can get. (And one can't really fault Ms. Keller's performance...what the movie cries out for is one of those things you've either got or haven't.) Wilder perhaps recognized this himself, given that he ends the film with two characters having this exchange:

- "This would have made a much better picture than the script I brought you"

  - "Yes, but who would you get to play it?"

 Fedora shoots a scene recalling Hedy Lamarr's scandalous nude swim in Ecstasy (1933)

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Much in the way Alfred Hitchcock's lesser works have come to be reevaluated after his death, Fedora's longstanding unavailability combined with renewed cinephile appreciation for Billy Wilder has produced a sort of revisionist interest in the film. Though it's an independent, Fedora feels like a product of the studio system. Its old-school charms playing better as "pure cinema" in today's climate of CGI and comic book franchises than they did back in 1978. I wouldn't call Fedora an underappreciated masterpiece, but I do think it's Billy Wilder's best film since 1966's The Fortune Cookie, and superior to some of his more unwatchable fare like Kiss Me, Stupid (1964).

Because I hadn't remembered the film so fondly, revisiting Fedora via the pristine, restored Blu-ray, I'm able to enjoy it as a kind of extended The Twilight Zone episode. (In fact, it recalls a similar-themed 1964 Twilight Zone episode titled "Queen of the Nile," in which Ann Blyth starred as an ageless movie queen with a secret.)

I confess to not being able to take the film as seriously as some. Fedora's flaws are too elemental for them not to mar my overall experience. But the film is made with a sincere (if bitter) conviction, some style, and a great deal of wit ("Not there! That's the cat's chair!"). Which, when combined with the abundant unintentional humor, grants Fedora a kind of loopy, absurdist grace.

Mommie Dearest
Little Antonia (Christine Mueller) learns it's no picnic being the daughter of a movie star 

One of my favorite things about Fedora (which couldn't have been intentional and will sound like faint praise) is how its execution and construction seem designed to draw attention to the more far-fetched aspects of the plot rather than conceal them. Fedora begins on a note of implausibility and just keeps stacking the crazy from there. 

The first leap of faith we're asked to accept is that during the waning days of the '70s nostalgia craze—when real-life screen legends Mae West and Audrey Hepburn were appearing in embarrassments like Sextette (1978) and Sidney Sheldon's Bloodline (1978); when Golden Age stars were routinely trotted out like waxworks displays on TV shows like Fantasy Island and The Love Boat; and when movie theaters were showing Star Wars (1977), Saturday Night Fever (1977) and The Deer Hunter (1978)—that anyone in their right mind would think there was an audience clamoring for a remake of Anna Karenina starring a 67-year-old Anna.

Sunset Boulevard -1950

Fedora - 1978

There's fun to be had in catching all the Sunset Boulevard references. Just as it's enjoyably distracting to take note of all the mystery elements that don't quite make sense (Fedora goes around in gloves and dark glasses even when no one but her handlers are around). But it gets a little wearying hearing Wilder endlessly vent his spleen about Hollywood and the movie biz through Holden's character. Holden would follow Fedora up with another film in which he played a battle-scarred Hollywood veteran with an ax to grind: Blake Edward's S.O.B. (1980). It would be Holden's last film. 

Throughout Fedora, I kept wondering why no one commented on the fact that her servant Miss Balfour (she reminds me a bit of The Omen's Mrs. Baylock crossed with Mommie Dearest's Carol Ann) never ages. That's certainly true in real life for character actress Frances Sternhagen, who looks pretty much the same today as she always has.

PERFORMANCES

Looking (refreshingly) every day of his 59 years, William Holden's un-nip-tucked appearance fits nicely in with the film's "youth at all costs" theme; the actor's solid likability grounding Fedora in a reality that little else in the film is tethered to. And while scenes of his running or kicking down doors had me more concerned with his health than the plot (and I could have gone to my grave without the sight of Holden's granddad bod in saggy jockey shorts), he nevertheless gives a solid performance and is a welcome presence in Wilder-land. 

In the nearly empty theater where I saw Fedora, this big dramatic scene revealing Fedora's
 hidden shrine to Michael York was greeted with giggles, not gasps 

Fedora came at the tail end of America's brief but high-profile love affair with Swiss/German actress Marthe Keller. After catching the attention of the studios with her performance in Claude Le Louche's And Now My Love (1974), America beckoned and cast her in a series of showy roles that only made clear they hadn't a clue as to how to use her. Her thick accent branding her as an "other" or "exotic," she was cast as a femme fatale in the films Marathon Man and Black Sunday, and the manic pixie dream girl to Al Pacino's morose race car driver in Bobby Deerfield.

I think Keller's beautiful, but largely at sea when it comes to conveying that old-Hollywood star quality that made even tiny actresses like Judy Garland and Tallulah Bankhead feel like they filled up a room when entering it. Also, the dubbing thing just does no one any favors. But with that being said, I still think Keller is quite good here. Willful yet fragile, she's the warm heart at the center of a cold Hollywood nightmare.

Of the cast members appearing to have the most fun in their serio-camp roles are Hildegard Knef and Jose Ferrer, which seems rather apt, as they play caricatures more than characters.

Fedora, long unavailable and rarely-seen, is definitely worth a look. As I've said, it plays much better now than in 1978. You won't find the same level of perceptive cynicism Billy Wilder brought to his far superior Sunset Boulevard, but there's still much to enjoy amongst the film's unrealized ideas. And if you're of a certain age, plenty of nostalgia.

Thomas Tryon is said to have based the character of Fedora on a number of Hollywood legends, but the one most often cited is the largely forgotten Corinne Griffith. At age 72, Griffith claimed not to be the real Corinne Griffith, but rather, the actress' 52-year-old sister. Her assertion being that, following the death of the original Corinne many years before, she assumed the identity of her older sister and carried on with both her life and career. 

Scene from "Fedora"  1978

BONUS MATERIAL

Faye Dunaway was always the Fedora Billy Wilder needed. And by the looks of her at age 77 in this 2018 Gucci commercial (which captures more real movie star magic in 90 seconds than the entirety of Wilder's film), I'd say she IS Fedora.

Swan Song: The Story of Billy Wilder's Fedora
The European Blu-Ray release of Fedora contains many enviable extras not available here in the States. Among them is this documentary featuring deleted scenes and commentary by Marthe Keller, Michael York, and others involved in the making of the film. Alas, some of the interviews are in French & German, and the DVD offers no subtitles. It's available on YouTube HERE

For more on Fedora, check out the blog Angelman's Place 

Old-Fashioned, but not Old Hat

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2018