Cut! And That's A Wrap!

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By Malcolm Jones

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Not so very long ago, Hollywood was a place where pretension was outlawed. The greater the artist, the louder that artist insisted he was no more than a craftsman. John Ford, who won a record four Oscars for directing, famously announced himself, "I'm John Ford, I make Westerns." Billy Wilder, whose Oscars numbered a measly two, put it only slightly differently: "I don't make cinema, I make movies." With the major players refusing to testify, it's no surprise so few great books have ever been written about Hollywood. What is a wonder is that somehow eager readers suddenly have been dealt a pair of aces back to back: two first-rate works on Ford and Wilder. It's enough to make you fall for Hollywood endings.

Wilder, lucky for us, has grown more loquacious in his 90s--although he's still insisting that he just made movies. Director Cameron Crowe ("Jerry Maguire"), an ardent Wilder fan, found that as long as he avoided calling Wilder a genius, he could keep him talking. The result, "Conversations With Wilder," is a grand tour of Wilder's movies, ranging from "Double Indemnity" to "Sunset Boulevard" to "Some Like It Hot." The shrewdness and acidity of those movies remains in Wilder's conversation. Cary Grant "never got the [Academy] award. He got the 'special' award... the leading men, who get awards, have to walk with a limp or act retarded." But there is also an unexpected, and delightful, Old World courtliness: "Tom Cruise, he's like Cary Grant. He makes the hard things look simple."

Even without his films, Wilder will be remembered as a great raconteur. John Ford without his movies would merely be remembered as one of the century's epic liars. Scott Eyman, Ford's latest and best biographer, has his work cut out sorting through the blarney Ford left strewn in his wake. But what a wake: Ford made the first of more than 150 feature-length films in 1915, his last in 1966. He made comedies, tragedies, historical epics, Westerns, war movies and love stories. Simple on the surface, often corny, Ford's movies are redeemed by their complex intelligence and genuinely dark view of life's prospects. Everything about this model biography is a pleasure, right down to the last line: paraphrasing the closing speech in "The Grapes of Wrath," Eyman says of Ford, "Like Tom Joad, he is all around us in the dark."

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