Billy Wilder

Ace in the Hole puts a reporter at a cave-in and lets him work the trapped man for everything his career can get out of it. That opinion of people runs through the whole shelf: a housewife in Double Indemnity talking an insurance salesman into killing her husband for the payout, a clerk in The Apartment lending his flat to executives for their affairs and being promoted for it. Wilder machined the screenplays so that every early line comes back to collect. The corpses and the laughs come out of the same low view of what money does to people, and you enjoy both.

Signature

• Construction tight enough that every setup gets paid off.
• Voiceover and flashback used as confession.
• Venality treated as ordinary.
• Comedy and noir working inside one moral universe.