
Some Like It Fraught
IN AUGUST 1945, THREE MONTHS AFTER ADOLF HITLER’S SUICIDE in the bunker and the Allied victory in Europe, the Hollywood film director Billy Wilder arrived in Berlin. Wilder’s film Double Indemnity, that pinnacle of film noir, had come out the previous summer to great acclaim and box office success. The Lost Weekend, Wilder’s next film, equally dark and also a future classic, was being readied for fall release at Paramount. Now Wilder had been enlisted by the US Office of War Information to return to the city he’d fled in 1933, when he was forced out of screenwriting because he was a Jew. The