The death of Gene Wilder last week at 83 has led to the publication of many fond encomia to a performer who had ceased being of much interest 40 years ago, precisely at the moment when he became a movie star. It was the release of a romantic chase comedy called Silver Streak in 1976 that made Wilder a bankable Hollywood commodity in his own right and not just as Mel Brooks’s secret comic weapon in The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein (which Wilder conceived and cowrote). It also sealed his doom as a creative talent.
Brooks had seen some gleam of madness in the very earnest young Broadway actor with whom his wife Anne Bancroft had appeared in a 1963 production of Bertolt Brecht’s intolerable Mother Courage and Her Children. And he went to town. In Brooks’s hands, Wilder’s sweet face and offhandedly humble manner were revealed as the thin mask hiding his true face—the face of a demented neurotic lunatic. The scene in The Producers when Wilder’s mild-mannered accountant Leo Bloom suddenly turns into a tantrum-throwing 2-year-old is one of the greatest feats of comic acting ever recorded on film, as is his conversion from a skeptical doctor into a full-blown mad scientist in Young Frankenstein.
It was the director Arthur Hiller who took Wilder and put his cuddly persona at the center of Silver Streak. Wilder served as the straight man to Richard Pryor, whose own explosive comic talent made Silver Streak a huge hit. And that would pretty much be it for Wilder. He would support Pryor in three more increasingly bad movies when he wasn’t playing just the most lovable teddy bear of a man you ever met.
He was a cuddly 19th-century rabbi traveling through the Old West in The Frisco Kid and a cuddly cartoonist in Funny About Love. He wrote and directed several terrible movies and one decent one, The Woman in Red, which had the advantage of being a remake of a French farce. But even in that one, as a happily married man suddenly seized with adulterous passion for a beautiful woman he has never met, Wilder gave some killer crazy-person material to his costars, Charles Grodin and Joseph Bologna, and stuck with being cuddly.
He first showed his true inclination in 1971 with his only memorable non-Brooks performance as the reclusive candymaker Willy Wonka—who had, of course, been conceived by Roald Dahl but was brought to vivid life through Wilder’s own eccentric and memorable acting choices. Wonka is wild and macabre and quite vicious (like the monstrous Dahl himself), but in the movie he ditches all that when he turns into the loving and generous father a little boy has never had. Wilder was great in the early going when he was putting flesh on the bones of the dark and rich Wonka, but it was the milk-chocolate Wonka of the movie’s final moments he truly wished to be.
The man who helped Wilder find his happy place predeceased him by a week. Arthur Hiller died at 92 in August. Hiller had had a fascinating career in his heyday from 1964 to 1980. He made two wonderfully dark and literate comedies with the screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky: The Americanization of Emily in 1964 and The Hospital in 1971. He directed The In-Laws, the movie that probably has the funniest screenplay ever written by an American (Andrew Bergman). He directed a terrific New York tale called Popi with Alan Arkin as a Puerto Rican widower desperate to find a better life for his young sons.
But Hiller never earned any reputation to speak of because he worked in service of the scripts he directed and never adopted a signature style. Popi affects a neo-realist style, with hand-held cameras and a documentary feel. The Hospital is shot almost entirely in shadow. The In-Laws is overly bright, in the manner of a 1970s TV movie, probably because Hiller clearly knew his job was to make sure the camera was on Alan Arkin and Peter Falk as they spoke Bergman’s peerlessly off-kilter dialogue. Hiller was a chameleon, and he was only as good as his material.
Hiller never did anything of note after The In-Laws. The 1970s had ended and, with them, Hiller’s feel for the pulse of the American moviegoer. That was why he knew how to turn an unconventional performer like Gene Wilder into a light-romantic leading man—indeed, knew he would somehow be more convincing for the times than a more conventional type. Silver Streak is a really lousy movie, with a dreadful screenplay by Colin Higgins, but it made gobs of money in 1976.
So what if it led Gene Wilder down a path to movie mediocrity? Wilder made a lot of money along the way himself—and was happier getting to play the nice guy. Wilder was a genuinely kind man who wanted good things for everybody; his 2005 memoir, Kiss Me Like a Stranger, makes that almost painfully clear. Mel Brooks had uncovered Wilder’s id and by doing so, had given Wilder a career, three classic roles, and a name that will long survive his death. But Wilder didn’t want to be a lunatic. He wanted to be a mensch.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.
