Billy Wilder Giftset (1959)

"[Kiss] ...clever and brash, it's helped out enormously by the performances of Martin, Farr and (particularly) Novak...  Geoff Andrew, Time Out
"[Some] A dazzling screwball that holds up decades later.  Metro Weekly
"[Some] One of the greatest comedies ever.  Michael Thomson, BBC Online
"[Kiss] Stunningly subversive, even for Wilder.  Nell Minow, Movie Mom
"[Apartment] Quite simply one of the finest comic romances ever made.  Rich Cline, Shadows on the Wall
"[Apartment] Gleeful! Ingenious! A smashing good comedy!  The New York Times
"[Fortune] A very funny film...a deft mixture of cynicism, wit and idealism as only writer-director Wilder could do it.  TV Guide's Movie Guide
"[Fortune] Mr. Wilder's last film and a comedy of unrelieved vulgarity, but it has style and taste.  Vincent Canby, The New York Times

Editor's Note This collection contains the following Billy Wilder films: THE APARTMENT: COLLECTOR'S EDITION, THE FORTUNE COOKIE, KISS ME STUPID, and SOME LIKE IT HOT: SPECIAL EDITION. See individual titles for descriptions.

	Dean Martin
	Felicia Farr
	Fred MacMurray
	George Raft
	Jack Lemmon
	Judi West
	Kim Novak
	Marilyn Monroe
	Ray Walston
	Ray Walston
	Ron Rich
	Shirley MacLaine
	Tony Curtis
	Walter Matthau
	Billy Wilder - [All] Director

Variety 8 of 10
[Fortune] Producer-director-writer Billy Wilder presents in "The Fortune Cookie" another bittersweet comedy commentary on contemporary US mores. Generally amusing (often wildly so) but overlong, the pic is pegged on an insurance fraud in which Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau are the conspirators...Original screenplay is by Wilder, paired for seventh time with I.A.L. Diamond. Plot turns on the complications following TV cameraman Lemmon's accidental injury at the hands of grid star Ron Rich. Matthau, shyster lawyer and Lemmon's brother-in-law, sees fancy damages in the injury, and exwife Judi West smells money in a fake reunion with Lemmon...Lemmon, confined perforce to sickroom immobility (bandages, wheelchair, etc) is saddled most of the time with the colorless image of a man vacillating with his conscience over the fraud, and its effect on Rich, whose playing has deteriorated from remorse...Title derives from a scene where Lemmon breaks a fortune cookie, only to find inside Abraham Lincoln's famous aphorism about fooling all/some people all/some of the time.

The Village Voice 8 of 10
[Kiss] A grimly suggestive and unexpectedly tender bedroom farce, Billy Wilder's Kiss Me, Stupid is a true film maudit--condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency and savaged by almost every American reviewer when it was released for Christmas in 1964. In the Voice, Andrew Sarris called Kiss Me, Stupid "another exercise in joylessly jejune cynicism." The kindest notices opined that it really wasn't much nastier or more labored than Wilder's previous comedies...But fashions change, and well before his death this year at 95, Wilder had become a lovable relic whose place in the people's pantheon of post-war Hollywood directors had begun to rival Sir Alfred Hitchcock's. Kiss Me, Stupid is unlikely to inspire a Broadway musical, top an AFI poll, or birth a hundred-dollar coffee-table book, but it could burnish Wilder's posthumous reputation--especially as the crisp new 35mm black-and-white print that opens Friday for a week at Film Forum reinstates the original version of a scene the panicked studio excised during previews. - J. Hoberman

Reel.com 10 of 10
[Some] From its start with a police raid on Spats' speakeasy to its finish featuring one of the most famous lines of dialogue in movie history, Some Like It Hot delivers hilarity the way Spats' Tommy gun spits bullets: rat-a-tat-tat. This was a famously unhappy production with Wilder, Lemon, and Curtis having to deal with Monroe at her most physically and emotionally fragile, a state that resulted in countless retakes and numerous delays for the production. None of that is apparent on the screen that crackles with Wilder's energetic direction and Wilder and writing partner I.A.L. Diamond's sparking wit...The performances are seamless, as well...Monroe's performance perfectly blends innocence and sensuality and belies her off-screen emotional meltdown. Curtis deftly moves between his various personas, his Josephine more prim and ladylike than Lemmon's Daphne...There's a reason, though, why it was Lemmon who garnered most of the acting acclaim for the movie: his is a performance of such exquisite timing and barely concealed hysteria that the impulse to laugh is there even before he opens his mouth or moves a muscle. Comic acting doesn't get any better than this. - Pam Grady

Chicago Sun-Times 10 of 10
[Apartment] There is a melancholy gulf over the holidays between those who have someplace to go, and those who do not. ''The Apartment'' is so affecting partly because of that buried reason: It takes place on the shortest days of the year, when dusk falls swiftly and the streets are cold, when after the office party some people go home to their families and others go home to apartments where they haven't even bothered to put up a tree...When Billy Wilder made ''The Apartment'' in 1960, ''the organization man'' was still a current term. One of the opening shots in the movie shows Baxter as one of a vast horde of wage slaves, working in a room where the desks line up in parallel rows almost to the vanishing point. This shot is quoted from King Vidor's silent film ''The Crowd'' (1928), which is also about a faceless employee in a heartless corporation. Cubicles would have come as revolutionary progress in this world...Wilder was fresh off the enormous hit ''Some Like it Hot'' (1959), his first collaboration with Lemmon, and Lemmon was headed toward ''The Days of Wine and Roses'' (1962), which along with ''The Apartment'' showed that he could move from light comedian to tragic everyman. This movie was the summation of what Wilder had done to date, and the key transition in Lemmon's career. - Roger Ebert