With George Axelrod (How To Murder Your Wife, The Manchurian Candidate, Breakfast at Tiffany's), based on his play. Wilder wanted Matthau as the lead - Fox wouldn't risk it. Tom Ewell is the married book publisher with the over-active imagination. I think Billy wanted a sign that they had indeed slept together but either the studio or the censor wouldn't allow it - his films were constantly being thwarted in this way.
It's not just the Rachmaninoff that this film has in common with Brief Encounter - the fades into the fantasy scenes are done in a similarly creative way. Photographed by Milton Krasner in CinemaScope.
Q wanted a Billy Wilder weekend - and why not? This one we hadn't seen in ages. Billy and his co-writers adapted material from all sorts of sources especially plays (they had the structure built in) but of them all this is the most play-like, I guess because it's mainly set in one apartment - and for that reason, well no, not for that reason - The Man Who Came To Dinner is set almost entirely in the house, yet that doesn't suffer as being too 'play like'. Why?
With Evelyn Keyes, Sonny Tufts, Robert Strauss, Oscar Homolka. Music by Alfred Newman, Doane Harrison an associate producer, Hugh Fowler the editor.
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