This is Billy Wilder's penultimate film, made in 1978 entirely outside the conventional Hollywood system, filmed and shot on locations and sound stages in Europe. The script is by Wilder and his longtime collaborator Izzy Diamond based on a story by the actor/writer Tom Tyron, but it is not one of their famous comedies. The film is a return gander at mankind's grotesqueries, more in the style of the black and white films Wilder made with Charles Brackett at Paramount in the Forties and Fifties. In some ways it is a sequel or a theme and variations on Wilder and Brackett's great success SUNSET BOULEVARD with a middle-aged Joe Gillis now a desperate producer rather than a desperate screenwriter. The Gillis-like character has come to an island in Greece, Corfu, to peddle a script to a recluse actress, a character obviously based on the great Garbo, here also called monosyllabically Fedora, as in the hat. After many futile attempts to reach the great star on her island, he comes across her, shopping in town, hidden behind her celebrated chapeau only to discover she is not an aged diva long retired from the movie business but an attractive if skittish young woman with the voice and movements of a stage ingenue. Holden accepts this unusual phenomenon without question, just as we, the audience, are expected to do. Much time is then spent in the plot trying to explain how this could be possible, and in craftsman-like fashion Wilder and Diamond tie it all up or bundle it together by the grand finale. The film is elegantly photographed by the English cinematographer Gerry Fisher, lighting spectacular sets built in the Bavarian film studios by Wilder's longtime collaborator, the great Hungarian production designer Alex Trauner (LES ENFANTS DU PARADIS). But none of this, as well-made as it is, can hide the greatest flaw in the film--the many plot improbabilities. Others here have listed some of them but let me add one more: Towards the end of the film, Fedora in hospital receives a phone call she thinks is from the great love of her life Michael York, played as Pauline Kael once wrote "unconvincingly by Michael York," but it is not Michael with his distinctly posh English voice who is calling but Jose Ferrer with his unmistakable American vowels pretending to be. Fedora is fooled, of course, as was Holden in the Corfu marketplace, and as we are constantly asked to be. Sadly, this reasonable request for suspension of disbelief --after all it's only a movie--is not helped at all by the performances of the two female leads. Both earnest but ill-suited for the task. Martha Keller is extremely attractive and talented, but too young and too incapable of acting a young woman trapped in an old woman's body or is it an old woman trapped in a young woman's body. Maybe Meryl Streep might have succeeded but lovely Martha does not. Hildegard Knef as the Polish countess jailer has a few good moments of vulnerability towards the end of the film, but in the beginning scenes she is asked to do nothing more than play an old gorgon barking at Holden in her German accent.
All in all, this may take the prize as the worst film ever written by two men of genius. It plays as if after the death of Joe Gillis in SUNSET, Norma Desmond, who had once written a script of SALOME as her comeback vehicle, decided to have another go at screenwriting by herself and came up with something even more "outlandish" than her last attempt. That in a word is FEDORA.
All in all, this may take the prize as the worst film ever written by two men of genius. It plays as if after the death of Joe Gillis in SUNSET, Norma Desmond, who had once written a script of SALOME as her comeback vehicle, decided to have another go at screenwriting by herself and came up with something even more "outlandish" than her last attempt. That in a word is FEDORA.