Billy Wilder Retrospective Opens at BFI Southbank

The BFI Southbank will screen Almost Perfect, a comprehensive retrospective of Billy Wilder's films, from 19 October until the end of the year. The season celebrates the director who penned and helmed Double Indemnity, Some Like It Hot and The Apartment, and whom the Guardian calls the father of film noir.

Wilder's life spanned the century his films helped define. He was born at the start of the 20th century in Austria-Hungary and died at the start of the 21st in California. His gravestone carries a nod to his most famous line: "I'm a writer but then nobody's perfect."

The retrospective's title, Almost Perfect, plays on that epitaph — and on the argument that Wilder came closer to perfection than most. The Guardian's assessment is direct: Wilder had "a habit of making flawless films throughout his career".

The story of how he got there begins in Europe. Wilder was an émigré, and like all survivors, the Guardian notes, he never forgot where he came from or what he had left behind. His early years in show business were spent in Berlin, where he later claimed to have been kept awake all night by "a toilet that was on the blink".

That anecdote is characteristic. Wilder was, in the Guardian's words, "an inveterate self-mythologiser, a film-maker with a brand long before there were opportunities for promotion through Instagram accounts and chicken shop dates". The line between the man and the legend was one he drew himself, with comic timing and commercial instinct in equal measure.

The BFI season arrives as a reminder of how much of modern cinema's grammar Wilder wrote. Double Indemnity set the template for film noir. Some Like It Hot remains a benchmark of screen comedy. The Apartment fused workplace satire with melancholy romance. Together they anchor a body of work that the retrospective's programmers evidently judge near-flawless.

For audiences in London, Almost Perfect offers a rare chance to see the full arc of an émigré career — from Austria-Hungary to Hollywood titan — projected on a big screen.