Die-hard film fans know that the great Billy Wilder had an older brother, Willy, who directed under the nom d’écran of W. Lee Wilder (1904-1982), and whose work Billy dismissed in no uncertain terms (when he deigned to discuss him at all, which apparently wasn’t often). Family values aside, this is not surprising, since talent—to put it mildly—was not evenly distributed among the Wilder gene pool. Further evidence in support of that theory is provided by the fact that Willy, who perhaps unwisely gravitated to Hollywood from a career in the handbag industry, had his equally untalented son, Myles, write most of his films.
The elder Wilder made several entries in the horror, science fiction and fantasy genre that is my usual beat. His last credit, for example, was The Omegans (1968), the somewhat murky story of adulterous and would-be murderous lovers outwitted and done in by the husband, who slips them some H2O from the forbidden Black River. The contents of this jungle waterway may alleviate arthritic pain and even resemble a fountain of youth, but with some undesirable side effects, e.g., a phosphorescent glow, long-term damage leading to deformity, and eventual death, whereupon the body self-cremates. When I interviewed the film’s leading lady, the vivacious Ingrid Pitt, for Filmfax some years ago, she said, “I must tell you a funny story about [Wilder]. He and his brother lived in Vienna when the Nazis took over power, and they only had one passport between them, so Willy left and sent the passport back for Billy. Billy wasn’t his real name, it was Samuel. Samuel became Billy and he got out of the Nazi clutches.
“Many years after I did The Omegans, I auditioned with Billy here in London for some film, I can’t even remember what it was. I went in there, flags flying and full throttle and said, ‘I know your brother, I made a film with him in the Philippines, isn’t it fantastic?’ He got really shitty and said, ‘Yeah, well, fine, good for you. Why don’t you just bugger off?,’ or words to that effect. I was so shocked. I didn’t know he couldn’t stand his brother. Why? I never stuck around to find out. Sad, isn’t it? Maybe horrible things happened, what do I know, but I thought it was idiotic for him to treat me like that…. That film is so bad. I think it wouldn’t be so bad if it hadn’t been for me. I think I was just atrocious in it. Somebody in America at the Chiller convention gave me a very poor pirated video of the film. It was so grainy I could hardly see what was going on. Unfortunately, not hazy enough to disguise what a terrible performance I was giving…I would much rather forget the whole thing.” Luckily for Ingrid, better things lay immediately ahead: her next credit was a solid supporting role in my favorite film of all time, Where Eagles Dare (1968).
Working backwards, W. Lee also gave us The Man without a Body (1957), which—incredibly—required the services of two directors, Wilder and Charles Saunders, and, if nothing else, gets points for the originality of its loopy scenario, sans Myles. Ailing businessman George Coulouris (the star of Saunders’s Womaneater, aka The Woman Eater, the following year) has scientist Robert Hutton revive the head of Nostradamus to help him with his financial prognostications, and said head runs amok after being grafted onto a donor body. Before that, he and Myles brought us the reincarnation yarn Fright and the Lon Chaney, Jr. vehicle Manfish (both 1956), the latter allegedly based on Poe’s “The Gold Bug” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.” You tell me. For better or worse, however (and if you guessed “worse,” then you can see where this is headed), W. Lee’s reputation, such as it is, rests primarily on a trio of no-budget SF films he and Myles made back to back under his own Planet Filmplays banner (as were Fright and Manfish): Phantom from Space (1953), Killers from Space, and The Snow Creature (both 1954).
To be continued…
