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With six Academy Awards, four entries on the American Film Institute's list of 100 greatest American movies, and more titles on the National Historic Register of classic films deemed worthy of preservation than any other director, Billy Wilder counts as one of the most accomplished filmmakers ever to work in Hollywood. Yet how American is Billy Wilder, the Jewish migr from Central Europe? This book underscores this complex issue, unpacking underlying contradictions where previous commentators routinely smoothed them out. Wilder emerges as an artist with roots in sensationalist journalism and the world of entertainment as well as with an awareness of literary culture and the avant-garde, features that lead to productive and often highly original confrontations between high and low.

Gerd Gemünden is Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities and Professor of German Studies, Film Studies, and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Framed Visions: Popular Culture, Americanization and the Contemporary German and Austrian Imagination (1998) and editor of volumes on Wim Wenders, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Douglas Sirk, as well as an anthology of critical writings on Marlene Dietrich.