Billy Wilder

Both these films of Billy Wilder's stand where a man sells what is private for the sake of promotion. In Ace in the Hole the out-of-work reporter Chuck Tatum walks into a newspaper office while his car is being towed through Albuquerque, and at a deserted trading post along the road he learns that the young man who runs it is trapped in a cave. The film had been prompted by the much-discussed tragedy of Floyd Collins, trapped in 1925 while looking for a new entrance to the Mammoth cave system; after Paramount put the film into cinemas it changed the title to The Big Carnival. In The Apartment, Buddy Baxter's flat is borrowed by the company's executives for meetings outside marriage, and Baxter, forever promised a quick step up, puts up with humiliation in exchange for an extra key. Wilder won the directing Oscar with that film at the thirty-third ceremony, held in 1961, where the best picture award went to him as its producer as well. In 1993 he received the Berlinale's honorary Golden Bear.