Fedora

Barry Detweiler is a producer out of work. He has a script and his one hope is to bring back a great star who left the cinema years ago. Fedora lives on a Greek island with a well known countess. He goes to the island. He sees the woman and notices something strange: forty years have passed and she has not aged. Around her are a doctor, the countess and a servant, and nobody will let him speak to her alone. Billy Wilder directs and wrote the screenplay with I. A. L. Diamond. William Holden plays Detweiler. The narrative sits on the same ground as Wilder's Sunset Boulevard: a star withdrawn from the cinema and a male narrator looking at her. The director does not hide the resemblance. At the time it was made Wilder could not get work in Hollywood; the production was financed in Germany, which matches the subject of the film directly. The matter at the centre is the concealment of ageing and the value the industry places on it. The turn at the midpoint changes the narrative entirely and from that point the film tells another story. It attracted little interest on release and remained among Wilder's last films; it was reassessed later. Who it is for: viewers who like Billy Wilder and films about Hollywood. Who it is not for: the pace is slow, the narrative approaches melodrama, and the comparison with his earlier film is unavoidable.