Billy Wilder

Billy Wilder’s debut as a director: pictured here are French film stars Danielle Darrieux and Pierre Mingand in Billy Wilder’s French movie drama for the Pathé Consortium Cinéma, ‘Mauvaise Graine’ (1934) - [in English ‘Bad Seed’], also starring Raymond Galle, Paul Escoffier, Michel Duran, and the Black French actor Gaby Héritier. Billy Wilder also wrote the screen play for this movie with others, and the music for the film was composed by Franz Waxman. Danielle Darrieux was one of the greatest French movie stars of all time and her eight decade career is one of the longest in movie history. Pierre Mingand was known for his impersonations of Maurice Chevalier at the Folies Bergère, and Billy Wilder worked that impersonation into a scene in ‘Mauvaise Graine’. Producing 12 German movies between 1929 and 1933 in Berlin, Billy Wilder, who was from a part of the Austrian Hungarian empire which is now in Poland, also participated on the German movie ‘People on Sunday’ (1930), considered a groundbreaking example of the ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ or ‘New Objectivity’. He then went on to write his first screenplays for four German movies, ‘Emil and the Detectives’ (1931), ‘The Man in Search of his Murderer’ (1931), ‘Her Grace Commands’ (1931), and ‘A Blonde Dream’ (1932). After that he moved to Paris to escape the Nazis, where he directed ‘Mauvaise Graine’, and then before it was released, he escaped the political storm brewing in Europe, and in 1933 Billy Wilder moved to Hollywood. And then his incredible Hollywood career began.