The Female Journalists in the Films of Billy Wilder

What is it about?

The cinematic image of journalism has traditionally relegated the role of women to the background. The same occurs in Billy Wilder films, whose powerful portrayal of the profession in Ace in the Hole (1951) and The Front Page (1974) was cemented in his previous career as a reporter for tabloids in Vienna and Berlin in the twenties. Among the numerous journalists that appear in the twenty-six films he wrote and directed, only one in ten are women, and they are also relegated to the stereotypical patterns of representation of the early twentieth century. But unlike many other directors who worked as journalists before entering the world of motion pictures and who subsequently contributed to the construction of the film stereotype of the profession, Wilder could boast about something that was hardly within reach of his peers, since he had impersonated a female journalist who offered advice in the Berlin tabloid Tempo. This paper analyzes the female journalist characters in the twenty-six films written and directed by Billy Wilder, among the 240 workers in the mass media who appear in those films. The results show that Wilder relied on a highly stereotyped portrait of the profession, with only three female characters with enough of their own identity to stand out as individuals, and that Wilder’s portrait ties in with a primitive view of the profession in which women are only one out of ten media workers and only suited to write gossip columns and offer home advice.

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