This is for all fans the same writer who created Sunset Boulevard, Witness for the Prosecution (which Agatha Christie considered the best film version of her work...while she was alive) The Apartment, Some Like it Hot and Sabrina. Wilder was named in a poll the greatest screenwriter in history and the fact that this movie is just one of the greatest films he ever made speaks to the fact. It's not just that all of them are masterpieces; its the versatility in screenplay. I'm pretty sure, if I didn't know practically all the dialogue in these movies by heart, that I could see two minutes of ANY wILDER film and no he'd written it.

By the way, according to his biography the collaboration between Wilder and Raymond Chandler was hell from start to finish. The two of them hated every moment they worked together. It is a testament to their committment to the product that this masterpiece was created and you don't see a sign of it.

I'm also reminded of when WIlder was publishing ads for Double Indemnity in the trades he took the occasion to publicly mock David O. Selznick the king of publicity. At the time Selznick was promoting his epic Since You Went Away with a trade ad that REFERREed to it "The four most important words in movies since Gone With The Wind." Wilder reacted by publishig an add that said: "Double Indemnity are the two most important words in filmmaking since Broken Blossoms. i didn't know this but that film is a 1919 D..W Griffith sentimental weepie which is not what Double Indemnity is." By writing this ad, Wilder was calling out the pretentiousness not only of Selznick but all trade ads. Alfred Hitchcock was so tickled by the dig he wrote: "The two most important words in comedy are BillY Wilder." Selznick, who had a huge ego and no sense of humor, reacted by threatening to withdraw all his ads from Variety.