This is a picture that is about the reason this picture can't work. William Holden’s Barry Detweiler and the mysterious superstar Fedora both complain about the way that Old Hollywood glamor has died. "Now the kids with beards are in charge," he says. "Cinema Verité, the naked truth, as naked as possible," she complains.
And is Billy Wilder trying to make a truly meta picture by demonstrating that these claims are true? At the cost of his film? I doubt it. But Fedora only succeeds in the way it fails. It has a great story that would be perfectly suited for Wilder in the forties, but by 1978 it withers in the light of New Hollywood drabness. (I have always maintained that all films made in the seventies look terrible.)
This movie has so much in common with Wilder's Sunset Boulevard: William Holden narrating in the past tense about his bizarre brush with an eccentric aging actress. Really, way too much in common. Did he think he could remix it? The plot is strong, and I admit that I only discovered the surprise ending about five minutes before it was revealed. But, the real problem is that that moment is only slightly past halfway through the film. After that, the already shaky film (a forties noir filmed like a seventies thriller) degrades into endless flashbacks that are nothing more than exposition.
I'm not even convinced that this film could work, due to the terrible construction that gives forty minutes of explanations as the movie's final act. In his prime, Wilder probably could have rewritten it so that it ran smoothly, but he would have to have filmed it anachronistically. Filming an Old Hollywood melodrama in the harsh light of the New Hollywood is a death sentence from the beginning.
Unless he made the entire movie just to demonstrate that contemporary cinema has destroyed classic cinema by letting it destroy this film. But he wouldn't do that, right...?
(I only have two more Billy Wilder films to see. Stay tuned for the definitive list—soon!)