“EVERY DIRECTOR HAS HIS OWN colors, like a painter,” observed Billy Wilder in 1962. “Some paint like Dufy, others are darker, like Soutine, say, but I’ve never wondered about whether I was bitter or cruel or pessimistic or anything. I like the story, that’s all there is to it. I tell stories I like.” A writer by nature, Wilder was a man of uncommon wit and unforgiving sarcasm who made his martinis with the same verve as he made his movies (“I like to mix a little vinegar in the cocktail,” he once quipped). His was a raconteur’s cinema, long on smart, snappy dialogue, short on visual acrobatics. And though his dizzyingly prolific, half-century-long career brought us everything from romantic comedy masterpieces Some Like it Hot (1959) and Sabrina (1954) to such acerbic gems as Double Indemnity (1944), Sunset Boulevard (1950), Ace in the Hole (1951) and The Apartment (1960), Wilder remained forever reluctant to embrace the notion of director as artist; he saw himself merely as a trafficker in mass entertainment. Famous for doing very few setups, he generally shied away from any show of technical virtuosity at the expense of what Jack Warner always called the three most import things in a movie: “Story, Story and Story!” In the words of Marlene Dietrich, who starred in A Foreign Affair (1948) and Witness for the Prosecution (1957), “Billy Wilder was like a master craftsman who knows his tools and uses them well to create a structure he can garland with humor and wisdom.”

Wilder, who made it to a spry 95, has been dead for 10 years as of today. It seems fitting, then, that a reappraisal, even a tribute, like the one Noël Simsolo offers in Masters of Cinema should come along. This slender, richly illustrated and appropriately entertaining volume was originally released in France in 2007, and is now available in an elegant English translation by Trista Selous under the auspices of Cahiers du Cinéma. Equal parts photo scrapbook, thumbnail production history, and long-form essay, Simsolo’s Billy Wilder gathers its material not only from the standard literature of contemporary Wilder Studies — including Ed Sikov’s definitive biography On Sunset Boulevard, a sprawling work that’s still the leader of the pack, and Cameron Crowe’s animated Conversations with Wilder — but also from a large body of French sources, most of them first published in Cahiers. In keeping with the basic parameters of the Masters of Cinema series — other recent volumes include companions to Fellini, Welles, Bergman, and Chaplin — which adopts the auteur model first introduced by the Cahiers crowd in the 1950s, Simsolo provides an anatomy of Wilder’s life and of his individual style of direction. (Given his status as a studio professional, Wilder has often eluded the kind of ardent appreciation that French cineastes reserve for renegade directors.) The story Simsolo tells unfolds along a narrative axis that leads from Wilder’s childhood in Vienna through his distinguished career as a writer and director in Hollywood and abroad, encompassing dozens of screen credits, more than a handful of Oscars, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute. And, of course, since it’s Wilder...