Recently in Vienna, I asked people to point the way to Billy Wilder’s house. The late great filmmaker was born there in 1906, the son of a Jewish restaurateur, and he worked as a reporter before heading to Berlin and movie employ. Somewhere in the city there’s a building with a plaque, but nobody knew where. Home and unsatisfied, I’ll make do with the Brattle Theatre’s "Wild About Wilder!" Mondays, which run through December 16.

The Lost Weekend (1945), which screens this Tuesday, November 25, is a boozy love-in in which a would-be novelist (Ray Milland), sickened by his inactivity, flubs a Friday-Sunday in the Big Apple by begging drinks and/or money for drinks from bartenders, pawnshop operators, and tavern hangers-on. From frame one through the end, this noirish movie is obsessive about the pursuit, and the guzzling, of alcohol. Downer it might be, but The Lost Weekend got Oscars for Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Director. Really best: Jane Wyman as the inebriated writer’s enabler girlfriend.

Joining Weekend on the November 25 double bill is Witness for the Prosecution (1957), a talky, plot-twisty courtroom drama from a play by Agatha Christie. Portly Charles Laughton stars as a headstrong barrister who, post–heart attack, is called on to defend a lightweight inventor (Tyrone Power) who seems incapable of bloody murder. The accused is married to a cold, cool Aryan (Marlene Dietrich) whom he rescued from post-war Germany. Wilder’s direction here is competent but rather impersonal, as if he were bored with the whodunit conventions of the Christie mystery. But there are some juicy, clever turn-arounds in the last act, as Dietrich gets genuinely steamy.

Mark December 2 as a must-see: the first Boston screening in decades of The Big Carnival/Ace in the Hole (1951), Wilder’s cynical take on the sensationalist media, as journalists, Kirk Douglas among them, scramble over a scoop story when a miner gets stuck in a cave. I’ll be at the Brattle, since this movie is unavailable on video or DVD.

December 9 starts with Some Like It Hot (1959). You know that one’s good. It’s paired with The Fortune Cookie (1966), which shows off Wilder’s favorite couple, Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. Lemmon is a sports cameraman who while on duty gets run over by a pro football player and has to be hospitalized. Enter his larcenous brother-in-law (Matthau), an ambulance-chasing lawyer who sees dollar signs behind the minor injury and persuades Lemmon to feign major hurts. The funniest parts of the movie are Matthau’s run-in negotiations with the football team’s fancy-shmantzy attorneys: this low-life Jew runs circles around the trio of patrician WASPs. Matthau won a Best Supporting Oscar as the guy "who could find loopholes in the Ten Commandments."

And on December 16, The Seven Year Itch (1955), in which married Tom Ewell fantasizes about bachelorette neighbor Marilyn Monroe. This is the cute movie with the most famous of upskirt scenes, MM blowing in the breeze.

The Brattle also has a brilliant Douglas Sirk package this weekend, November 22-24, that includes Written on the Wind (1957) and The Tarnished Angels (1958). Both star Dorothy Malone, whom I interviewed once at the Dallas Country Club. About Written on the Wind, for which she won an Academy Award as the fast-driving, self-destructive, sexually heated oil baroness, Malone had this to say: "An agent kept calling that there is a director from Europe who wants you and only you. Sirk was every woman’s dream of a director. He was very Prussian, wore a scarf, and maybe he had a walking stick. If he liked you, he was so much fun. I found him utterly charming. It must have been terrible if he didn’t like you."

Malone was reunited with Sirk and Written on the Wind stars Robert Stack and Rock Hudson for The Tarnished Angels, a moody, melancholic adaptation of William Faulkner’s early novel Pylon. The Tarnished Angels is the best version of Faulkner on film, but Malone remembered most how miserable she was making it. She was cast as a parachute jumper, but she was traumatized at having to jump off airplane wings to a mattress far below. Worse, Sirk had her hang for hours from the ceiling, suspended on wires, while the crew rehearsed and technicians lit the film’s sexiest scene: the barelegged Malone descending via parachute through the air, her skirt tossed high by the wind (in reality two freezing fans). Years later, Malone almost died of a brain aneurysm. When she investigated, she discovered that what happened to her had happened to many pilots who had been caught in parachutes. Her conclusion: the great Douglas Sirk had almost killed her.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com