Billy Wilder’s first career was as a tabloid journalist, first in Vienna and then in in Berlin in the ’20s, and in a sense he never lost his hard-boiled newspaperman’s credentials. His movies — both the ones that he co-wrote in Hollywood in the ’30s and early ’40s, before becoming a movie director (the best are Midnight and Ninotchka), and the ones that he co-wrote and directed, beginning with The Major and the Minor in 1942 — are distinguished by their cockiness, their cynical tone, their colorful (sometimes purple) language, their gleeful, even daredevil mix of the exotic and the vulgar. Wilder, who died last week three months short of his 96th birthday, loved to crack wise and didn’t have much use for the subtle or the indirect. You didn’t go to his movies for depth, and though his best work has undeniable craftsmanship, it’s more a wordsmith’s craftsmanship than a visual artist’s. (That great velvet-and-cyanide gothic Sunset Boulevard is the glaring exception.) He valued showmanship more, which may be one reason so many of his movies were adaptations of stage plays: The Major and the Minor, Five Graves to Cairo, Stalag 17, Sabrina, The Seven Year Itch, Witness for the Prosecution, Irma La Douce, The Front Page.

Wilder was a German Jew who fled Hitler in 1933, just four years after beginning a career as a screenwriter with the celebrated documentary People on Sunday (which also initiated the careers of Robert Siodmak and Fred Zinnemann, two other gifted Germans who later joined him in Hollywood). He never got rid of the Viennese accent in his speech, but the argot spoken by the characters he and his co-writers (usually Charles Brackett early on, and then I.A.L. Diamond) created was Yankee toughspeak, sardonic and self-conscious. "I wonder if I know what you mean," Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson, the blondest and most poisonous of the ’40s femmes fatales, ventures to Fred MacMurray’s Walter Neff in Double Indemnity after he’s made a pass at her, and he snaps back, "I wonder if you wonder." Asked to produce his credits, the down-and-out screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) in Sunset Boulevard quips, "The last one I wrote was about Okies in the Dust Bowl. You wouldn’t know it, because by the time it reached the screen it took place on a torpedo boat." "You think I would have learned by now," Shirley MacLaine’s Fran Kubelik tells her out-of-reach lover (MacMurray again) in The Apartment just before his callousness drives her to attempt suicide. "When you’re in love with a married man, you shouldn’t wear mascara." It’s hard to think of a filmmaker who made so many movies with quotable lines and phrases, like "the floor show" to describe the alcoholic ward in The Lost Weekend and "the fuzzy end of the lollipop," which Marilyn Monroe’s Sugar says she always gets stuck with in Some Like It Hot. Everyone in my generation who devoted a significant portion of a misspent childhood to NBC’s Saturday Night at the Movies can recite the last line of Some Like It Hot ("Nobody’s perfect") and the first exchange between Holden and Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard: "You’re Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big." "I am big. It’s the pictures that got small."

Even though some of Wilder’s best-known movies — Ace in the Hole, The Apartment, One, Two, Three, The Fortune Cookie — are sourballs that sit heavy on the stomach, few directors made so many classic entertainments. Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard, and Some Like It Hot, conceived over a mere decade and a half of filmmaking, are four of the most enjoyable — and unforgettable — movies Hollywood has ever produced. The last of these, a dizzy Prohibition-era farce released in 1959, came at the end of the worst decade for comedy in movie history and proved to be so relentlessly hilarious that it provided a kind of salvation for the parched. Sunset Boulevard, which began that decade, is a different kind of comedy, black as the grave and so audacious it can still make you gasp. It’s a story told by a corpse about a desperate aging silent-screen star who initially mistakes the man, half her age, she’s going to take as her lover as an undertaker she’s expecting for her deceased monkey. The nastiest and most brilliant satire ever directed at the movie business, it’s fueled by Wilder’s delight in biting the hand that fed him. The delight is infectious.