I have loved Billy Wilder films since childhood and was intrigued how often Ohio is mentioned. Why does Billy Wilder love the state of Ohio? Perhaps the Austrian-born screenwriter/director envisaged the state as quintessentially American (right or wrong). Perhaps, we may never know.
Some of Wilder's interesting references to Ohio in films:
Love is the hardest thing in the world to write about. So simple. You've got to catch it through details, like the early morning sunlight hitting the gray tin of the rain spout in front of her house. The ringing of a telephone that sounds like Beethoven's "Pastoral." A letter scribbled on her office stationery that you carry around in your pocket because it smells of all the lilacs in Ohio. - Don (Ray Milland), The Lost Weekend
Don (Ray Milland) also deduces that Helen (Jane Wyman) is from Toledo, Ohio by looking through her coat and finding that its maker's mark is from Alfred Spitzer. Well, and I guess since she's from Ohio, it shouldn't be surprising that one of the presents she gives Don is 'the new Thurber book'.
The character of Sugar, played by Marilyn Monroe in the film Some Like It Hot, hailed from Sandusky, Ohio.
In Stalag 17, the cynical POW Sefton (William Holden) drills the German-speaking Price (Robert Graves) about his self-proclaimed Ohio upbringing since he suspects that he is a Nazi spy planted in the prisoner barracks. SEFTON
Shut up!
(slaps his face)
Security Officer, eh? Screening
everybody, only who screened you?
Great American hero. From Cleveland,
Ohio! Enlisted right after Pearl
Harbor! When was Pearl Harbor, Price?
Or, don't you know?
PRICE
December seventh, forty-one.
SEFTON
What time?
PRICE
Six o'clock. I was having dinner.
SEFTON
Six o'clock in Berlin. They were
having lunch in Cleveland.
(to the others)
Am I boring you, boys?
HOFFY
Go on.
SEFTON
He's a Nazi, Price is. For all I
know, his name is Preismaier or
Preissinger. Sure, he lived in
Cleveland, but when the war broke
out he came back to the Fatherland
like a good little Bundist. He spoke
our lingo so they put him through
spy school, gave him phony dogtags --My absolute favourite reference: In the beginning of Sunset Boulevard, Joe Gillis mentions in a voice-over how embarrassing it would be to move back to Dayton and work again for the Dayton Evening Post if he is unable to make it in Hollywood as a screenwriter.
The Fortune Cookie Jack Lemmon and Walter Mattheau their first movie together was filmed at St Vincent Charity Hospital as well as the old Cleveland Stadium. CBS cameraman Harry Hinkle (Jack Lemmon) gets injured when football player Luther "Boom Boom" Jackson (Ron Rich) runs into him while he is covering a Browns game at Cleveland Stadium. Saint Mark's Hospital is in reality St. Vincent Charity Hospital. In 1966, the scene was filmed on East 24th Street in an older section. In 1966, St. Vincent Charity had completed a then-ultramodern curved Hospital building.
Terminal Tower was the base for the law firm used. In one image, one can see Erieview Tower and construction of the Federal Building's steel skeleton. Scenes were filmed at the Cleveland Browns vs Minnesota Vikings game at Cleveland Municipal Stadium on 31 October 1965.
Text originally from 2011.
