8 Best Billy Wilder Monologues – Opening Monologue

The Seven Year Itch (The Girl)

Category: Movie Role: The Girl From: The Seven Year Itch

I think it’s just elegant to have an imagination. I just have no imagination at all. I have lots of other things, but I have no imagination. … Your imagination! You think every girl’s a dope. You think a girl goes to a party and there’s some guy in a fancy striped vest strutting around giving you that I’m-so-handsome-you-can’t-resist-me look. From this she’s supposed to fall flat on her face. Well, she doesn’t fall on her face. But there’s another guy in the room, over in the corner. Maybe he’s nervous and shy and perspiring a little. First, you look past him. But then you sense that he’s gentle and kind and worried. That he’ll be tender with you, nice and sweet. That’s what’s really exciting.

The Apartment (C.C. “Bud” Baxter)

Category: Movie Role: C.C. "Bud" Baxter From: The Apartment

On November 1st, 1959, the population of New York City was 8,042,783. If you laid all these people end to end, figuring an average height of five feet six and a half inches, they would reach from Times Square to the outskirts of Karachi, Pakistan. I know facts like this because I work for an insurance company: Consolidated Life of New York. We’re one of the top five companies in the country. Our home office has 31,259 employees, which is more than the entire population of Natchez, Mississippi. I work on the 19th floor: Ordinary Policy Department – Premium Accounting Division – Section W – desk number 861. My name is C. C. Baxter. C. for Calvin, C. for Clifford, however most people call me “Bud”. I’ve been with Consolidated for three years and ten months and my take home pay is $94.70 a week. The hours in our department are 8:50 to 5:20. They’re staggered by floors, so that sixteen elevators can handle the 31,259 employees without a serious traffic jam. As for myself, I very often stay on at the office and work for an extra hour or two, especially when the weather is bad. It’s not that I’m overly ambitious, it’s just a way of killing time until it’s all right for me to go home. You see, I have this little problem with my apartment… I live in the West 60s, just half a block from Central Park. My rent is $85 dollars a month. It used to be $80 until last July when Mrs. Lieberman, the landlady, put in a second-hand air conditioning unit. It’s a real nice apartment, nothing fancy, but kind of cozy. Just right for a bachelor. The only problem is, I can’t always get in when I want to.

The Apartment (Fran Kubelik)

Category: Movie Role: Fran Kubelik From: The Apartment

Let’s not start again on that, Jeff. Please? I’m just beginning to get over it. Look, Jeff, we had two wonderful months this summer, but that was it. Happens all the time. Wife and kids go away to the country and the boss has a fling with his secretary, or the manicurist, or the elevator girl. Come September, the picnic’s over. Goodbye! The kids go back to school. The boss goes back to the wife. And the girl … they don’t make these shrimp like they used to. For a while there you try kidding yourself that you’re going with an unmarried man. Then one day he keeps looking at his watch, and asks you if there’s any lipstick showing. Then rushes out to catch the 7:14 to White Plains. So you fix yourself a cup of instant coffee and you sit there by yourself and you think. And it all begins to look so ugly.

Sunset Boulevard (Joe Gillis)

Category: Movie Role: Joe Gillis From: Sunset Boulevard

Yes, this is Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, California. It’s about five o’clock in the morning. That’s the Homicide Squad, complete with detectives and newspapermen. A murder has been reported from one of those great big houses in the ten thousand block. You’ll read about it in the late editions, I’m sure. You’ll get it over your radio and see it on television because an old-time star is involved; one of the biggest. But before you hear it all distorted and blown out of proportion, before those Hollywood columnists get their hands on it, maybe you’d like to hear the facts, the whole truth. If so, you’ve come to the right party. You see, the body of a young man was found floating in the pool of her mansion with two shots in his back and one in his stomach. Nobody important, really. Just a movie writer with a couple of ‘B’ pictures to his credit. The poor dope! He always wanted a pool. Well, in the end, he got himself a pool, only the price turned out to be a little high.

Sunset Boulevard (Norma Desmond)

Category: Movie Role: Norma Desmond From: Sunset Boulevard

I can’t go on with this scene, I’m too happy. Mr. DeMille do you mind if I say a few words? Thank you. I just want to tell you all how happy I am to be back in the studio making a picture again. You don’t know how much I’ve missed all of you. And I promise you I’ll never desert you again because after ‘Salome’ we’ll make another picture and another picture. You see, this is my life. It always will be. There’s nothing else. Just us, the cameras, and those wonderful people out there in the dark!… All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.

Some Like It Hot (Sugar Kane Kowalczyk)

Category: Movie Role: Sugar Kane Kowalczyk From: Some Like It Hot

Yeah, you better keep a look out. I’m not very bright I guess. No, just dumb, if I had any brains I wouldn’t be on this crummy train with this crummy girl’s band. I used to sing with male bands but I can’t afford it anymore, have you ever been with a male band? That’s what I’m running away from. I’ve been with six different ones in the last two years . Oh brother! … I’ll say…I can’t trust myself. I have this thing about saxophone players , especially tenor sax. I don’t know what it is but they just curdle me. All they have to do is play eight bars of “Come To Me, My Melancholy Baby” and my spine turns to custard. I get goose pimply all over and I come to them. Every time. … But you’re a girl thank goodness. That’s why I joined this band: Safety first. Anything to get away from those bums. You don’t know what they’re like! You fall for them. You really love them, you think, “This is going to be the biggest thing since the Graf Zeppelin.” The next thing you know, they’re borrowing money from you, they’re spending it on other dames and betting on horses. Then one morning, you wake up, the guy’s gone, the saxophone’s gone. All that’s left behind is a pair of old socks and a tube of toothpaste all squeezed out. So you pull yourself together, you go on to the next job, the next saxophone player. It’s the same thing all over again. See what I mean? Not very bright. I can tell you one thing, it’s not going to happen to me again. Ever. I’m tired of getting the fuzzy end of the lollipop.

Sabrina (Sabrina Fairchild)

Category: Movie Role: Sabrina Fairchild From: Sabrina

Once upon a time, on the north shore of Long Island, some 30 miles from New York, there lived a small girl on a large estate. The estate was very large indeed and had many servants. There were gardeners to take care of the gardens, and a tree surgeon on a retainer. There was a boatman to take care of the boats: to put them in the water in the spring, and scrape their bottoms in the winter. There were specialists to take care of the grounds: the outdoor tennis court and the indoor tennis court, the outdoor swimming pool and the indoor swimming pool. And there was a man of no particular title who took care of a small pool in the garden for a goldfish named George. Also on the estate, there was a chauffeur by the name of Fairchild, who had been imported from England, years ago, together with a new Rolls Royce. Fairchild was a fine chauffeur of considerable polish, like the eight cars in his care, and he had a daughter by the name of Sabrina. It was the eve of the annual six meter yacht races, and as had been tradition on Long Island for the past 30 years, the Larrabees were giving a party. It never rained on the night of the Larrabee party, the Larrabees wouldn’t have stood for it. There were four Larrabees in all: father, mother and two sons. Maude and Oliver Larrabee were married in nineteen hundred and six and among their many wedding presents was a townhouse in New York and this estate for weekends. The town house has since been converted into Saks Fifth Avenue. Linus Larrabee, the elder son, graduated from Yale, where his classmates voted him the man Most Likely to Leave his Alma Mater Fifty Million Dollars. His brother, David, went through several of the best eastern colleges for short periods of time, and through several marriages for even shorter periods of time. He is now a successful six-goal polo player, and is listed on Linus’s tax return as a six hundred dollar deduction. Life was pleasant among the Larrabees, for this was as close to heaven as one could get on Long Island.

Double Indemnity (Barton Keyes)

Category: Movie Role: Barton Keyes From: Double Indemnity

Yeah, in the front office. Come now, you’ve never read an actuarial table in your life, have you? Why they’ve got ten volumes on suicide alone. Suicide by race, by color, by occupation, by sex, by seasons of the year, by time of day. Suicide, how committed: by poison, by firearms, by drowning, by leaps. Suicide by poison, subdivided by *types* of poison, such as corrosive, irritant, systemic, gaseous, narcotic, alkaloid, protein, and so forth; suicide by leaps, subdivided by leaps from high places, under the wheels of trains, under the wheels of trucks, under the feet of horses, from *steamboats*. But, Mr. Norton, of all the cases on record, there’s not one single case of suicide by leap from the rear end of a moving train. And you know how fast that train was going at the point where the body was found? Fifteen miles an hour. Now how can anybody jump off a slow-moving train like that with any kind of expectation that he would kill himself? No. No soap, Mr. Norton. We’re sunk, and we’ll have to pay through the nose, and you know it.