They announced his death on a Thursday, always the movie industry's biggest, busiest day. The studios and the exhibitors are sweating the arrival of the new prints, the publicists are in full twit, the critics are scribbling away, and the ushers are getting ready to go up the ladders to change the marquees.

Now it all stops inconveniently for a day, and that comic chortling you hear from some celestial source -- it's got to be him. That's Billy Wilder: always a troublemaker, laughing at the discomfort that was his stock in trade.

The tiny filmmaker, who died Wednesday at age 95, was a great director, maybe one of the greatest ever. Born in the Austro-Hungarian empire and heir to a European tradition of cosmopolitanism, merry sexual opportunism and raffish charm, he brought those subversive values to American pictures and made a career gleefully pointing out how much bad resided in the good and how much good within the bad. He was cynical about everybody except the dull, to whom he paid the ultimate insult: He ignored them.

His death marks the end of an era. He's the last of that great wave of European immigrants who reached Hollywood in the '30s, haunted (and in some cases hunted) by Nazism, and brought with them a moral complexity that our native-born could not master. Directors Fred Zinnemann, Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak and Douglas Sirk come to mind, but there were many more. Even Bertolt Brecht did some Hollywood time. It was an infusion of talent, attitude and technique almost unprecedented and certainly unequaled by later invasions, like the live-TV directors of the '50s, the British ad guys of the '80s or the MTV hotshots of the '90s.

Wilder's movies almost always had edge, decades before the term "edge" had been coined. His was a universe of cads and bounders and slicksters, always on the hustle. They were morally compromised from the start, like William Holden as the gigolo screenwriter in the 1950 "Sunset Boulevard," who, besides being sleazy and weak, has one other character trait that might keep him from being a hero as the film begins: He's dead. Stop and think: How many movies are narrated by a gigolo corpse floating face-down in a Hollywood swimming pool?

Then there was Holden again a few years later as a black-marketeering POW sergeant in "Stalag 17," a man for whom World War II, with all its loudly expressed encomiums to duty, was really just a shot at profit. When the odds favored him -- and only then -- he became a hero.

And who can forget seedy Fred MacMurray, his eyes ball bearings of lust and greed, his mind not quite as clever as he thought it was, in the great "Double Indemnity" of 1944? Oh, and finally, there's Jack Lemmon in "The Apartment" (1960), a young executive wannabe, selling out to his boss (the oily MacMurray again) by letting the older man use his apartment as a trysting site. Then he has the misfortune of falling in love with his boss's mistress.

Wilder could never believe in the American Dream of fair play, decency, morality and courage; he was too Middle European for that, and had learned too much from the films of his hero Ernst Lubitsch, inventor of the famed "Lubitsch touch" and another clever cosmopolitan too amused to play it fair and square.

Wilder was born in 1906 in what is now Poland under the name Samuel Wilder, the son of a hotelier. Perhaps it was seeing all the combinations and recombinations of couples coupling and uncoupling in a large building full of rooms to rent that gave him his jaundiced view of humanity. Or perhaps it was his years as a journalist, first in Vienna, later in Berlin, working for tabloids. Or perhaps it was his secondary career in those Berlin years as a taxi dancer -- that is, "guy to let" -- that corrupted him so delightfully.

Whatever: His would never be the path of the straight and true. When he tried, however manfully, to tell stories about the straight and the true, they always went straight and truly into the ground, like his leaden version of "The Spirit of St. Louis" with a decades-too-old Col. Jimmy Stewart playing the barely post-adolescent Minnesota farm boy/aviator Charles Lindbergh. It may be Wilder's worst movie.

But give him an angle, a twist, a shading, and Wilder was in his element. He fled Germany in 1933, after Hitler came to power. By that time he'd already cracked the German film industry as a writer; he worked in Paris as a writer and moved to Hollywood, hired by Columbia, then 20th Century-Fox, and finally Paramount. One problem: He didn't speak English, a hindrance to anyone writing in that language.

After thin years (he roomed with Peter Lorre, and what a pair of roomies they must have been), he finally began the first of two professional collaborations that were to define his life. It was with the screenwriter Charles Brackett, of Williams College, Harvard Law and World War I. It was an astonishing combination -- or clash -- of sensibilities, the staid New Englander and the licentious Viennese, yet it produced films like "Bluebeard's Eighth Wife" and the great Garbo vehicle "Ninotchka" (both directed by Lubitsch). It was to protect his and Brackett's work from the studio hacks that the two of them took on additional responsibilities as, respectively, director and producer.

The first of these collaborations was "The Major and the Minor," and then the war drama "Five Graves to Cairo," both of which display Wilder's obsession with impersonation (Ginger Rogers pretends to be a child to travel half-price by rail in the first; in the second, young soldier Franchot Tone pretends to be a waiter to gain access to Rommel's documents in an Egyptian hotel).

The first of their great movies was the noir masterpiece "Double Indemnity," derived from James M. Cain's hard-boiled wallop of a book about an insurance salesman who thinks he can beat the game, and the babe who takes him along with her on the road to Hell. "The Lost Weekend" came next, with its dramatization of the DTs, from the Charles Jackson novel. Finally, after "The Emperor Waltz" and "A Foreign Affair," came "Sunset Boulevard."

Wilder had been in Hollywood 17 years and Brackett 25 by that time, and each understood the fuel of need, vanity, delusion and fear that drove the town. Thus their greatest work, certainly the best movie about movies ever made. Joe Gillis (Holden), third-rate screenwriter at the end of his rope, fleeing the repo men, takes refuge in an ancient, decaying mansion on the rue de title, only to learn that it's the home of the great silent star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson, made up to resemble a gargoyle on steroids). Soon he is hired to help her write her "comeback" project, and soon after that he learns he's been hired not just as an editor of her prose but also as the editor of her libido, which remains considerable. The pay is great; the workplace, however, is difficult to endure. Plus, he has to help her bury her dead chimpanzee one midnight.

The parable is compelling: youth and talent, corrupted and prostituted into decay by dreams of glory, the result being spiritual ennui and ultimately despair and then death; it's the Hollywood story at its most vicious, most cynical, most grotesque. It's Wilder and Brackett's tough-as-brass-bushings poison valentine to the town that made them rich and famous. It's also, in its severity, its rigor, its dark, consistent humor, a masterpiece. "Mr. De Mille," croaks the mad harridan Norma, her face a Kabuki mask of narcissistic self-delusion and too much foundation, "I'm ready for my close-up." Of course the movie was a close-up of Hollywood.

The two separated after that on the vague grounds of artistic differences (Brackett evidently thought Wilder went too far in "Boulevard"); each prospered. Wilder made fabulous if lesser movies: "Ace in the Hole," "Stalag 17," the effervescent "Sabrina," the vivid courtroom drama "Witness for the Prosecution," with Marlene Dietrich in a trick role.

Wilder's second great period began inauspiciously with the romantic comedy "Love in the Afternoon," when he met the writer I.A.L. Diamond. The I.A.L., incidentally, stood for Interscholastic Algebra League, of which the Romanian-born screenwriter Itek Dommnici had been the 1936 champion at Columbia University. Later, advised his name was too "Jewish," he chose Diamond and added the I.A.L.

Diamond had been a mid-level writer of light films like "Two Guys From Texas" and "Let's Make It Legal"; he and Wilder liberated the genius in each other. They made 12 movies, and at least three of them are great: "Some Like It Hot," "The Apartment" and "The Fortune Cookie." Only one is mediocre, "The Front Page," in which Lemmon and Walter Matthau (with whom Lemmon first paired in "Fortune Cookie") are too old for their parts and the old vehicle, a play from almost a half-century earlier, creaky.

It is said that Wilder lost his stuff in the '70s -- his last film was 1981's forgettable "Buddy, Buddy" -- because America caught up with his outre sensibility. He could no longer shock with innuendo as he once could. The buzz of sexual impropriety that he alone could hint at but not depict was all gone. In an era when anything went, the first to thing to go was the subtlety of the suggestion.

Maybe so; maybe not. I prefer to think that Wilder simply grew disgusted, and retired, 21 years ago, to a happy indolence of dark mirth, ripostes delivered in German with lightning speed, and happy memories of a life spent brilliantly and a retirement earned grandly. I hope he became Norma Desmond without the attitude problem. That's what was so cool about him: He never needed a close-up.