Billy Wilder (1950)
Its reputation as a classic isn’t hard to understand. For a start, it has a great title. Sunset Boulevard, as well as being an actual Los Angeles location, is a name resonant in itself and metaphorically perfect for the film, whose two main characters are a former star of silent movies, inhabiting the long twilight of her career, and a struggling screenwriter, drawn into her world with, for him, fatal consequences. Billy Wilder and his co-writers, Charles Brackett and D M Marshman Jr, use a narrative device of startling effrontery (and which, in 1950, may have been unprecedented in a Hollywood movie). The story is told by the deceased screenwriter, Joe Gillis (William Holden); he introduces himself as a corpse floating in a swimming pool, in the grounds of the mansion belonging to the once-famous Norma Desmond. Most important, Sunset Boulevard is the prototype of movies that skewer the cold heart of the Dream Factory, a place where illusions long outlive hope.
The show business has-been desperate for a comeback, the writer as a particularly disposable part of the movie-making enterprise – these are familiar screen figures now. The enduring power of Wilder’s film is thanks in large part to his excavational casting: the people playing film-industry relics in Sunset Boulevard are the real thing, performers and artists actually forgotten or ill-used by Hollywood. During the 1920s, Gloria Swanson made about thirty films; between Music in the Air (1934) and Sunset Boulevard, she made one (Father Takes a Wife (1941)). Norma Desmond’s butler, later revealed to be the first of her ex-husbands and the once-famous film director Max von Mayerling, is played by Eric von Stroheim, whose artistic losing battles with Hollywood studios were notorious. (When Norma watches herself on screen, with Max working the projector, Billy Wilder illustrates her Hollywood heyday with a clip from Queen Kelly (1929), starring Swanson and directed by von Stroheim – he was fired from the production before the controversial film was completed.) The trio of neighbours who visit the mansion to play bridge with Norma – ‘the waxworks’ as Joe Gillis calls them – are Anna Q Nilsson, H B Warner and Buster Keaton. The fact that Keaton is (now, at any rate) the only recognisable face among them is eloquent.
Sunset Boulevard doesn’t aim to be likeable and succeeds in that aim, but its cynical cleverness is impressive. Joe Gillis first enters the grounds of Norma’s palazzo on Sunset Boulevard by chance, as he tries to give the slip to two men trying to repossess his car. She may have disappeared from public view but Joe recognises Norma immediately: ‘You used to be in silent pictures – you used to be big’ – his remark elicits her famous reply, ‘I am big – it’s the pictures that got small’. When she learns he’s a scenarist, she shows him the script she’s written for her comeback movie, in which she intends to play the title role of Salome. Joe realises the script is hopeless but agrees to work on it. He moves into the mansion at Norma’s insistence and soon becomes, in more ways than one, a kept man there. Sunset Boulevard, shot by John F Seitz and with an art direction team headed by Hans Dreier, has an unmistakable look. The baroque details and bizarre rituals of Norma’s home – especially the monkey funeral – remain remarkable, more than fifty years on. It’s a fine irony, given the film’s theme, that its reputation has endured so strongly.
Yet that theme is narrow. Billy Wilder elaborates it ingeniously but it’s not enough on its own and the storyline used to substantiate it is much less extraordinary than the movie’s assault on Hollywood. Norma Desmond’s belief in her imperishable stardom is deluded but she’s less blind about age withering her as a woman and, as such, she’s more conventionally pitiable. When Joe first escapes her clutches, Norma attempts suicide; he returns but she’s increasingly anxious about his relationship with the young script reader Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson). While Joe’s prostitution chez Norma, of himself as well as of his art, is daringly unusual, his involvement with Betty isn’t. The scenes between William Holden and Nancy Olson are nicely played – and, for the viewer as well as Joe, a relieving contrast to the supercharged ordeal of life with Norma. Although she was born and raised in Hollywood, Betty is refreshingly sane and sanguine about the movie business, as illustrated in a nighttime sequence in which she and Joe walk together through deserted backlots. The experience evokes for Betty memories that are pleasant without being crazily starstruck. Even so, her part of the story has the feel of filler.
Gloria Swanson’s performance epitomises both the irresistible grip and the limitations of the film. She is iconic in the role of Norma Desmond and Wilder may have encouraged her to play it in the manner of a silent-movie star but I wish, whenever I watch Sunset Boulevard, that I could be more confident Swanson was capable of different. The grotesque facial expressions, madly glinting eyes and talon-like fingers make for great stills; but Swanson’s stylised melodramatic poses and gestures lack variety, and so do her line readings. Although Norma, as the very senior partner in a sexual liaison, is more self-aware and vulnerable than Norma the narcissist-fantasist, Swanson doesn’t show many different facets in the two aspects of the character – although she is more human in the occasional more casual, less pressured bits of conversation between Norma and Joe. Whether it’s intentional or not, Swanson’s style of acting seems primitive and shallow beside William Holden’s understated, expressive naturalism. Holden brilliantly captures Joe Gillis’s charm, weakness and self-loathing. The cast includes, as well as examples of those left on the trash heap of movie history, more durable Hollywood authorities in the form of Cecil B DeMille and Hedda Hopper – as themselves. The participation of these two in Sunset Boulevard, an often ferocious biting of the hand that fed Billy Wilder, is richly ambiguous.
16 May 2017
