68 years ago...
Sunset Boulevard (1950)
Director: Billy Wilder
Country: United States
Length: 110 minutes
Type: Film-Noir
I've seen and enjoyed
'Sunset Blvd.' several times but this was the first time I've watched it since I've been exploring the films that led up to it. This allowed me to understand it not as another movie from my past but almost as a contemporary film, made by a 40-year-old Hollywood looking back it's own painful gestation with love and regret. Having begun to enjoy the work of tragic dead silent film-stars like
John Gilbert,
Douglas Fairbanks and
Rudolph Valentino, it added an extra layer when they are eulogised in the dialogue.
Struggling screenwriter Joe Gillis chances upon the crumbling mansion of a forgotten silent-film megastar called Norma Desmond, where she lives isolated from a world that has long since forgotten her, cared for by a mysterious butler called Max. Her macabre and insane world are emblematically introduced as Gillis arrives during the elaborate funeral arrangements for her beloved chimpanzee. He sees an opportunity to exploit Desmond by earning a buck pretending to put the finishing touches to a patently dreadful script she has written, intended for the comeback that she believes will somehow still happen. However, the tables are slowly turned as Desmond sucks Gillis into a controlling and suffocating relationship as her toy-boy.
Many real Hollywood faces play themselves, or heightened versions thereof, like silent comedian
Buster Keaton, Director
Cecil B. DeMille and showbiz columnist
Hedda Hopper. Not forgetting that two of the four principle characters are a fictional dormant silent-film star, played by semi-retired real silent icon
Gloria Swanson and a forgotten silent-film Director played by real "banned" silent Director
Erich von Stroheim. In a scene where Norma exhibits one of her old movies, Stroheim had the wicked idea to make it 1932's
'Queen Kelly', the last film he and Swanson made together, which was not released in the US and from which Stroheim was fired.
Swanson's performance is like nothing else, a deliberately exaggerated exhibition of the worst of silent era pantomime, turned up to a maniacal level, her eyes bulging with insanity and her hands bent into tortured claws.
William Holden plays the fly caught in her web with contrasting restraint and a sarcasm laced Film-Noir voice-over. 'Sunset Blvd.' is
Billy Wilder's calling card as Director of one of the finest films ever made and the acknowledged master of dark and twisted dramas. Swanson also delivers some of the most famous lines in movie history, such as:
"We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!"
"I am big! It's the pictures that got small"
"All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up"
(^ Top video essay)
Another Luis Buñuel film next (hmm).