 "Photo: Courtesy Photo")
An American classic and one of the best movies about "the movies" ever made, "Sunset Blvd." is a melodrama that's equal parts indictment and commemoration of Hollywood show business. The film touches on the harsh realities of Tinseltown - it'll chew up, spit out, and step on (for good measure) any shmoe who dares to dream a celluloid dream. Yet "Sunset Blvd." also seems to be in awe of the magic of the moviemaking itself, the power of that flickering light and those floating images we are collectively enthralled by as we sit inside a dark room.
"Sunset Blvd." is named for the street on which washed-up silent movie star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) lives. The film, starting at 1950, chronicles the relationship between Desmond and the struggling screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden). Unfortunately for Joe, the chronicle ends with his death. I am not spoiling anything because it begins with his death as well. In a thoroughly modern twist, Gilles narrates the film from beyond the grave, in the hard-boiled style lifted from detective novels of the 1930s. In the opening scene, Gillis muses about the cops fishing him out of Norma's swimming pool as he floats with two bullets in his back and a slug in his stomach.
The broke Gillis meets Desmond as bill collectors are chasing him into her run-down mansion. Initially he thinks it's abandoned. When he meanders inside he's surprised to find a butler who seems to be expecting him. The house is a baroque and lavish monument to the 20s, a cross between the Addams Family mansion and Xanadu from "Citizen Kane." He's led to see Desmond upstairs, where she's waiting by the corpse of her dead pet chimp. It's not a good sign when rich people own pet chimps -- anyone remember who Bubbles belonged to? Anyway, they think Gillis is the undertaker. Slowly, he recognizes her. "You're Norma Desmond," he says, "you used to be big." She's taken aback and utters the immortal line, "I am big. It's the pictures that got small!"
The two begin a mutually destructive relationship. Desmond has never gotten over her lost stardom and is now demented with longing, living in a fantasy world of her own creation where all her adoring fans are clamoring for her return. She's written a script called "Salome" and wants Gillis to revise it so she can make her return to the screen (whatever you do, don't call it a "comeback"). Gillis takes the job because he has no money and no place else to go. He's basically using her, but she's also using him. Eventually she tries to transform him into one of her adoring fans, or an old beau from the 20s, and he reluctantly becomes her lover, or maybe "bedtime companion" would be a better description. Any of his attempts to leave are met by threats of suicide. Considering the fact that the narrator is a dead man, one can infer that this will not be an uplifting story of hope and redemption.
The movie is filled with actors and actresses either playing themselves or versions of themselves. Cecil B. Demille, a well-known director of the time, appears as himself. In the film, he has directed Desmond in numerous silent pictures, and she appeals to Demille to direct her comeback project. He inspires the famous final line of the film, which you probably know already, but not exactly where it came from. The great silent movie clown Buster Keaton makes a cameo appearance as well, and his actual failure to make the transition to sound echoes the plight of other characters in the film. In addition to that, Erich von Stroheim, who plays the butler, was a silent movie director, and the film he's most known for, "Greed," was regarded as a colossal failure at the time. But the real draw here is Gloria Swanson.
Gloria Swanson, who plays Desmond, was actually a silent movie actress as well, and, like Desmond, found it difficult to find roles as she grew older. As Desmond, Swanson constantly overacts, always tilting her head back, widening her eyes to the size of saucers and fluctuating the eyebrows that seem to be painted on the middle of her forehead. Though she may overact, it's right for the character, who has had so few opportunities to act in films that she seems to be practicing for her next big role in her day-to -day life. Initially, it's a little funny, but as we get to know the character, and as certain serious events occur, it's just sad. She's revealed as not a clown, but as a fully developed character. Here's a person who's so lonely, so desperate to be loved, so obsessed with the past and what could've been, that she has developed a caricature-like outward appearance as a defense mechanism, to protect what fragile grasp she has on the shambles of her life. It's Swanson's portrayal of this character that makes the movie.
Hollywood is presented as fickle in "Sunset Blvd.," having cast Desmond aside after they could find no use for her in the women's 40--50-year-old age demographic. The capacity for artistic expression in Hollywood seems stifled as well. When we first meet him, Gillis has long given up on getting anything meaningful through the Hollywood machine and has degenerated into pitching high-concept B-movies that he makes up on the spot. The down-and-out writer is constantly irked by an up-and-coming script reader who quite accurately identifies his work as crap; the thing is, he already knows that but can't do anything about it. I have no doubt that this view of Hollywood was inspired by the experiences of the director and co-writer of "Sunset Blvd.," Billy Wilder.
Wilder, whose credits include "Double Indemnity," "Some Like It Hot," and "The Apartment," contributed to the scripts of his films at a time when a writer-director was virtually unheard of in the factory-like production system (one of the exceptions would be Preston Sturges and his glorious comedies of the 1940s). I believe that "Sunset Blvd." was Wilder's way of coming to terms with this conflict in Hollywood cinema; though Wilder undoubtedly loved to make movies, the process was probably hell, filled with endless compromises, rejections, and flat-out failed attempts. There are probably many casualties of the so-called "dream factory," including the fictional Norma Desmond, Joe Gilles, and even Billy Wilder to a certain extent. But when the product is like "Sunset Blvd.," it makes me think that it all might be worth it in the end. Well, sometimes at least.
Join us for a free screening of "Sunset Boulevard" on Thursday March 13, at 7:00 p.m. in the MUB Theatre I. . Be well, FU
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