Billy Wilder’s
Sunset Boulevard (1950) is a seminal
masterwork of American cinema on several levels. First, it represents the
director’s razor sharp, often caustic wit at its most acerbic. The poison from
the pens of Wilder, Charles Brackett and D.M. Marshman Jr. managed to raise more
than a few critical eyebrows when the film had its premiere. It is reported
that afterward MGM’s L.B. Mayer rushed Wilder in the lobby shouting “How could you do this?” Indeed, Sunset Boulevard gave audiences its
first unvarnished portrait of a town (Hollywood) and an industry (film-making)
lovingly overinflated by the media pundits as an escapist paradise where beauty
(manufactured or otherwise) reigned eternal and supreme.
Two decades
earlier David O. Selznick’s A Star Is
Born (1937) had attempted to illustrate the darker side of fame with the
implosion of one man’s life and career paralleling the meteoric rise of his wife’s
fame and popularity in movies. But even then the narrative maintained that
glistening image of Hollywood as a mythical El Dorado steeped in perennial
youth and beauty. In Selznick’s movie Hollywood wasn’t the villain, but a
sympathetic compatriot unable to spare one of its own from a looming personal
disaster. Wilder, however, puts the
blame for his protagonist’s downfall squarely on Hollywood’s shoulders.
The backdrop
of Sunset Boulevard lacks Central
Casting’s surface sheen. Gone are the false impressions of benevolent moguls
with their ‘family-esque’ atmosphere of looking out for one another, replaced
by a manipulative, devious and deliciously cutthroat hierarchy of malevolent misfits,
each looking for shameless advancement. Sunset
Boulevard strips bare all of the manufactured mythologies Hollywood
encouraged about itself, exposing a rather seedy underbelly of mutual contempt,
backstage chaos and sexual/psychological aberrations that all but tear apart
the sunny scenic edifice of this southern California Mecca.
Instead, we
are shown an industry, and indeed a world in moral decline and social decay.
The mansion where faded screen queen, Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) endures
her imposed exile is hardly gay or glamorous, but rather a relic chocked full
of elegant memories from an abandoned time, allowed to quaintly molder in all
its dusty retirement. The exterior façade and courtyards are overgrown in wild
vines that shield its grand dame; her beloved Isotta Fraschini Tipo 8A raised
on blocks inside a cobwebbed garage. So long as Norma remains absent from the
spotlight her memory of that other time remains pleasurably intact – at least
for her. It’s when she attempts to resurrect the past with a comeback that the
malignancy of her own reality begins to intrude upon her sanctity and sanity in
all sorts of self-destructive ways.
Yet, Norma’s
demise is not entirely of her own doing. She might have remained just as she
was; the forgotten diva from the silent era, protected by her ever-devoted butler,
Max Von Mayerling (Eric Von Stroheim); oblivious to the fact that her audience
had moved on without her. But Norma is re-introduced to the present beyond her
shuddered wrought iron gates with the accidental arrival of Joe Gillis (William
Holden); already considered something of a has been screenwriter even if his
looks suggest that he might find a second career as a B-grade leading man. But
Wilder’s impressions of Hollywood afford no such salvation for either Joe – who
sees Norma strictly as his meal ticket – or Norma, who buys his services –
professional and otherwise – in an increasingly desperate hope of reliving her
past.
Sunset Boulevard is more than just a tragic noir
melodrama where the malaise of its May/December romance corrodes all vestiges
of moral decency to the point of total madness. It is a bitter and unapologetic
exposé on Hollywood itself, laying the unromantic truth about fame at the
audience’s feet – re-conceived as a devastating sickness on the human condition.
Norma’s friends, whom Joe refers to as ‘the waxworks’ are a who’s who of once
iconic and seemingly indestructible stars; like H.B. Warner and Buster Keaton
whom the then present Hollywood of the 1950s had all but forgotten and
deliberately chosen to ignore. Even Von
Stroheim, once considered the preeminent director/star of his time, has been
reduced to playing the part of a man servant in Sunset Boulevard; his illustrious past achievements (Greed,
Foolish Wives, et al.) eclipsed by this stint as a supporting ham.
Wilder begins
his story with its tragic finale; the discovery of a lifeless Joe Gillis,
floating face down in Norma’s swimming pool. The scene of police and paparazzi
savoring the moment is at once grisly yet ghoulish, even as Joe begins to narrate
the circumstances leading up to his own murder; a rather ingenious way of
subverting the awkwardness of the traditional flashback and effortlessly
rewinding this sordid tale to a scant six months before. Then, Joe was bitter
and practically penniless, shopping his screenplay ‘Bases Loaded’ around the
majors but with no luck at all. His last ditch effort to sell Paramount
producer and fair weather friend, Sheldrake (Fred Clark) on the concept reaches
an impasse when precocious script reader, Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson) offers
her own unflattering critique of Joe’s work – that it’s been written from hunger, but with absolutely no
heart.
The next few
scenes are a tour de force with Wilder illustrating the cold-shoulder
isolationism of a very unfriendly Hollywood and how it can swallow a man whole
and brand him with the scarlet letter of failure to annihilate even his very
presence from the status quo. Attempting to outrun men who have come to
repossess his car, Joe gets a flat tire and is forced to take refuge beyond the
gates of a dilapidated Italianate mansion; its grounds forlorn and foreboding;
overgrown and faintly smelling of rot and formaldehyde. Joe is mistaken for an
undertaker and summoned inside the house by a mysterious female voice calling
to him from one of the upstairs windows.
Entering the
once proud villa, Joe is greeted by Max, the austere and very mysterious butler,
and shown to a room where the remains of a chimpanzee have been laid out for
the mourning. Joe reveals his true identity, temporarily incurring Norma’s
discontent. But his recognition of her past reputation tenders her contempt
moot. Moreover, Norma becomes mildly
intrigued when she realizes that Joe is a screenwriter. Perhaps their accidental
meeting is kismet after all. Norma has been plotting her return to the movies;
her immense script of Salome in dire
need of a cunning rewrite.
Joe has little
interest in the project until Norma offers to pay him handsomely for his
efforts. Even better, she quickly and quietly absolves all of his outstanding
debts and sets about to remake Joe into the very image of that young dapper
stud he wishes he were. Appealing to his greed, Joe willing abides this
transformation – at first. But very soon he begins to realize that Norma is luring
him away from his own dreams and worse, she is quite mad in her lost pursuits
of resurrecting her own career. Ensconced
in the apartment above her garage, Joe feverishly works on his rewrite of Norma’s
screenplay, determined to escape her suffocating allure before it’s too late.
The tragedy for Joe is, of course, that he fails to acknowledge it is already
too late for him.
Max tells Joe
that he will not allow anyone to intrude on ‘madam’s’ self-inflated opinion. In
fact, he has been solely responsible for writing Norma all of her fan mail
these many lean years, sustaining Norma’s delusions about her own enduring fame.
Joe also learns that Max was once Norma’s husband. Since their divorce he has
kept rather sycophantically vigilant watch over her various affairs – staunchly
determined to keep Norma from succumbing to her regular bouts of extreme melancholia.
Over time Joe
begins to resent Norma’s patronage, particularly as it seems inextricably
coupled with her dispassionate patronizing of him as her boy toy. Norma
eventually confesses to Joe that her affections for him run much deeper than
anticipated. To ease his own mind and regain some sense of self as a man, Joe
escapes the mansion to go slumming at a New Year’s Eve party at his friend,
Artie Green’s (Jack Webb) apartment. There he is reintroduced to Betty who also
happens to be Artie’s fiancée. Betty comes to understand Joe, despite being
unaware of his present predicament, and offers to help him rewrite a screenplay
they will market to Paramount. But as Joe decides to break free of Norma he is
informed by Max that she has attempted suicide at the thought of losing him.
Bitterly reluctant, but still feeling a sense of obligation, Joe returns to
comfort her.
Upon her
recovery, the two drive over to Paramount after receiving a call from the
studio – Norma with a renewed sense of optimism to propose ‘Salome’ to Cecil B.
DeMille (playing himself) who she has erroneously assumed shares her interests
on the project. Too late, Joe learns that the studio merely wanted to borrow
Norma’s car for another movie shoot. But DeMille - sympathetic - at least on
the surface, affords Norma every luxury of an old time star. Her reappearance
on the set of his Samson and Delilah draws out admirers from both cast and crew
who vet their superficial fascination at the spectacle of one time Hollywood
royalty on display.
For Norma,
this faux adulation proves she is still every bit queen of the lot. She returns
home invigorated to endure an exhaustive regiment of exercise and beauty
treatments that will help get her back into shape. In the meantime, Joe quietly
sneaks off at night to work on his screenplay with Betty at Paramount; the two falling
in love and commencing with an affair that breaks Artie’s heart. When Norma
discovers a copy of the script with Betty’s contact info in Joe’s room she telephones
Betty in a deliciously devious attempt to destroy her naiveté about the man she
loves. But Joe overhears the conversation. Determined to come clean once and
for all, he tells Betty to come to Norma’s house to see for herself what has
become of him.
Joe is deliberately
cruel to Betty upon her arrival, convincing her that he would rather live off
of Norma than be with her. But as Betty leaves the mansion in tears Joe plots a
more crushing revenge. He tells Norma that he never loved her. But most
destructive of all, he reveals to her that she has no fans left in the world;
that her career is a thing of the past, and that the studio has no intension of
ever resurrecting her bygone glory. Traumatized by this reality, Norma retreats
into madness of her own design. She retrieves a pistol from her vanity and menaces
to Joe. Ignoring her threats Joe is shot to death in the courtyard, stumbling
into the pool where his body was discovered at the start of our story.
We return to
the present, with Norma – completely mad - descending the stairs as newsreel
cameras capture the moment for posterity. Assuming that this is the first scene
to be shot for her new movie, Norma thanks DeMille, the police and
photographers for their ‘support’, concluding her macabre epitaph with a rather
sinister salutation to “all those
wonderful people in the dark” – the fans who have unceremoniously abandoned
her so many years before.
In these final
moments Sunset Boulevard achieves a
rather morbid celebrity of its own; a foreshadowing of the high cost of fame on
those whose fragile egos are incapable of sustaining the inevitable abandonment
of their own popularity. The moment is
at once gruesome yet heart-rending, forever altering our perception of
Hollywood as that idyllic paradise where nothing bad could ever happen to
either the bold or the beautiful.
In retrospect
the casting of William Holden and Gloria Swanson seems apropos. Yet neither was
a first choice for their parts. Wilder had initially thought of casting Mae
West and Marlon Brando in the leads. But both actors refused to partake in the
exercise; the former unable to consider herself playing a ‘has been’; the
latter fearful that his participation on the project would ruin his then
fledgling movie career. Swanson had been one of the legendary silent stars
whose career derailed with the disastrous debut of Queen Kelly (1929);
ironically directed by Von Stroheim. Holden too was down and out by 1950,
considered washed up before Sunset
Boulevard reinvigorated his fame. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of Sunset Boulevard is that although it
restored Holden to his rightful place among the stars, it did absolutely
nothing for Swanson who was nominated, but lost the Best Actress Oscar to Judy
Holliday for Born Yesterday.
Swanson’s
performance is undeniably the flashier of the two, and to be sure the actress
does indeed play it for all its worth with all the exaggerated grand gesturing
and mannerisms of a silent movie queen decidedly out of season in the era of
the talkies. Yet Swanson is far more subtly nuanced than critics of the day
gave her credit. She runs the gamut of emotions: from commanding diva to anxiety
ridden cougar, and finally, absolute psychopath, her mind as cluttered by
memory as it is eaten away with a maelstrom of sagging inner tumult.
Billy Wilder’s
best movies are glib affirmations of the fundamentally flawed male/female
relationship; the woman pretending to be a child in love with a soldier (The Major and the Minor); the seemingly
trustworthy man driven to self-destruction by a notorious mantrap (Double Indemnity) or the virtuous woman
passionately in love with a hopeless alcoholic (The Lost Weekend). In hindsight one can see the amalgam of these
worrisome liaisons fully fleshed out and carried to their extreme in the toxic rapport between Norma and Joe in Sunset Boulevard.
Wilder’s
commentary on men, women and the havoc their interplay of emotions and hormones
play on each other reveals a dire impasse that Wilder’s filmic protagonists
either ignore or seem grossly unwilling to acknowledge until it is too late.
This theme is regurgitated by Wilder throughout his career, culminating with
its most playful resolution at the end of Some
Like It Hot in which Jack Lemmon, in drag, reveals to his millionaire
boyfriend (Joe E. Brown) that he is also a man, resulting in the riotous
rebuttal: “Well…nobody’s perfect.” If
anything, Some Like It Hot’s last
few moments seem like a modest apology for Sunset
Boulevard’s grand guignol finale with Joe left for dead in his watery grave,
yet caught in a strange purgatory to forever retell the dirty little story of
his very short life.
At long last Paramount
Home Video debuts Sunset Boulevard
on Blu-ray. Honestly, it’s about time – especially since this year marks
Paramount’s 100th anniversary in film-making. But the studio has
always been rather lax where its catalogue is concerned. Indeed, they were one
of the first studios to sell off their rights to pre-1950 titles to TV, most
eventually becoming orphan wards of the Universal library. More recently
Paramount announced the selloff of its remaining history on home video to
Warner Bros. distribution; a move that may stifle future product reaching the
hi-def marketplace in a timely manner. After all, WB owns not only its own
library, but also MGM’s extensive canon, part of the David O. Selznick
catalogue and all of RKO’s holdings. Just what this means for the future of
Paramount titles on home video remains open for discussion. But I digress.
Paramount’s
1080p Blu-ray easily bests its 2008 Centennial DVD with a more subtly nuanced
gray scale that preserves John F. Seitz’s moody dim-lit cinematography. Sunset Boulevard is a problematic movie
to preserve. Most of its original nitrate is lost and its preservation master
made on the more stable acetate is gone too, leaving only a dupe negative to
work from. That could spell disaster, but in Sunset Boulevard’s case the results are more impressive than
anticipated and, in fact, quite good and very solid throughout. Fine detail pops. We can see for the first
time the ever so subtle distinctions in tonality that tended to blur into a
messy grayness on the DVD. There’s both
clarity and consistency to the image that preserves its grain structure very
well while ever so slightly improving the overall crispness without any obvious
digital sharpening. The audio gets more punchy too, particularly Franz Waxman’s
marvelous main title.
The extras are
mostly imports from the Centennial DVD; including a series of featurettes
produced by Laurent Bouzereau and featuring interview styled recollections from
A.C. Lyles, Nicholas Meyers, Ed Sikov, Andrew Sarris and Nancy Olson to name
but a handful. Compartmentalizing these comments into brief featurettes is a
disconcerting practice on home video these days. It’s done primarily because
the studios want content for practically nothing and featurettes have a
different pay scale for their participants than full blown documentaries. But
there’s a lot of overlap in the sound bytes that could have been avoided if a
more comprehensive piece had been prepared instead.
In addition,
we get Sikov’s academically dense but highly intellectual and thoroughly
fascinating audio commentary, an interactive ‘map’ that shows us where all the
real locations are, the outtake original opening of the film and the same tired
old featurette on Paramount’s output during the 1950s. The one new extra is “The
Paramount Don’t Want Me Blues” – an outtake sing-a-long from the party sequence
at Artie’s apartment. Ho-hum! Bottom line: this is Sunset Boulevard – a certified classic by any barometer one chooses
to measure cinema greatness. It belongs on everyone’s must see/must own list.
Get it today. Highly recommended!
FILM
RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)
5
VIDEO/AUDIO
4
EXTRAS
3
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