SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950)

Country: U.S.A.

Genre(s): Drama

Director: Billy Wilder

Cast: William Holden / Gloria Swanson / Nancy Olson

Plot:

Out of work writer Joe Gillis recounts his final days as the reluctant writing partner and companion of Norma Desmond, who was once one of Hollywood’s great beauties of the silent era.  With her stardom long behind her, Desmond is now a delusional recluse fixated upon the younger writer, whom she clings to as her last hope of recapturing her former glory.

What I Liked

Like any halfway decent noir film, “Sunset Boulevard” is narrated by a dead man.  We know Joe Gillis is dead about one minute in.  That’s not to say that the film is a pure representation of the noir subgenre; it transcends the limitations of categorization.  It has many of the stock characters, gimmicks, and themes of noir: the hard-luck cynic for a protagonist responsible the aforementioned narration, a grim murder, the Los Angeles backdrop, the obsessive use of shadow and sharp angles, and the snuffing out of all things naïve.  However, there are also strong elements of showbiz drama, psychological thriller, and cultural satire.  There is even the faint trace of the horror in the sense of decay and hopelessness that persists throughout its two hour length.  In one of the film’s many famous moments, faded movie star Norma Desmond describes herself as bigger than the movies (“I am big; it’s the pictures that got small.”). In similar fashion, “Sunset Boulevard” refuses the limited confines of simpler film-making.

Though Gillis is technically the film’s main character, it is Desmond who serves as the crux of the film’s intrigue.  In a masterstroke of casting, she is played with magnificence by Gloria Swanson, who, like the character herself, was a largely forgotten star from Hollywood’s silent era.  She lurks about her empty palace of a home with a purposeless grandiloquence that would be downright hilarious if it weren’t absolutely tragic.  Her every gesture and word is a performance for an audience that exists nowhere for her but in her own imagination.  The character is one part Charles Dickens’s Miss Havisham (who is referenced early in the film), one part Orson Welles’s Charles Foster Kane, and one part Swanson herself; she is as compelling to witness as all three put together.  Swanson is exactly as over-the-top as she needs to be while portraying a psychopath who knows of no other way to hide her shattered self-esteem than with pretension and egomania.  When watching her, one wonders where Desmond ends and Swanson begins, and vice versa; that’s what acting is supposed to be.

Incidentally, Swanson isn’t the only major figure of the silent cinema to show up.  Cecil B. DeMille and Buster Keaton actually play themselves while Erich von Stroheim is chilling as Max, Desmond’s former director and ex-husband, who has been reduced to a doting manservant.

What I Didn’t Like

Where the character of Desmond completely destroys and rebuilds the cliché evil dame of noir film, main character Joe Gillis (played by William Holden) is the noir cliché incarnate.  Granted, he does famously start our film as a corpse floating in face-down in a pool and that’s a pretty good jumping off point for any movie, but beyond that the guy is pretty much a bore.  Perhaps he was written so blank so that the audience can easily insert themselves into Gillis in order to properly experience Desmond in all her pathetic glory through his eyes.  Either way, as the dead man told his tale, I found myself impatient for the part where he goes for that final, bullet-riddled swim.

Most Memorable Scene

As the film was drawing to its close, I began thinking of several key moments that had the potential to stick with me the most and be recognized in this part of my entry.  Then came the closing minute, which not only features what is easily the most famous line of the film but also gives us the inevitable completion to Desmond’s psychological collapse.  She looks straight at us – that audience she and only she has been aware of all along – as horrifically mesmerizing as Medusa.  She leers at us, lures us, and scoffs at us in a matter of seconds and we’re reminded of an earlier line in the film, “We didn’t need dialogue.  We had faces!”  Then, stepping even closer until we have nothing to look at but her, she utters those final, unsettling words, “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.”  With that, we know now there is no escape from the madness; not for Desmond and not for ourselves.

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5