This is a version of a review airing on ABC Radio Ballarat and South West Victoria on July 24, 2020.
This is part of a series of articles reviewing the American Film Institute's Top 100 Films, as unveiled in 2007. Why am I doing this? Because the damned cinemas are closed and I have to review something.
(PG) ★★★★★
Director: Billy Wilder.
Cast: William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim, Nancy Olson, Jack Webb, Cecil B DeMille, Fred Clark, Lloyd Gough.
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| "And these are the many reasons why I should play Superman." |
It's a rare film that can claim not only one of the greatest opening scenes of all time, but also one of the best closers. Sunset Boulevard is that film.
Starting with the narrator dead in a swimming pool and ending with a ghoulish tableau surrounding a crazed woman hallucinating she's on a movie set, Sunset Boulevard is a deserving entry on the AFI list as one of the greatest movies of all time. But it also happens to be one of the best swipes at Hollywood to come out of Hollywood, a wonderfully absurd comedy, and one of the best noir films ever.
It's certainly not typical for a noir to have the victim walking us through the crime (instead of, say, a gumshoe detective), but it's a trick director Billy Wilder pulled years earlier on the also-awesome Double Indemnity. In fact, Otto Penzler, in his 101 Greatest Films Of Mystery & Suspense, argues that Double Indemnity (1944) and Sunset Boulevard (1950) bookend a golden age of noir.
Sunset Boulevard mixes its hard-boiled mystery with a ferocious dig at Hollywood. Penzler argued that Sunset Boulevard not only closed the door on an era of noir, but it also opened the door on a host of anti-Hollywood films willing to bite the hand that fed them, such as In A Lonely Place, The Big Knife, A Star Is Born, The Bad & The Beautiful, and The Barefoot Contessa. Mind you, Sunset Boulevard can't take all the credit - it was edged out at the 1950 Oscars in most categories by a little film called All About Eve, which also took a wild swing at the star-making machine, albeit in theatre as opposed to cinema, but it could easily have been set in Hollywood.
But whether it was beginning or ending trends, Sunset Boulevard ultimately succeeds on the strength of its performances, its script and its direction. The obvious stand-out in these categories is Gloria Swanson as the screw-loose starlet of a bygone era. The character of Norma Desmond cut too close to the bone for a lot of actresses - Mae West, Greta Garbo, Pola Negri, and Mary Pickford all turned down Wilder down before he approached Swanson.
Swanson herself almost turned it down. Director George Cukor talked her into auditioning for the part after she bristled at having to do a screen test. Cukor knew it was a great role. "If they ask you to do 10 screen tests, do 10 screen tests, or I will personally shoot you," he reportedly told Swanson.
It would be the role that haunted Swanson, but that she is ultimately remembered for, as detailed in this amazing interview from 2003 with her daughter. She was less Norma-like than some of Wilder's other candidates. Unlike Norma, Swanson had made films in the sound era, but retired in 1941 to focus on other pursuits, such as theatre, TV, radio, and clothes designing. But Sunset Boulevard was still close enough to her reality - a silent film Norma screens for Joe Gillis (Holden) is Swanson's own Queen Kelly, which was directed by Erich von Stroheim, who plays Norma's man-servant Max, and it was widely known that Swanson as much a diva as a box-office drawcard, much like Norma.
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It's a brave performance, but also a great one. Swanson is hamming it up, indulging in the kind of large expressions and gestures that were de rigueur in silent film acting. But she brings that style of acting into the real world - not easy to do - and somehow still makes Norma a realistic and occasionally fragile person.
Her relationship with Joe is beautifully written. Through a slow but steady stream of emotional and financial blackmail, she grooms him to be first her writer, then her gopher, and then her lover. Joe believes he's in control, right up to the point where he's obviously not, and Holden gives Joe a great mix of masculinity and vulnerability. It's written so we can see where it's going (the intro does kind of give it away), and we're not surprised by where it ends up, no matter how ludicrous. Having a monkey funeral early in proceedings probably helps - nothing seems ludicrous after that. But ludicrous or not, it's enthralling all the way as Holden crawls deeper and deeper into a trap he can't get himself out of.
Wilder, Charles Brackett, and D. M. Marshman Jr's script really is something special, aided by the wonderful performances. The way they turn Norma from caricature to real person and finally into a monster is magnificent. They lean heavily on the narration early, often unnecessarily, but the dialogue is so good we don't care. "He’d just look at your heels and he’d know the score". "He was a smart producer, with a set of ulcers to prove it". Great stuff. But the best is yet to come.
GILLIS
I know your face. You're Norma Desmond.
You used to be in pictures. You used to be big.
NORMA
I am big. It's the pictures that got small.
That's gold right there.
Wilder made so many great films. Seven are in the National Film Registry, four are on the AFI list, and he was nominated for an astounding 21 Oscars - 13 as screenwriter, eight as director. Sunset Boulevard is his best as a director. It's bolder than anything else he did, thanks to its willingness to point out the way Hollywood built and destroyed careers on a whim, the way it undervalued writers, and the way it created monsters. In many ways, it's the anti-Singin' In The Rain, which got in its gentle digs at Tinsel Town but loved it all the same. Sunset Boulevard offers no such adoration amid its venomous barbs.
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The film's opening - the result of a back-up choice thanks to bad test screenings for the original opening - is one of the great attention-grabbers of all time, but it's the closer that is the cherry on top of an incredible preceding 105 minutes. Mimicking the artifice of a silent film or an ancient tableau painted on a palace wall, a wide-eyed Norma slides through a sea of cops and reporters, thinking she has finally returned to a film set, when in fact she is about to be arrested and thrown in jail for murder. It's a remarkable moment that caps off a remarkable film.
Perhaps the biggest compliment regarding Sunset Boulevard came from Hollywood itself. When Oscar night rolled around, the voters only rewarded the film in three of its 11 nominated categories. It was all a little too close to home for them, it seemed. MGM head Louis B Mayer certainly thought Wilder's film was concerningly acerbic. "You have disgraced the industry that made and fed you!" Mayer told Wilder. "You should be tarred and feathered and run out of Hollywood!"
Wilder's response? "Go fuck yourself."
And that pretty much sums up Sunset Boulevard's thoughts on Hollywood, and a large part of why the film is still celebrated today.
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