...nothing in the last half century has equaled the sarcasm this one provokes about Hollywood eating its own.
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(Feng and Puccio shared duties in writing the primary review. Feng wrote the technical summaries, and Puccio wrote the Entertainment Value paragraph.)
"All right, Mr. DeMille. I´m ready for my close-up."
"Sunset Boulevard" According to Yunda Eddie Feng:
Sunset Boulevard is one of the most well-known streets in the world. There´s a certain glamour associated with a celebrated name, but as the street´s name implies, there´s a world-weariness associated with the location. No wonder Billy Wilder titled his withering exposé of the Hollywood system "Sunset Boulevard"--what more could be sadder or scarier than an avenue of broken dreams? The film observes pitiful characters heading towards their dooms. However, the movie is the kind of glorious achievement desired by many a filmmaker.
"Sunset Boulevard" begins with a dead man narrating his own story from beyond the grave. Joe Gillis (William Holden), a reporter-turned-screenwriter from Dayton, Ohio, has had some dry spells and problems with creditors. He accidentally stumbles upon a decaying mansion inhabited by Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), a movie star during the silent film era, and her butler/chauffeur (Erich von Stroheim, director of the legendarily lengthy "Greed"). Neither one being in demand, Gillis and Desmond begin to have a relationship based on deception and delusion--of the "self" varieties. Given the morbid beginning and the grimly humorous tone of the film, you can safely anticipate a downward spiral.
As a wise person once said, the rewards are not found at the end of the journey but during the journey itself. Watching "Sunset Boulevard" means reveling in the over-the-top Gloria Swanson performance, being frightened by the eerie presence of Erich von Stroheim (a once-famous director who had fallen on hard times by the time the movie was made), falling in love with the moral and optimistic Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson), and admiring the calm anchoring of William Holden´s subtle central performance. The performances are only a part of the story. The film is gothic in the truest sense of the word. In fact, there´s a touch of guignol in every shot, what with Desmond´s weird cigarette holder, the contrast between the opulence of satin and the ugliness of peeling paint, a luxurious Issota-Fraschini mounted on cinder blocks, and many other items with singular existences. "Sunset Boulevard" has moments of great humor, but we laugh with sadness in our hearts, knowing that all that glitters is not gold.
I´m surprised that a story so critical of the way Hollywood uses and then discards people could have been made in 1950. The studio system was alive and well during that period of time, and a glossy, cheery lifestyle image was sold to the public as the "reality" of Hollywood. Yet, the Paramount bosses were brave enough to greenlight Billy Wilder´s sophisticated vision and deconstruction of movie glamour, and they gave the world one of the all-time greats.
My esteemed colleague John J. Puccio, having taught high school film classes and having seen many more movies than I have, has more interesting thoughts than I do concerning "Sunset Boulevard". I yield the floor to him for the rest of the primary review.
"Sunset Boulevard" According to John J. Puccio:
The first time I saw "Sunset Boulevard," about a decade after it was initially released, I was in my mid-teens, and the film meant little to me in terms of any thematic content. Oh, I liked it; it was creepy and all with its big, old, dark mansion, its nutty old lady, and its sinister, old butler-chauffeur. But, I had no idea who Gloria Swanson was, no idea that she used to be as big a star in silent films as the character she portrayed. I had no idea who Erich von Stroheim was, no idea that he used to be as big a director as Swanson was a star or that he had actually directed Ms. Swanson in the early days. I had no idea who William Holden was, except that he was a handsome leading man. I had no idea who Cecil B. DeMille was, even though I had by then seen and enjoyed "Samson and Delilah," "The Greatest Show on Earth," and "The Ten Commandments." I had no idea who Billy Wilder was, even though I had seen "Some Like It Hot" a year or two before and put it at the top of my comedy favorites. And I had no idea "Sunset Boulevard" was supposed to be an exercise in black humor or that the relationship between the Holden and Swanson characters was supposed to be a match of convenience or that there were so many Hollywood in-jokes and allusions strewn about. I just thought that the movie was weird and a little bit spooky.
You can tell that, as a teen, while I loved movies, I was not much for the details of who made what, nor did I have much of a sense of film history other than having watched a whole lot of things today considered "classics." So, the nuances of "Sunset Boulevard" took a while to grow on me. By the time I was in college and taking my first film classes, I saw the movie again with a heightened admiration. Today, it´s one of my all-time favorite films, regardless of genre--an easy 10/10.
In any case, those first impressions of "Sunset Boulevard" are what stand out in my memory, probably more so than what I´ve learned about it since. I loved the struggling writer, Joe Gillis (Holden), the all-American boy-next-door, seemingly naive and innocent, being debased by his own laziness and greed. I loved the idea of the has-been movie actress, Norma Desmond (Swanson), a totally bonkers, suicidal egotist, living out her dying fantasies in a decaying Hollywood palace. "Poor devil," says Joe, "still waving proudly to a parade that had long since passed her by." I loved the exchange between Gillis and Desmond when they first meet: "Wait a minute. Haven´t I seen you before? I know your face. You´re Norma Desmond. Used to be in silent pictures. Used to be big." Desmond replies: "I AM big. It´s the pictures that got small." I loved the mansion´s broken-down tennis court and its crumbling swimming pool. I loved the ominous figure of Max Von Mayerling (von Stroheim), the butler, playing J.S. Bach´s "Toccata and Fugue in D minor" on the living-room organ (an instrument that plays by itself, too, when the wind blows through the pipes) and the weird scenes involving the burial of a dead chimp. I loved Ms. Desmond´s magnificent, ancient touring car, an Issota-Fraschini, one of the most expensive automobiles ever built. I loved Franz Waxman´s eerie background music. I knew it was a special film; I just didn´t know how special.
I had no idea at the time how deeply "Sunset Boulevard" got behind the scenes of the Hollywood movie trade, how penetrating and substantial its insights were into an industry that exploited and corrupted so many of the people whom it employed, just as it used and threw away Norma Desmond and Joe Gillis. I didn´t understand how the rotting mansion symbolized the corruption of the movie business itself. I didn´t know what "yes-men" were all about; what the Macombo or Romanoffs represented; what history lay behind Schwab´s Drugstore; who silent stars Buster Keaton or H.B. Warner or Anna Q. Nilsson were, Gillis´s over-the-hill "waxworks," or who Hedda Hopper was, for that matter; or where Sunset Boulevard was located. Heck, I didn´t even catch what a paid "companion" meant (a kept man, a gigolo).
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[release]10660[/release]