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William Holden falls under Gloria Swanson's spell in Billy Wilder's superb Hollywood satire Sunset Boulevard |
Director: Billy Wilder
Cast: William Holden (Joe Gillis), Gloria Swanson (Norma
Desmond), Erich von Stroheim (Max von Mayerling), Nancy Olson (Betty Schaefer),
Jack Webb (Artie Green), Fred Clark (Sheldrake), Robert Emmett O’Connor
(Jonesy), Lloyd Gough (Morino); as themselves:
Cecil B. DeMille, Hedda Hopper, Buster Keaton, Anna Q. Nilsson, HB Warner

The cops arrive to find Joe (William Holden) exactly like
that, while we hear Joe’s acidic commentary outlining exactly how this state of
affairs came about. Joe is a screenwriter in Hollywood (he’s in the second tier
of a second tier profession in the movies) who can’t get his latest script made
for love nor money. Dodging the debt collectors set on reclaiming his car, he pulls
into the drive of a mysterious house. It’s the home of Norma Desmond (Gloria
Swanson), a forgotten silent film star who now lives out her days in her
mansion, dreaming of her past glories and planning for a return to stardom that
will never come, tended to by her loyal butler Max (Erich von Stroheim). Joe is
roped in first to rewrite the (terrible) script she has been working on for her
comeback, and then to become her live-in lover. But can such a situation
survive Hollywood’s cold heart and Joe’s own self-loathing and desires to
restart his screenwriting career in partnership with ambitious young studio
script reader Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson)?
Billy Wilder’s poison-pen love letter to Hollywood skewers
the coldness at its heart. It does this with a triumphant mix of the grotesque
and the heartfelt, the surreal and the coldly realistic, an insider’s guide to
the world behind the magic of film-making and a story about those shut out of
that very world. Hollywood is a shallow, bitter town where you’re either top of
the bill or no-one at all. Would people from any other profession write such a
bitter denunciation of their job that is also laced with affection and love?
Maybe it has something to do with this being a unique profession which you have
to love to enter, but once there you work with people who see it as a business.
The smell of desperation is there from the start, with Joe
peddling his dreadful sounding baseball movie The Base Is Loaded to a polite but uninterested producer. Dropping
a host of names and accepting any number of changes to the story (including changing
it into an all-female sporting musical), Joe might once have had a talent but,
as he says, “that was last year, this year I need money”. William Holden was a late choice for Joe, but
he is perfect in the part, capturing the air of the self-loathing cynic, a man
bright enough to understand he’s shallow, a hack and desperate for any touch of
the fame and fortune Hollywood can bring him.
Just like Pip, Joe is a young man who feels he is entitled
to a life he scarcely seems to be qualified for. No wonder he settles into a
life as Norma Desmond’s gigolo – it may well damage his sense of masculine
pride to be an emasculated house-boy, but my God the suits are nice. And what
talent does Joe even really have anyway? The script he is peddling barely seems
to have any merit at all, and his extensive polish of Norma’s vehicle is still
so alarmingly bad it never even gets the slightest consideration from Cecil B.
DeMille. But Joe can’t let it go because he’s like a moth drawn towards those
bright Hollywood lights.
And those bright Hollywood lights have consumed forever
Norma Desmond. Wilder pulled Gloria Swanson out of an enforced semi-retirement
to play the silent screen siren, whose career her own so closely parallels.
It’s easy to remember Norma as a sort of Psycho-ish
grotesque, a demented Miss Havisham living in her own crazy patchwork world of
memory and delusion. Swanson certainly channels brilliantly the expression and
body language of silent cinema into the part, and Desmond’s use of the sort of
exaggerated gestures from that era in everyday life hammers home how her life
hasn’t moved on from her glory days.
But that would be to overlook the immense skill in Swanson’s
performance. Norma may be sad, desperate, probably more than a little unhinged
– a larger than life Miss Havisham to whom the “the pictures got small”, but
she’s also a real person. Swanson makes it clear she genuinely loves Joe, she’s
generous when she wants to be, devoted in her own way and immensely fragile.
She takes a delighted pleasure in entertaining – a sequence of her reliving her
glory days for Joe’s amusement (he couldn’t give a toss, making it all the more
painful), capped with a charmingly delightful Chaplin impersonation shows a
Norma who loves entertaining, loves putting a smile on people’s faces. Sure
she’s obsessed with fame and desperate to reclaim it, but she’s also deep-down
a real person.
But then that’s part also of Wilder’s romantic look at
cinema. He can totally understand the bitter, destructive “business” part of
it, but he still loves the show. His insiderish film is full of loving tributes
to old Hollywood. Norma sits and watches real film footage of the real Gloria
Swanson. The visit to Paramount Studios delights not only with its “backstage
pass” feel, but also in the excitement with which the ageing extras and stage
hands greet Norma. Norma’s weekly card games are staffed with genuine silent
movie stars like Buster Keaton. Cecil B DeMille even pops up as himself (on the
set of his film Samson and Delilah),
kindly trying to guide Norma out of the studio even as he lacks the guts to
tell her that her dream of a comeback is stillborn.
So how can you not feel sorry for Norma, who is clearly
locked up in her haunted house on the outskirts of town, a million miles from
reality, surrounded by endless reminders of her past glories. It’s so all-encompassing
it traps Joe as well – at one point Wilder shows him trying to storm out, only
for his pocket watch to literally get caught on the door. This place of dreams
is staffed by the butler Max, a beautifully judged performance of Germanic
chill mixed with doe-eyed devotion from Erich von Stroheim, also playing a dark
version of himself as Norma’s pioneering former director (and husband) now
reduced to protective butler. The entire house is a mausoleum without any escape.
The only character who seems truly positive is Nancy Olson’s
wonderfully sweet Betty Schaefer, passionate about crafting a career for
herself in the cinema. But even she is ruthlessly ambitious, a woman quite
happy to consider jilting her fiancĂ©e for Joe’s attentions and has her eye on
the price of success. She may have the talent, but she’s also got the sharpness.
Billy Wilder’s film brilliantly explores all these divides
and contradictions in Hollywood and its history. Because what is Hollywood but
a town that pays lip service to the past, but only has eyes for the future? Particularly
with women. Female stars have a short shelf life and then they are dispatched.
Poor Norma is still glamourous, still clearly has star quality – but as far as
Hollywood is concerned she may as well be a million years old. No wonder Joe,
used to these attitudes, is so ashamed to be kept by her – a woman he
constantly refers to as a middle-aged friend.
The dialogue, as you would expect from Brackett and Wilder,
is superb from top to bottom with zingers and well-constructed dialogue
exchanges so well placed they will survive for as long as there are movies. The
film is beautifully shot by John F Seitz – part gothic horror, part dark
romance, part neo-realist. Its pacing is perfect, its four act construction
perfectly put together. All four of the principals (all Oscar nominated, none
winning) are pitch perfect, sketching out characters that feel real and mixed
with tragedy and loss as much as they are larger-than-life otherworldliness.
It’s the mixture of the freak show and the heart, in the
massive Havishamesque estate, that marks this out as Hollywood does Dickens.
The astute understanding of central characters, with enough depth to understand
their shallowness, the grotesques that revolve around them but still have their
humanity, it’s all there. Wilder mixes it with his own Hollywood emotions and
his dry wit and cynicism to create a damn near perfect movie.
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