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Ask someone to name a great example of film noir, and automatic references to Sunset Blvd. should tumble out. Billy Wilder's 1950 expose about the darker side of Hollywood stands at the top of the film noir rankings on the Internet Movie Database, ahead of Reed's The Third Man (1949), Welles' Touch of Evil (1958), and Wilder's own Double Indemnity (1944). With Wilder now 95 years old can we hold any hope that Paramount will record some director commentary to include on a special edition DVD of Sunset Blvd.? The old director should have some great stories—his film outraged many of the Hollywood establishment when it was released. Louis B. Mayer blurted out that "This Wilder should be horsewhipped!" No finer film about the inner workings of Hollywood has ever been made.
The last major Hollywood feature to be filmed on a nitrate negative, it is now available on DVD. I was lucky enough to see it on the big screen recently for the first time, and many scenes continue to haunt long afterwards while I've already largely forgotten the banal Spy Game (2001) that I've seen more recently.
Why didn't Gloria Swanson receive a unanimous declaration for Best Actress for her portrayal of former silent screen goddess Norma Desmond? Perhaps the Academy thought Swanson merely played herself. She certainly plays the ultimate vamp to the hilt and convinces when she defiantly declares: "I am big. It's the pictures that got small." In hindsight, it's fortunate that Mae West didn't accept the part—it was offered to her first when Wilder originally conceived Sunset Blvd. as a comedy.
Starting with a traditional film noir narrative voice-over along a very unglamorous Sunset Blvd. a young man floats lifelessly in a Hollywood star's swimming pool before flashing back to get the full details—definitely not a "feel good" movie. Later that same swimming pool will lie empty and trash ridden, inhabited by rats to reinforce Wilder's theme that not all is well within the underbelly of Hollywood.
Young hack writer Joe Gillis (William Holden) adequately carries the plot forward, leading us to a gauche mansion on Sunset Blvd. that appears untouched since the 1920s—the grounds aren't kept and a vintage automobile with 1932 plates rests on blocks in the garage. Gillis describes the place as something out of Dickens' Great Expectations, and he is just about to meet another "Miss Havisham," surrounded by past memories.
Mistaking Gillis for a funeral director, called to the house to service her dead monkey, former silent screen goddess Norma Desmond discovers that Gillis is a writer and offers him a position he can't refuse—a live-in editing job on her screenplay Salome, starring herself in a comeback role to satisfy the "millions of people" she believes have never forgiven her for deserting the screen. Of course Desmond plans to have Cecil B. De Mille direct it—they've made a lot of pictures together. She bemoans the fate of "modern" Hollywood and its obsession with talking pictures and its abandonment of silents when there was "real" acting and "real" faces:
"They're dead, they're finished! There was a time in this business when they had the eyes of the whole wide world. But that wasn't good enough for them. Oh, no. They had to have the ears of the world, too. So they opened their big mouths, and out came talk. Talk! Talk!"
Wilder actually does cast De Mille in a significant cameo as himself. There are other "inside" Hollywood references all through the film, comparable in more recent times with Altman's The Player. Wilder pays homage to the silent screen with real life cameos by stars Buster Keaton, Anna Q. Nilsson and H.B. Warner (Desmond's bridge partners who Gillis calls "the waxworks"'). When Desmond visits Paramount Studios to call on Cecil B. De Mille, the legendary director is actually filming Samson and Delilah, and De Mille calls her by the actual pet name he had for Gloria Swanson—"Young Fella."
The most poignant and subtle references revolve around Erich von Stroheim, who plays Desmond's butler. In real life he was an early great film director, whose own career took a downturn with the advent of talking pictures, so there is added meaning when his character recalls, "There were three young directors who showed promise in those days, D.W. Griffith, Cecil B. De Mille and Max von Mayerling." In fact, the silent movie screened in the old mansion is Queen Kelly, directed by von Stroheim in 1929 and starring Gloria Swanson.
Following that film within a film screening, where it's become apparent that Gillis has become ensnared into one hellish trap, Swanson makes another reference to a real Hollywood legend:
Still wonderful, isn't it? And no dialogue. We didn't need dialogue. We had faces. There just aren't any faces like that anymore. Maybe one. Garbo. Oh, those idiot producers! Those imbeciles! Haven't they got any eyes? Have they forgotten what a star looks like?
Director Wilder hasn't forgotten. His camera moves flawlessly through the dark landscape, capturing the thin veneer that Hollywood is based on. You can see the longing for the old days light up von Stroheim's eyes as he describes his old office on the Paramount lot by day, and feel the dark foreboding along those backlot facades being constructed late at night. Seen through Holden's eyes, the camera shines brightest on Swanson and her faithful silent screen partner von Stroheim—a banal side story of a romance with another woman in Gillis' own age bracket flops lifelessly.
Charles Burnett's Academy Award winning screenplay definitely knows the territory and follows Joe Gillis' ill fated journey into Hollywood's false dreams, delivering some of the most memorable lines in film history. Before the final camera blur, Swanson dramatically descends the staircase to make her final and most unforgettable declaration:
�There's nothing else. Just us, and the cameras, and those wonderful people out there in the dark. All right, Mr. De Mille, I'm ready for my closeup.''
Wilder certainly gives an intimate portrait of Hollywood with all its warts and imperfections. Swanson, surrounded with false celluloid images from yesteryear and imprisoned within her gaudy cocoon, creates a sobering view of the movie star lifestyle. It ain't all glamor and glory!
Many have dreams of movie glory. I've known a few people who not only dreamed of Hollywood, but re-located there much like Gillis does to seek a career that could end up no more satisfying than Norma Desmond's at best. No one has communicated these bleak thoughts more eloquently than Billy Wilder in Sunset Blvd. although hippie poet Richard Brautigan (who eventually committed suicide) echoes similar themes:
January 26, 1967
at 3:15 in the afternoon
Sitting here in Los Angeles
parked on a rundown residential
back street,
staring up at the word
HOLLYWOOD
written on some lonely mountains,
I'm listening very carefully
to rock and roll radio
(Lovin' Spoonful)
(Jefferson Airplane)
while people are slowly
putting out their garbage cans.
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