Sunset Boulevard Review – Hollywood has never looked more glorious or more tragic | film

forEli Wilder’s film, starring Gloria Swanson as a reclusive former silent film star, and William Holden as a young wannabe writer who becomes her saved man, feels more than ever just like a satire of Tinseltown or L.A. noir, but a ghost story. It’s the ultimate movie about how the screenwriter is always the loser and the fool. You can tell Norma Desmond (Swanson) has failed because she actually wrote a screenplay – which is more than Joe (Holden) ever achieved in the context of this film.

The screenplay for Sunset Boulevard, which Wilder co-wrote with Charles Brackett and D.M. Marshman Jr, is of course fantastic. 75 years later, we can appreciate the film’s sober judgment on the dangers of cinephilia and ancestor worship in Hollywood. The name of the street itself, with its dying fall, is a mysterious harbinger of the frightening and horrific things that happen here. David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive was just as cold. The Name of the Street is all about the final ending, and this is one of the very few films of any genre with a truly satisfying ending: the way in which the delusional, delusional celebrity is finally induced, her eyes wide-eyed, to quietly walk down the stairs to surrender to the authorities. She grimaces and heads straight for the lens at the end, just like Anthony Perkins in Psycho – a movie, by the way, that was heavily influenced by this one.

Holden, with a wrinkled slouch, plays Joe Gillis, a former writer for the Dayton Evening Post in his home state of Ohio, who came to Los Angeles to make pictures, but none of his scripts sell anymore. After being chased by repo men who want his car back, he blows a tire (an impressive stunt) and is driven desperately to a creepy old house in Sunset owned by Norma, who believes he is a veterinarian undertaker who will bury the deceased chimpanzee. It is revealed that the strange musical wailing sound is not part of the soundtrack, but rather the wind whistling through the organ pipes in one corner of Norma’s ornate and dusty lounge, a clever “digitic” gag.

Clearing up the confusion, and discovering his vocation, Miss Desmond believes that this clever young man could be just the man to revise her epic handwritten script for a film about Salome, to star herself, and soon the penniless Joe is taking up residence in her house, with the clothes and the gold cigarette boxes and the watches she has bought for him as she plans to come back (she hates the word “return”). But Joe finds himself working on another woman’s script: that of production assistant Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson), who has a really good idea. They fall in love with each other…much to Norma’s great dismay.

In fact, twenty-six years later, Swanson married her last husband in real life: a ghost writer and former journalist. Her hilarious performance as Norma is crazy, intense but not completely ridiculous, and very sensual and intelligent. The film makes it quite clear that she and Joe have sex, and that the experience serves as an emotional education for Joe, who thrives and matures in spite of himself under Norma’s tutelage.

Swanson, a veteran of the silent era, brilliantly suggests an artist who learned the extravagant mannerisms of early cinema at a sensitive age and could never shake them; Norma’s face was eaten away by a silent movie kabuki mask. Swanson executes many of the film’s startling lines with absolute confidence (“I’m big; it’s the pictures that got small”; “We didn’t need dialogue, we had faces!”) and also does a very good Charlie Chaplin impression.

Sunset Boulevard is a self-referential film about Hollywood, with appearances by Cecil B. DeMille, Buster Keaton, and gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. This is the essence of the dire warning. There is no doubt that film professionals should be aware of and inspired by Hollywood’s glorious past – but they should not fall into its captivity, as happened with Joe and Norma. The style and mannerisms of silent cinema weren’t that way because people wanted it to be weird and wonderful. Silent films were excitingly innovative and new, a stunning leap forward from vaudeville and nickelodeon. Movies were and still are pure innovation.

Finally, Norma finds herself at Paramount Studios under the impression that DeMille actually wants to write this bizarre script for her, as she angrily shoos away the microphone that gets too close to her face—that annoying talking device. Perhaps the unspoken tragedy of Sunset Boulevard is that no one after this film had the wit to use Swanson’s unflattering style and comedic flair. She did move on to talkies but only appeared in three more films after that. This was her masterpiece.