Life > February 6, 2003

By Hayley Sanders

Old Gold and Black Reviewer

As a Hollywood classic, as well as arguably the finest film from the late director Billy Wilder, whose death in the spring of 2002 sparked renewed interest in his work, the tragicomic Sunset Boulevard has haunted, inspired and chilled audiences and critics alike for the past 50 years.

At the time of its release in 1950, the film became a marvelous box-office success, and reignited the careers of the two key players in the film, Gloria Swanson and William Holden.

Swanson, in reality a former great star of the silent film era, plays the unforgettably eccentric Norma Desmond, a lavishly wealthy yet unfathomably lonely reclusive middle-aged woman who resides in a crumbling xanadu of a mansion, built in the Hollywood heyday of silent films in the roaring 1920’s.

While once considered an icon of glamour and fame, Desmond now desperately struggles to relive the glory days, and, in the tradition of Miss Havisham, centers her life around times long gone by. She cannot move on with her life, existing in a state almost completely detached from reality.

Desmond thoroughly believes, or wants to believe, that Paramount will call any day to inform her that she will be the star of their next project. She passes her days by lounging around her gothic mansion decked out in ritzy little dresses, haughtily puffing on a perfectly stylish cigarette.

She even throws a bridge game complete with iced champagne and invites three of her friends, played by Buster Keaton, Anna Q. Nilsson and H.B. Warner, whose careers similarly all became undone due to the introduction of sound in films. Thus, the parallels between the real Tinseltown and the movie version run deep.

Desmond surrounds herself with people from her past, and this inability to transcend the past leads to her ultimate destruction. Indeed, mentally she’s delightfully unhinged, which at times can be both amusing and profoundly, pathetically sad.

But this trait adds tension between reality, in which she experiences profound isolation and attempts suicide several times by slitting her wrists, and her constructed world of fantasy, where self-importance reigns supreme. The character has created these as a reaction to her crash from stardom 20 years ago that provides the great source of interest for the film.

The film wisely implies that extreme narcissism and extreme loneliness are two sides of the same coin and more closely related than one may care to think.

Indeed, many people who watch the film may at least partially identify with Desmond’s behavior, in that we all force ourselves to believe in various illusions to get through the day. Besides revolving around the nature of illusion, it also explores and asks the question of how people go about confronting their inner demons arisen from the past.

The other interesting dynamic of the film lies in the relationship between Desmond and the struggling and straight-up broke screenwriter Joe Gillis; she is his “keeper,” and he plays the role of her dashing “gallant.”

At the beginning of the film, Wilder is shown lying dead, floating in clear blue water of a swimming pool. Wilder uses a flashback for the entire film, yet this beginning scene resonates and stays with the viewer for the entire film. Shot from the bottom of the pool, this is one of the most clear and interesting openings in the film.

Gillis, while not of the most quality character, as the flashback reveals, is seen as the victim of an unforgiving system in Hollywood that overlooks real talent.

In fact, the film serves as a searing indictment of an unjust studio system, in which politics and power obviously takes precedence over valuing art and writing of real substance.

The witty dialogue in this classic also deserves recognition. When Joe and Norma first meet he exclaims in a famous line, “You’re Norma Desmond. You used to be in pictures. You used to be big.” She furiously replies back, “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.”

Joe cooly returns with, “I knew there was something wrong with them.” Such banter continues throughout the film, lightening its darker moments.

Even half a century later, films such as American Beauty and Lynch’s Twin Peaks show direct influence from this groundbreaking film, which American Film Insitute listed as number 10 in their Top 100 list. Even in its time, Boulevard managed to score 11 Academy Award nominations and three Oscars.

Ultimately, this bizarre and yet beautiful film reveals the complex situation that people find themselves in when questions about their identity and fundamental character haunt them.

When it premiered, Sunset Boulevard stood as a completely groundbreaking work, and still offers great insight into the completely mad, irrational, but also highly comical world to which desperately undefined people cling.

The film is now out on DVD, with extras such as audio commentary by author Ed Sikov, a behind the scenes look at the making of the film, and stills of production, the movie, and above all, the publicity which both the actors and their characters craved.