Billy Wilder’s film starring Gloria Swanson as a reclusive former silent movie star, and William Holden as a young wannabe writer who becomes her kept man, more than ever looks not merely like tinseltown satire or LA noir, but a ghost story. It’s the ultimate film about how the screenwriter is always the loser and the chump. You can tell that Norma Desmond (Swanson) is washed up because she has actually written a screenplay – which is, however, more than Joe (Holden) ever achieves in the course of this film.
Sunset Boulevard’s own script, co-written by Wilder with Charles Brackett and DM Marshman Jr, is of course superb. And after 75 years, we can appreciate the movie’s sober judgment about the dangers of cinephilia and Hollywood ancestor worship. The street name itself, with its dying fall, is an occult omen of the eerie and macabre things that happen here. David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive had the same chill. The street name is about the final ending, and this is one of the very few films of any sort with a really satisfying ending: the way in which the delusional old celebrity, her eyes pinwheeling, is finally induced to come placidly down the stairs to surrender to the authorities. She grimaces and gurns directly into the lens at the very last, rather like Anthony Perkins in Psycho – a film that incidentally was very much influenced by this one.
Holden, with a rumpled slouch, plays Joe Gillis, a former copy boy on the Dayton Evening Post in his Ohio home town, who has come to Los Angeles to make it in pictures, but none of his scripts are selling any more. Chased by repo men who want his car back, he blows a tyre (an impressive stunt) and pulls in desperately to a creepy old house on Sunset belonging to Norma, who thinks he is the vet undertaker who is going to bury her deceased chimp. A strange musical wailing sound is revealed to be not part of the soundtrack but the wind whistling in the pipes of an organ in one corner of Norma’s dusty, ornate parlour, a clever “diegetic” gag.
After clearing up the confusion, and having discovered his profession, Miss Desmond thinks that this smart-alec young fellow could be just the man to polish up her epic handwritten script for a film about Salome, to star herself, and soon the penniless Joe is staying at her house, with clothes and gold cigarette cases and watches bought for him by her as she plots her return (she detests the word “comeback”). But Joe finds himself working on another woman’s script: that of production assistant Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson) who has a genuinely good idea. They are falling for each other … to Norma’s very considerable chagrin.
Twenty-six years later, in fact, Swanson would marry her final husband in real life: a ghostwriter and former journalist. Her hilarious performance as Norma is crazed, intense but never entirely absurd, and also very sensual and witty. The film is quite clear that she and Joe are having sex, and that the experience is a sentimental education for Joe, who flourishes and matures in spite of himself under Norma’s tutelage.
Swanson, a veteran of the silent era, brilliantly suggests a performer who has learned the extravagant mannerisms of early cinema at an impressionable age and can never unlearn them; the kabuki mask of silent movies has eaten into Norma’s face. Swanson executes the film’s many showstopper lines with absolute aplomb (“I am big; it’s the pictures that got small”; “We didn’t need dialogue, we had faces!”) and also does a very good impression of Charlie Chaplin.
Sunset Boulevard is a self-referential film about Hollywood, with as-themselves cameos for Cecil B DeMille, Buster Keaton and gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. And this is the heart of its terrible warning. Of course movie professionals should be aware of and inspired by Hollywood’s glorious past – but they must not, like Joe with Norma, be held captive by it. The style and mannerisms of silent cinema were not that way because people wanted them to be quaint and picturesque. Silent movies were thrillingly innovative and new, a staggering leap forward from vaudeville and nickelodeon. Movies were and are pure innovation.
Finally, Norma finds herself at Paramount studios under the impression that DeMille actually wants to make this bizarre script of hers, where she irritably brushes away a microphone that strays too close to her face – that irritating talkie gadget. Perhaps the unspoken tragedy of Sunset Boulevard is that no one after this film had the intelligence to use Swanson’s undimmed style and comic flair. She really had transitioned to the talkies but only featured in three more films afterwards. This was her masterpiece.
