Sunset Boulevard
Billy Wilder
Initial release: August 10, 1950 (USA)
As we shuffle into the theaters to watch the latest Marvel blockbuster, as we shuffle through Netflix to find something to zone out to while we scroll on our phones, it can be easy to forget that film as a medium is over a hundred years old. People had been making movies for audiences of millions for forty years before "talkies" came along. Silent-era Hollywood had its own stars, its own rules, its own glamor. All that changed in 1930, as actors started speaking and Hollywood started cracking down on what filmmakers could get away with, and not everyone weathered the transition very well.
The year is 1948. Joe Gillis is a struggling screenwriter trying to make a few bucks so his car doesn't get repossessed. After escaping the repo men by driving down a lonely stretch of Sunset Boulevard, out where the house numbers are in the quintuple digits, he hides his car in the ramshackle garage of a seemingly abandoned mansion. The mansion is a monument to faded glory, the kind of Roaring Twenties monstrosity only a world-famous silent movie star could build. He soon discovers that despite its dilapidated state, the house is occupied by just such a star: Norma Desmond, formerly one of Hollywood's brightest stars, but now a recluse, forever trapped in her own glory days and unable to come to grips with the fact that the world has moved on. Her only companion is Max the butler, a creepy, stoic thumb of a man utterly devoted to Norma and unwilling to shatter her delusions.
Norma hires Joe to edit her movie script, a sprawling, melodramatic monstrosity that serves little purpose other than to be a hideously overwrought vanity project for Norma, who believes it to be her ticket back into the spotlight. Joe figures he can use this to his advantage, but little by little, Norma traps Joe, showering the younger screenwriter in gifts while studiously avoiding paying him in actual cash. Joe is torn between wanting a way out (and away from Norma's advances and manipulation) and being comfortable in the gilded cage he's been put in.
While Sunset Boulevard is billed as a film noir, and indeed that's what Billy Wilder was known for making, there's a darkly comedic streak a mile wide. Norma is played by Gloria Swanson, herself a one-time beloved silent screen goddess who likewise never fully made the switch to talkies, but, unlike Norma, found fulfillment in other pursuits; Sunset Boulevard was her big return to Hollywood, and she proves herself just as excellent an actress who talks as one who doesn't. We get some incredible moments like Norma's Charlie Chaplin impression, or how about just about anything to do with her dead pet chimp? Norma clings to Joe in ways both funny and disturbing, a nightmarish yandere (or perhaps grandere?) whose house is practically a museum dedicated to her glory days. Joe is an opportunistic leech who realizes too late that his assumptions about who was playing who were completely wrong. None of it ends well for anyone.
If Sunset Boulevard is anything, it's an indictment of Hollywood and the studio system. Norma is more than just a has-been movie star: she is unquestionably a product of Hollywood, of the Fame Monster, that unending hunger to always have eyes on you. Norma infamously lays it all out at the film's end, speaking to an audience that isn't there: "This is my life! It always will be! Nothing else! Just us, and the cameras, and those wonderful people out there in the dark!" No wonder MGM's notorious bully of a founder, Louis B. Mayer, hated it. On top of that, the film industry, once mighty, is shown as now resting on shaky ground, as communist witch hunts and the rise of TV threaten Hollywood hegemony. Joe is broke; the producer he tries to sell a script to openly admits that he once rejected Gone With The Wind ("Who wants to see a Civil War picture?" he asks) and a friend of his is trying to shoot a western in Arizona that's going disastrously. The only recognition Norma gets throughout the film is from the old Hollywood elite, who all still remember Norma as a symbol of their own glory days, but are now reduced to bit parts and extras. Even Cecil B. DeMille is making the same old Bible stuff he's made since the silent era. (His 1956 remake of his silent classic, The Ten Commandments, may be his magnum opus, but let's be real here, DeMille only ever made one kind of film.)
While "New Hollywood" was still a good fifteen or sixteen years away, Sunset Boulevard makes it clear that the wheels are coming off on Old Hollywood. The glitter of the Golden Age turned out to be only so much gilding, and the studio system is crumbling around everyone's ears. And much like Norma's inability to get with the times, it had only itself to blame.
-june❤