A dead body of Joe Gillis, a struggling screenwriter, floats in the swimming pool at a mansion on Sunset Boulevard. In a flashback, the dead man as a narrator retells the events leading to his death. Directed by Billy Wilder, Sunset Boulevard (1950) tells the story of grand delusions, failure and defense mechanisms.
The film portrays a bizarre turn in the life of a screenwriter behind the eight ball, named Joe Gillis and played by William Holden. He failed to sell one of his stories to Paramount Pictures, and soon escapes the repossession men who wanted to take his car. He wanders inside a seemingly desolate mansion, but is greeted by Norma Desmond, played by Gloria Swanson, a has-been movie star, who lives with her butler Max. Norma is unaware of the times that have changed and refuses to admit that the public memory of her fame has been consigned to oblivion. She hires Joe as a script doctor for her film about Salome, where she wants to play the title role and return to the screen once and for all. Turns out, Max has been writing fan letters to her since she is mentally and emotionally fragile, and has attempted suicide in the past. Soon, Norma falls for Joe and continues to live the delusional life in which she is still a famous movie star.
Joe Gillis: You’re Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big.
Norma Desmond: I AM big. It’s the pictures that got small.
As with his other films, Billy Wilder likes a great story, and everything else was less important, no wonder that this one received the Academy Award for Best Story and Screenplay. Wilder stated: “Eighty percent of a picture is in the writing. The other twenty percent is in execution, in having the camera at the right spot, in the luck of choosing a good subject and in the luxury of having good actors.” Wilder was interested in American culture since he was an Austrian-born director. In the late 1940s, grand Hollywood houses were still there, and many former silent-era movie stars still lived in them. A character of Norma Desmond could be any of the real movie stars, for example Clara Bow had an amazing career, but after retiring from acting, she started to show symptoms of schizophrenia and tried to commit suicide. Charles Brackett, the producer and one of the writers of the movie, stated that they never considered anyone other than Gloria Swanson, who was known for her talent and beauty in the silent-film era. As for Gloria Swanson, she tried to revive her career in talkies—that is, sound films—but soon accepted the end of her acting career and worked on TV and radio. So this was really her comeback as well.
Joe Gillis (as narrator): The plain fact was she was afraid of that world outside. Afraid it would remind her that time had passed.
John F. Seitz was the cinematographer of the film, which was shot in shadowy noir style. The dead body at the beginning of the film is shot from an expressionist-like disoriented angle. The mansion looks like Kane’s Xanadu, almost in Gothic fashion, and is full of shadows and mystical lighting, while the Paramount Pictures and the outside world are lit in normal fashion, providing the contrast between two quite different worlds. For some scenes, Seitz would sprinkle dust in the air, which also contributed to the overall moody effect.
The crew cared for every detail, even the photos that are all around the mansion are the publicity photos of Gloria Swanson from her acting heydey. Norma’s room is decorated in art nouveau style, it’s gaudy and extravagant. Norma wears dark glasses even though it’s daylight, she’s dressed in black and the house looks like the archetypal haunted house. Even though the ghost of Joe Gillis returns to tell his story, the real ghost is the past Norma Desmond, whose face occupies the totality of the house.
When Joe first enters the mansion, he’s mistaken for an undertaker and Max states in a sinister way to call him if he needs any help with the coffin. A monkey is on the bed since this is a film where a monkey funeral takes place. When the crew asked Wilder how to shoot it, he responded with: “You know, the usual monkey-funeral sequence”. Reportedly, Wilder directed Gloria Swanson by saying: “One more time, Gloria, and show us what you feel. Remember, Norma Desmond was f****ing the monkey!” We learn that Norma has been married three times, Max the butler was one of them, but the chimpanzee might have been one as well. In this scene, this film seems more like a Lynch film than a Wilder one.
This film is also a mirror and critique about the film-making process. We see how ideas are recycled, and how scripts are tossed and accepted. There’s the old Hollywood which now seems bleak, and the new one is even bleaker. The transition from silent films to talkies wasn’t an easy one, and the sound film was often rejected as a new medium or a form of art since we already had that in theater. Some critics considered the silent film a unique form of art because the facial expressions and the ability to tell a story without a sound required great talent and good story lines, illustrated by Norma’s embittered monologue:
Norma Desmond: There once was a time in this business when I had the eyes of the whole world! But that wasn’t good enough for them, oh no! They had to have the ears of the whole world too. So they opened their big mouths and out came talk. Talk! TALK!
Swanson and Holden played their roles perfectly. Holden could pass for troubled hapless gigolo anytime. Swanson truly was Norma Desmond, you can see the aged beauty, but you can also see the walls she has built around her. This is a film about a film, and even though she isn’t aware of the reality, we are as the audience. We can see the story that she is living, the story that she is writing, and the real story unwinding before our eyes. In the film, even Joe Gillis reminds us: “You don’t yell at a sleepwalker. He may fall and break his neck.” That’s why Max still writes those letters, and that’s why the film’s famous last shot of Norma descending the staircase is glamorous. Because it is for her, and she dances like nobody’s watching, and lives like everybody’s watching. The Sunset Boulevard is literally the sunset in a career of a has-been. But a new dawn won’t come. Who of us hasn’t relived our peak moments at least in our heads? Every one of us carries a bit of Norma Desmond when we go through our hard times. And sometimes we are aware of the illusion, but sometimes it’s easier to live inside one.
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References
Cooke, Grayson (2009). We had faces then: Sunset Boulevard and the sense of the spectral. Southern Cross University.
Sikov, Ed (1998). On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder. Hyperion.
Staggs, Sam (2002). Close-up on Sunset Boulevard: Billy Wilder, Norma Desmond, and the Dark Hollywood Dream. St. Martin’s Press.
I Hated Black And White Movies 