This is a review of Sunset Blvd. (1950)
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15 September 2013
This is a review of Sunset Blvd. (1950)
What the connotations were, in 1950, of an address in Sunset Boulevard, I do not know, but I am sure that Billy Wilder knew what his audience would think, and what specifically it signified to have one in the early ten thousands...
Both as Norma Desmond and in real life (Gloria Swanson was then the age of the former actress whom she plays), the end of what is often called The Silent Era partly caused a wane in her popularity in the 1930s. Here, though, Swanson – and Wilder with her – is capitalizing on her name, and I suspect that the photographs with which she decorates her still lavish home are from that home.
With Wilder’s amusing script, we have all the elements for us to be more knowing than William Holden, as Joe Gillis, and for the spooky Max, played delightfully by Erich von Stroheim, to put the wind up him – whether or not one believes that the corpse of Gillis is literally telling the story, or that we somehow hear what he has to say from his perspective, including narrating Desmond’s descent under the direction of Max, is neither here no there.
The strength of what we see unfold is how it is rooted in the fabric and how it brings the characters to life – as Gillis is beckoned into the palazzo, having symbolically lodged, without asking, his pride-and-joy white motor in one of its garages, his mind is already thinking of Dickens’ Miss Havisham. By contrast, the house comes alive, out of a slumber as if he is a Prince Charming to her Sleeping Beauty, and yet the lavishness of what is bestowed on him is not unlike what Pip thinks that he seeks after.
Here, the benefactress needs no guessing at, only how she could have preserved her wealth, and Gillis is no more grateful or moderate with what he is bought by her than Pip is with the attempts to make him a gentleman – in neither case does it prove what is really desired.
Whether we believe that the room over the garage becoming inoccupable is just convenient, or the house having its way with Gillis, it comes back to life with him there, and provides the means for what happens to unfold, even including Miss Desmond’s own vehicle, which Max seemingly effortlessly gets back on the road – the pool would not be there without Gillis, and Miss Desmond would not have a life outside the house without him.
In this house without locks, the doors come to resemble pairs of eyes (as Beckettt was later to play with in Film (1965), and even to ask Buster Keaton to play another serious role), and yet there are secrets, from turning, from Miss Desmond, by turning off the lights of the car when Gillis goes out in it.
What Pip turns out to want is Estella, and Gillis wants is Betty Schaefer and to work with her on a script. In Gillis’ case, he is not big enough to accept her gracious willingness to forget all that he has told her (although maybe he believes that she would not be able to do so, and that she is better off without him), but still thinks that he can give the relatively ageing star ‘the go-by’, after all that he has thrown in her face as fantasy.
The cameras and the lights show who is mistaken in thinking that she is still a star, as Gillis is forced to admit…
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
