Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard” is the portrait of a
forgotten silent star, living in exile in her grotesque mansion, screening her
old films, dreaming of a comeback. But it’s also a love story, and the love
keeps it from becoming simply a waxworks or a freak show. Gloria Swanson gives
her greatest performance as the silent star Norma Desmond, with her grasping
talons, her theatrical mannerisms, her grandiose delusions. William Holden
tactfully inhabits the tricky role of the writer half her age, who allows
himself to be kept by her. But the performance that holds the film together,
that gives it emotional resonance and makes it real in spite of its gothic
flamboyance, is by Erich von Stroheim, as Norma’s faithful butler Max.
The
movie cuts close to the bone, drawing so directly from life that many of the
silent stars at the movie’s premiere recognized personal details. In no
character, not even Norma, does it cut closer than with Max von Mayerling, a
once-great silent director, now reduced to working as the butler of the woman
he once directed–and was married to. There are unmistakable parallels with von
Stroheim, who directed Swanson in “Queen Kelly” (1928), whose credits
included “Greed” and “The Merry Widow,” but who directed only
two sound films and was reduced to playing Nazi martinets and parodies of
himself in other people’s films.
In
“Sunset Boulevard,” Desmond screens one of her old silent classics for Joe
Gillis, the young writer played by Holden. Max runs the projector. The scene is
from “Queen Kelly.” For a moment Swanson and von Stroheim are simply playing
themselves. Later, when Joe is moved into the big mansion, Max shows him to an
ornate bedroom and explains, “It was the room of the husband.” Max is
talking about himself; he was the first of her three husbands, and loved her so
much he was willing to return as a servant, feeding her illusions, forging her
fan mail, fiercely devoted to her greatness.
In
one of the greatest of all film performances, Swanson’s Norma Desmond skates
close to the edge of parody; Swanson takes enormous chances with theatrical
sneers and swoops and posturings, holding Norma at the edge of madness for most
of the picture, before letting her slip over. We might not take her seriously.
That’s where Max comes in. Because he believes, because he has devoted his life
to her shrine, we believe. His love convinces us there must be something worth
loving in Norma, and that in turn helps explain how Joe can accept her.
Norma
of course is not a wrinkled crone. She is only 50 in the film, younger than
stars such as Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve. There is a scene during
Norma’s beauty makeover when a magnifying glass is held in front of her eyes,
and we are startled by how smooth Swanson’s skin is. Swanson in real life was a
health nut who fled from the sun, which no doubt protected her skin (she was 53
when she made the film), but the point in “Sunset Boulevard” is that she
has aged not in the flesh but in the mind; she has become fixed at the moment
of her greatness, and lives in the past.
Billy
Wilder and his co-writer Charles Brackett knew the originals of the characters.
What was unusual was how realistic Wilder dared to be. He used real names
(Darryl Zanuck, Tyrone Power, Alan Ladd). He showed real people (Norma’s bridge
partners, cruelly called “the waxworks” by Gillis, are the silent stars
Buster Keaton, Anna Q. Nilsson and H.B. Warner). He drew from life (when Norma
visits Cecil B. De Mille at Paramount, the director is making a real film,
“Samson and Delilah,” and calls Norma “little fellow,” which is what
he always called Swanson). When Max the butler tells Joe, “There were
three young directors who showed promise in those days, D.W. Griffith, Cecil B.
De Mille and Max von Mayerling,” if you substituted von Stroheim for von
Mayerling, it would be a fair reflection of von Stroheim’s stature in the
1920s.
“Sunset
Boulevard” remains the best drama ever made about the movies because it sees
through the illusions, even if Norma doesn’t. When the silent star first greets
the penniless writer inside her mansion, they have a classic exchange. “You
used to be big,” he says. Norma responds with the great line, “I am big.
It’s the pictures that got small.” Hardly anyone remembers Joe’s next line:
“I knew there was something wrong with them.”
The
plot has supplied Joe with a lot of reasons to accept Norma’s offer of a
private screenwriting job. He’s broke and behind on his rent, his car is about
to be repossessed, and he doesn’t want to go back to his job as a newspaperman
in Dayton. He is also not entirely unwilling to prostitute himself; Holden
projects subtle weakness and self-loathing into the role. He goes through the
forms of saying he doesn’t want Norma’s gifts, but he takes them–the gold
cigarette cases, the platinum watch, the suits, the shirts, the shoes. He
claims to be surprised on New Year’s Eve when she throws a party just for the
two of them, but surely he has known from the first that she wants not only a
writer, but a young man to reassure her that she is still attractive.
The
thing about Norma is that life with her isn’t all bad. She isn’t boring. Her
histrionics and dramaturgy are entertaining, and she has a charming side, as
when she stages a pantomime for Joe, playing a Max Sennett bathing girl and
then doing a passable version of Chaplin’s Tramp. Joe is willing to be kept.
The only thing the film lacks is more sympathy between Joe and Max, who have so
much in common.
There
is of course the young blond Paramount writer Betty (Nancy Olson), who Joe
meets early in the picture. She’s engaged to be married (to a young Jack Webb),
but as Joe begins sneaking out of the mansion to collaborate on a screenplay
with Betty, she falls in love with him. He’s attracted, but pulls back, partly
because he doesn’t want her to discover the truth, but also because he likes
the lifestyle with Norma. And … maybe because, like Max, he has fallen under
her spell? His dialogue is sharp-edged and can be cruel. (When she threatens
suicide, he tells her, “Oh, wake up, Norma. You’d be killing yourself to
an empty house. The audience left 20 years ago.”) But there’s a certain pity,
too. “Poor devil,” he says, “still waving proudly to a parade which
had long since passed her by.”
I
have seen “Sunset Boulevard” many times, and even analyzed it a shot at a
time at the University of Virginia. But on this latest screening I was struck
by its similarity with the 1964 Japanese drama “Woman in the Dunes.”
Both are about men who are trapped in the home, or lair, of a woman who simply
will not let them out again. They struggle, they thrash a little, they look for
the means of escape, but at some subterranean level they are content to be
prisoners, and perhaps even enjoy it. Both women need a man to help them hold
back the inexorable advance of the sands–in Norma’s case, the sands of time.
Of
all the great directors of Hollywood’s golden age, has anybody made more films
that are as fresh and entertaining to this day as Billy Wilder’s? The credits
are astonishing: “Double Indemnity,” “Ace in the Hole,” “Some Like It Hot,” “The
Apartment,” “The Lost Weekend,” “Stalag 17,” “Witness for the Prosecution,” “Sabrina.”
And who else can field two contenders among the greatest closing lines of all
time? From “Some Like It Hot” there is “Nobody’s perfect.” And from “Sunset
Boulevard,” Norma Desmond’s: “There’s nothing else. Just us, and the cameras,
and those wonderful people out there in the dark. All right, Mr. De Mille, I’m
ready for my closeup.”
