Film Review: Sunset Boulevard (1950)

Much of the popular perception of history in the 20th century was created or maintained by Hollywood. This includes the history of Hollywood itself, although Hollywood filmmakers, when dealing with issues closer to home, showed more honesty and less willingness to see the world through rosy glasses. One of the most notable examples of such an approach is Sunset Boulevard, a 1950 drama directed by Billy Wilder, which is widely considered one of the classics of American cinema.

The film begins when the Los Angeles police discover a dead body floating in a pool. It is Joe Gillis (played by William Holden), the protagonist who narrates the plot in flashback. The story begins six months earlier when Gillis, a struggling screenwriter, tries to pitch his script to Paramount Pictures. While attempting to evade repossession men trying to take away his car, Gillis finds temporary shelter in a huge mansion belonging to Norma Desmond (played by Gloria Swanson), a middle-aged woman who used to be a big Hollywood star during the silent era. Desmond has been living as a recluse, tended only by her loyal servant Max (played by Erich von Stroheim), who is later revealed to be her former silent-era director and one of her former husbands. She nevertheless takes an interest in Gillis after learning that he is a screenwriter. She has apparently written a script titled Salome, in which she should play the lead role, representing her great comeback. Gillis is supposed to help her finish it. Although he knows that the script is bad and that Desmond is delusional, he accepts, because living in the mansion is too seductive and continues to do so even after Desmond requires sexual services from him. However, after a while, reality begins to inevitably clash with his sponsor’s fantasies, and Gillis’ attempt to end the increasingly toxic relationship leads to violence and tragedy.

When Billy Wilder and his co-writers Charles Brackett and D. M. Marshman Jr. began to work on the script for Sunset Boulevard, silent cinema had ended barely two decades ago, but for new generations, it must have looked like part of an ancient civilisation from a distant past. At least that was the general idea of Billy Wilder, who, although he had started his career in the silent cinema of Weimar Germany, felt somewhat of an outsider in Hollywood. He was looking at the luxurious mansions built for the iconic screen legends of the 1910s and 1920s, now populated with ageing people all but forgotten by the masses that had used to worship them only a generation ago. Wilder also recognised the true nature of Hollywood, an industry built on illusion and its ability to create and sell that illusion not only to the outside public but also to itself. Norma Desmond, one of the most iconic characters in the history of cinema, is the epitome of such self-delusion—a woman with enough fame and money to create her own little world in which time has stopped, cinema remains silent, and she is still the ravishing screen goddess that men want and women want to be. This self-delusion is maintained by people around her—Max, who does it out of genuine love and affection, aware that Norma Desmond simply can’t survive in the world that has passed her by; and Gillis, who starts exploiting it for his own benefit only to have second thoughts before paying the ultimate price for taking part in such deception.

Many critics and film scholars were at odds over how to characterise Sunset Boulevard. Some identified its genre as film noir due to its black-and-white cinematography, cynical male protagonist, and voice-over, while others saw it as a black comedy, viewing the clash between the lunacy of Norma Desmond and the practicality of Joe Gillis as a source of humour. However, the film works best as a surprisingly brutal criticism of the way Hollywood operated and still operates—an industry based on the simple pursuit of profit that exploits people, destroys their dreams, and twists their notions of morality. Sunset Boulevard underlines this point by featuring the character of Betty Schaeffer, a script reader at Paramount Pictures who helps Gillis develop his own script, played by young Nancy Olson, representing the voice of reason and something closest to “normalcy” in the crazy story. The script hints that the two of them could become romantic partners, and in a “normal” film, it would be the case. But she leaves the picture after being disgusted by the revelation of the true nature of Gillis’ relationship with his sponsor. This occurs even after a few subtle hints that Betty might be corrupted by the true Machiavellian nature of Hollywood and its predatory practices.

Sunset Boulevard is surprising not only in its self-criticism of Hollywood but also in the way that this self-criticism employs techniques that modern critics would call “meta.” The film was produced by Paramount Pictures, the grand Hollywood studio whose moguls apparently felt confident enough to have major characters as their employees, with some scenes even taking place on the set of
Samson and Delilah, a biblical epic directed by legendary director Cecil B. DeMille, who appears in a cameo playing himself. DeMille, one of the legends of silent cinema and one of the few who seamlessly continued a successful career decades into the sound age, is joined by a number of silent cinema stars who also briefly appear in cameos playing themselves. Even the two major actors—Gloria Swanson and Erich von Stroheim—could often be seen as playing fictional versions of themselves. Swanson was an actress immensely popular in the 1920s, only to have her career rapidly deteriorate with the advent of sound, while Erich von Stroheim was a director known for his eccentricity and megalomania, later degraded to character actor during the sound era. Both Swanson and von Stroheim worked together on Queen Kelly, one of the last large-budget silent films, a notorious flop, and parts of that film appear in Sunset Boulevard. Swanson, unlike the character she plays in the film, was quite aware of the changing times and wasn’t scared that the role of a pathetic lunatic like Norma Desmond would wreck her former image of a screen goddess. On the contrary, Sunset Boulevard did quite the opposite. The role became the best known of her career and actually made her closer to newer generations than her peers, ultimately perpetuating Hollywood myths and bringing the world of silent cinema closer to newer generations.

Those newer generations in the film are represented by William Holden, a relatively young actor for whom the role of an ambitious and morally challenged screenwriter represented a big break. Holden would soon become one of the greatest stars of 1950s Hollywood and have another great collaboration with Billy Wilder in the war prison drama Stalag 17. Wilder, whose brilliant direction helped make this otherwise dark and depressing story appealing, brought Holden back to explore similar subjects in the 1978 film Fedora, a rather underrated drama that can be seen as a spiritual sequel or remake of Sunset Boulevard.

RATING: 8/10 (+++)

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