But this isn't just some Hollywood broad, an old dowager ordering a pool clean, it's former silent movie superstar Norma Desmond. Once he clears up the misunderstanding that he's not actually there to inter the dead chimpanzee on the slab in a shiny white coffin, and that he's actually a writer for the movies, he's kind of hired. Why? Well, Norma has a notion to break back into the flickers with a script as long as the Bible about Salome with her as the star, of course. Ulp! Well, if it gets the debt guys off his back, he's in. After all, as shes just assured him, she's still big, it's the movies that got small.
This Mad Hatter's tea party scenario from 1950 is one of Hollywood's most damning self portraits. If Singing in the Rain softened the notion of Hollywood hope two years later, Sunset Boulevard gave it a big chore. Its combined noir cynicism and deflating pathos create a kind of ethereal horror by which the favours of tinsel town demand the entirety of their applicants. Billy Wilder and co. even supply a more measured image of honest work with the figures of younger people taking more practical paths to careers but Norma's crazed hunger and Joe's own unquestioned opportunism to be elevated by it are the things that leave that bad taste. The focus is on the freak show, not the bright young things. That is what still makes this film essential viewing for anyone who fancies themself a likely player.
Norma's screenplay is a mass of hopeless narcissism and Joe's attempts at editing it, when discovered, are absorbed into her host's ingestion of him as parasite. Of course, he resists being bought at the beginning but he has neither idea nor defence against someone whose riches flowed in from staged histrionics and interpersonal atrocities. For any of his resistance, Joe knows he's signed the contract and, saving opportunity, is effectively doomed. We also know, from the opening scene and narration, that he didn't make it out. We meet him visually floating face down in the swimming pool. We're finding out how he got there.
The tuned casting of this is essential. William Holden was still young but wise enough in his carriage and demeanour to convince us to get behind him. His narration is the same husky snark of a Phillip Marlowe or Same Spade except it begins with a bitterness that both would avoid.
The real coup is Gloria Swanson. She was a star of silent cinema. She did know De Mille and all the others. She knew the adoration, the parties and the endless champagne and attention. And her career, though it continued beyond the switch to sound, faded steadily to the point when she was more than ready for this. Among all those stars from the Hollywood firmament, she did know the tragedies and horror tales, the delusional and the heartrending. Though not one of them herself, she is in this role speaking for them, not just like them. If anything, she is more authentic and compassionate than the real life Cecil B. DeMille who appears in an extended cameo. Norma's quiet and stern butler is given a hate-filled gravity by silent auteur Josef von Sternberg. This film ain't kidding around. It is to Swanson's persistent credit that her own grotesque turn raises her to triumph in this sordid fable.
Sunset Boulevard was one of David Lynch's favourite films and it's easy to see why. It is an ornate nightmare of masks and fugue states set in a Hollywood that knows how stinking and cruel it always was. This would play seamlessly with Lynch's own attempt, Mulholland Drive, the pair of them craving deep into the horrors of delusion with the most convincing beauty.
Viewing notes: I saw this as Paramount's stunning 4K presentation. However, this one is always around. Not quite a Casablanca or Wizard of Oz, it's been treated well for home video from the DVD era on. If you don't want to commit to a home 4K you could easily come upon it at an op shop for a few bucks. I first saw it on midday TV and was capitvated but that doesn't happen anymore.
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