Mediocre Movie Club Movie Reviews

Sunset Boulevard

5/22/2017

A-
3.67

A fading actress clings to her stardom.

Directed by Billy Wilder
Starring Gloria Swanson and William Holden
Initial Review by Chris Cook

"All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up.” Everyone should’ve heard this line at some point by now. I was waiting for it the entire film; it was the final line of dialogue.

Ranked number 12 on the American Film Institute’s list 0f 100 best American films in 1998, and coming in at 16th on the 2008 list, Sunset Boulevard continues to stand up as a cinematic classic.

The film opens up with a dead body floating face down in a swimming pool. This was recently given a nod in the first episode of season seven of Archer.

The film is narrated by Joe Gillis (William Holden), a struggling screenwriter whose ideas get rejected and his car is threatened by repossession. While running from the repo men, he stumbles upon a run-down mansion, the home of washed-up actress Norma Desmond, played brilliantly by Gloria Swanson. Once learning that he’s a writer, she coerces Joe to move into her home and assist with fixing her intended comeback film script (think Stephen King’s Misery without the hacking off of limbs with an axe).

Norma still feels that her career is relevant, watching her own films on her at-home movie screen. She becomes infatuated with Joe, showering him with gifts, as he works with her script that he knows is horrible. He delivers it to Paramount Pictures, who start calling—not about the script—but to inquire about renting Norma’s old car for a movie. She’s so delusional about her stardom, no one will tell her the truth, due to her bouts with depression and suicidal tendencies. Later in the film, we learn that her servant, Max, played by Erich von Stroheim, continues to write her fan mail from other people; he’s the former director who discovered her, and went on to become her first husband. He couldn’t leave her after the divorce.

Joe eventually begins to sneak out of the house in the evenings to see Betty Schaefer (played by Nancy Olson), a script reader at Paramount who’s engaged to Joe’s friend, Artie. She has found potential in a scene from one of Joe’s scripts and wants to write the adaptation. The two of them wind up falling in love, which doesn’t settle well with Norma, especially after discovering the script they’re working on.

She proceeds to threaten to kill herself—for a second time; she slashes her wrists earlier in the film on New Year’s Eve after Joe left the elaborate party she threw just for the two of them—and ends up shooting Joe, who becomes the floating corpse in the pool seen in the opening. As the police officers and media arrive on the scene, the delusional Norma believes it’s the film crew arriving to film her comeback movie.

I enjoyed this film noir. It’s considered one of the best movies about the film industry; several high-name performers appearing as themselves—Cecil DeMille, Buster Keaton, and H.B. Warner, to name a few. Even being from the 50s, it brings up the concept of the media and reporting what’s relevant in the world. Great story, great acting. It had drama, comedy, romance, a car chase, a funeral for a monkey, and in my opinion, nearly 70 years later, it still stands up as one of the greats. A on this one.

4 Comments

Lane

5/29/2017 09:02:27 pm

My personal connection to “Sunset Boulevard” goes all the way back to 8th grade. That year, in school, I took French from a man named Mr. Knudson (pronounced with a hard ‘K’). I don’t know what qualified Mr. Knudson to teach French, because he wasn’t fluent. Mostly, we conjugated the verbs from the text book and learned to sing the French national anthem (which I can still sing a few bars of, in French).

What made Knudson’s class fascinating was that he fancied himself to be what we might call a “Man of Letters” of the old South. In Central Alabama, this is no easy mantle to wear. What was valued in the towns I grew up in was the ability to pull a truck out of mud, or shoot a deer, or correctly fill the gap in a 4-3 defense. Less practical, in that worldview, was how to correctly pronounce the word “lingerie” or which classic films are necessary viewing in order to consider yourself properly cultured. These were things, however, that Knudson was interested in.

Knudson grew up in Mobile and was the first cousin of Winston Groom, the author of “Forrest Gump,” and much of our class time each week was devoted to stories of his childhood, the adventures he had with his cousin Winston, many of which ended up being fictionalized for the book (but not the movie, to Knudson’s dismay). In the small redneck private school I grew up in—a school that just so happened to be founded the same year integration was made law of the land—Knudson was seen as an odd bird. It didn’t help that he actually resembled Big Bird in stature and demeanor. Students and teachers alike joked about him and made fun of him behind his back, and because it was 8th grade and I wanted to fit in, I did too. If it bothered him, he never let it show, but went on with his cultured sensibilities. Though I caved to the peer pressure, I secretly found him fascinating because, like him, I wasn’t much for deer hunting, but I did like movies and music and art.

It was that 8th grade year that, instead of conjugating French verbs one day, Knudson decided our education would be best served by experiencing classic film. The film he chose—one that was obviously important to him—was “Sunset Boulevard.” The eye-rolling and groans from the “peanut gallery” (as he called us) was vociferous. A black and white film! Ughhhhh! Four or five heads immediately went down on their desks for a nap. Thankfully, Knudson could care less what we thought and proceeded to show the film (which took a few days to watch all the way through since class periods were only 50 minutes). While other teachers would cave and just show “A Land Before Time” in order to kill class time, Knudson felt that there was genuine education to be found in the film. Before the year was out, we would watch “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Rebecca,” and “North by Northwest.” But the first classic film he introduced us to was “Sunset Boulevard.”

At first, I was also a little miffed at the choice; not that I wanted to watch “A Land Before Time,” but there was no way, I thought, that I would find this old movie interesting. Yet, how wrong I was. From the opening scene when Gillis’s body is found floating in the pool, to Norma’s final descent down the stairs of her mansion, the film captured my attention and imagination. When it was over, I remember thinking I couldn’t believe how good it was. While I had no cinematic language or framework to fully understand what I’d seen at that time, I did understand, for the first time, that there is power in storytelling, whether it was a big budget modern blockbuster or a black and white classic film. From there, I started to sneak old movies into the house—I watched the “Godfather” trilogy and tried to make a knockoff version with my friends with an old VHS camcorder. By the time I graduated high school, I had watched about 40 of the AFI top 100—basically all the ones that were available on VHS at the local Blockbuster. As I think about it, the reason I love watching movies today can really be traced back to that fall afternoon when Knudson decided to show us “Sunset Boulevard.” For that, I am thankful.

Re-watching “Sunset Boulevard” 20 years later, thankfully, doesn’t take away much of the magic of that early experience. Of course, there are ways that I can see now how much filmmaking has changed—not just the technology but also the way modern directors pace and frame their films. And, of course, now I can appreciate and understand what Billy Wilder was saying with this film as a cinematic love-letter to a bygone era; the way Hollywood uses and disposes of its stars; the tension between art and commerce.

But what it really comes down to is that “Sunset Boulevard&rd

Jon

5/31/2017 09:57:01 pm

The French national anthem. One more reminder that they know how do things the right way.

5/29/2017 09:03:24 pm

remains a great story. It captures your attention at 35 years old just as it did at 15, and when I watch it again in 10 years, I expect no less. This, I think, is the definition of a classic.

Grade: A

5/31/2017 11:17:23 pm

Writing reviews for classic movies like Sunset Boulevard always presents a challenge. Multiple bodies have recognized it as one of the greatest films of all time, giving it a level of historical significance that puts a heavy thumb on the scale of my personal enjoyment. People have been talking about it for almost 70 years, so I'm not going to have an original take or a novel idea. It's going to have been iterated in dozens of different forms, both in legit homage and parody, making it impossible to truly go in fresh and then wonder whether or not one's reaction has already been dictated by cultural osmosis. Oh well, here goes.

It's the rare film noir that gets made today. A key part of the genre, narration, has critically fallen out of favor. Of the two most recent examples I can think of, Brick and Oldboy, the former is played straight by one of the better writers of genre dialogue working today (Rian Johnson) and the latter is from an unreliable narrator, which I think is the only way narration can work. Joe Gillis is plenty reliable, and narration might've been de rigueur back then, but it's dated now. Sunset Boulevard even indulges in the worst aspects of narration, by naming a key quality of a character when that character is about to be introduced, priming the pump™ for how the viewer perceives them instead of letting the scene do it for them. Storied director Billy Wilder broke out with a better noir in Double Indemnity, so it's not like he doesn't know what he's doing. Gillis' insight-free narration only adds a crutch to Wilder's film, plainly saying what is apparent to a viewer that's paying attention.

Surprisingly, the narration is the only thing that feels dated in Sunset Boulevard. Some of the conversations feel like topics that continued to be debated after the film's release up til today, particularly Betty's frustration with aiming for middlebrow crowd-pleasers when, from her perspective, movies should be about something more than giving people exactly what they think they want. I'm currently reading Scenes at a Revolution, about the dawning of the last Golden Age of movies in 1967, and while some writers and directors are doing monumental, game-changing, profound work, others are stuck in the past trying to bloodlessly replicate what's worked the year before. Betty's off-the-cuff remark about 'plot 27A' implies the existence of a long master sheet of plots, where hired gun writers pick an alphanumeric structure at random and find a way to fit the in vogue star or genre on top of it.

There was a time when Norma Desmond was one of those stars, but her arrogance and Max's coddling have ensured that those days are long gone. In her mind, she's like one those sainted coal miners that Trump talks about, noble pursuers of their own destiny who should be immune from a changing world because reasons. She writes an aggrandizing screenplay starring herself that shuns quality for pick-me-ups, something needy Hollywood people still do (Jon Favreau in Chef is egregious). Gloria Swanson plays her with levels of ham unseen since all those pigs were killed in the swine flu outbreak, but Norma, whose lost the ability to tell the difference between performing and living, is someone who would hold poses and over-enunciate and make grand proclamations. As outlandish as she is, she retains the ability to generate sympathy thanks to Max constructing a false world for her. Max wanted to preserve her in amber, and it cost her relationship to the rest of humanity lest they give the lie to his subterfuge.

I prefer other of Wilder's films, specifically the narration-free The Apartment, but Sunset Boulevard impresses with its timelessness even as it's stuck in its era. Norma's an iconic representation of curdled fame, the star as a gravitational entity that sucks people into her orbit. The voiceover from beyond the grave costs it some points, as the film would lose nothing without it. I always appreciate the chance to knock off one more from the Sight and Sound Top 250 Films list. This wouldn't make my all-time 250, but I can see why it would make others. B

Sunset Boulevard

A-
3.67

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Sunset Boulevard

A-​3.67

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A-
3.67