Sunset Blvd. [Sunset Boulevard] ***** (1950, William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim, Fred Clark, Nancy Olson, Jack Webb) – Classic Movie Review 159

Gloria Swanson triumphs as Norma Desmond, an unbalanced, faded ageing former movie star, in Billy Wilder’s eerily dark, deliciously bitter and wryly humorous 1950 film noir classic Sunset Blvd.

‘All right, Mr DeMille, I’m ready for my close up.’

Biting the hand that feeds him, Billy Wilder’s eerily dark, deliciously bitter and wryly humorous 1950 film noir classic Sunset Blvd. [Sunset Boulevard] is a brilliant, searing film, with a splendidly jaundiced insider’s view of Hollywood and the price of fame. It’s probably the finest and most famous example of Hollywood on Hollywood.

Gloria Swanson triumphs as Norma Desmond, an unbalanced, faded ageing former movie star. She is a desperate, tragic, nutty relic from the days of silent pictures (‘We didn’t need dialogue, we had faces.’)

Norma has retired into her shell, living in reclusive obscurity in her weird huge old mansion on Sunset Boulevard with just her butler (who was once her director and husband) and her memories. Insanely deluded she still believes in herself, her fame, her indestructibility. (‘I am big, it’s the pictures that got small.’) She dreams of a comeback and then in walks the handsome young Joe Gillis…

William Holden also greatly impresses in a much less showy, realistic role as Joe Gillis, a down-on-his-luck, small-time hack scriptwriter. He reluctantly moves into her palatial Hollywood home, paid as both her lover and her screenwriter, working on a screenplay for the comeback movie she’s planning. But a happy ending isn’t in sight, as we’re told right from the start of the movie.

Everything’s just right here: a clever script that sparkles and disturbs, a delightfully eccentric performance from Swanson playing a gloriously larger than life version of herself, and priceless cameos from a quintet of silent cinema legends: actor-director Erich von Stroheim (as Norma Desmond’s creepy butler Max von Mayerling), comedy superstar Buster Keaton, producer-director Cecil B DeMille, actor H B Warner (as one of Norma’s bridge partners) and silent film superstar Anna Q Nilsson, as well as gossip queen Hedda Hopper. Keaton, DeMille, Warner, Nilsson, and Hopper all play themselves.

There were three Oscar wins, for best story and screenplay (Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, D M Marshman Jnr), score (Franz Waxman), and art direction-set decoration (Hans Dreier, John Meehan). John F Seitz’s fabulous, creepily atmospheric black and white cinematography deserved some recognition too, but did not get it, only a nomination.

None of the actors won either, though Swanson, Holden, von Stroheim and Nancy Olson were all nominated. In her most famous role, Olson gained her only Oscar nomination for Best Actress in a Supporting Role as Betty Schaefer. All four were robbed. The acting is so much part of what is great about this movie. Swanson never won an Oscar, after three nominations for Sadie Thompson (1928), The Trespasser (1929) and, following a long gap, this one.

Also in the cast are Fred Clark (as Sheldrake), Jack Webb (as Artie Green), Lloyd Gough (as Morino), Franklyn Farnum (Undertaker), Larry J Blake (1st Finance Man), and Charles Dayton (2nd Finance Man).

Mae West made the mistake of turning down the star role, and so did Greta Garbo, Mary Pickford and Pola Negri. Bet they kicked themselves! Montgomery Clift walked from the Holden part two weeks before the shoot, and it was offered to Fred MacMurray, who would not play a gigolo. However, MacMurray does play against his clean-cut type in Wilder’s in Double Indemnity and The Apartment. Wilder uses the Sheldrake character name again in The Apartment for MacMurray’s role.

Wilder made Swanson screen test, and she was talked into it by her director friend George Cukor, who had recommended her to Wilder in the first place.

It became Brackett and Wilder’s 17^th and final screenplay together, after their partnership suddenly ended.

MGM studio boss Louis B Mayer told Wilder at a star preview that he should be tarred, feathered and horsewhipped for bringing the profession into dispute. The normally witty Wilder replied: ‘F… you.’

In 1993 Andrew Lloyd Webber turned it into a famous musical that starred variously Glenn Close, Elaine Paige and Petula Clark.

The original negatives had vanished but it was restored with a 4K high-def scan in 2002 from decayed inter-positives.

After the fiasco of his 1929 silent film Queen Kelly with Gloria Swanson, who fired him, Von Stroheim found his career as director over but carried on working as an actor. He had not talked to Swanson in 20 years and said that he despised ‘That damned butler role’, probably his most high-profile, most admired film part.

Director Billy Wilder recalled that it was Von Stroheim’s idea to use the clip from Queen Kelly in Sunset Blvd. as a way of ‘art imitating life’. When Swanson’s Norma Desmond watches one of her old films, it is Queen Kelly, Stroheim’s Max Von Mayerling serves as projectionist and it is later revealed that he was the silent movie director who discovered Norma.

The title is shown in the opening shot as Sunset Blvd., stencilled in the gutter on the curb of that street. It is listed as Sunset Blvd. on its Library of Congress registration. However, it was named Sunset Boulevard in its original trailer and the movie poster shows Sunset Boulevard.

Norma Desmond tells the guard at the Paramount Studio gates: ‘Without me there wouldn’t be any Paramount Studio.’ Gloria Swanson was the studio’s top star for six years running.

Nancy Olson, 91 on 14 July 2019.

The last surviving cast member of Sunset Blvd., Nancy Olson, celebrated her 96tt birthday on 14 July 2024.

She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Sunset Blvd. co-starred with William Holden in four films, and appeared in The Absent Minded Professor (1961), its sequel Son of Flubber (1963) and the disaster movie Airport 1975 (1974).

http://derekwinnert.com/queen-kelly-1929-gloria-swanson-walter-byron-seena-owen-classic-movie-review-1981/

© Derek Winnert 2013 Classic Movie Review 159

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