43. Sunset Blvd.

Sunset Blvd. — aka Sunset Boulevard, there seems to be some debate about what the actual title is — is one of the daddies of American cinema and it's a bit of a shocker that I'd not seen it until just before Christmas. It's the story of struggling screenwriter William Holden who stumbles into the house of silent film star Gloria Swanson, once a world famous idol but now a deluded has-been. He sticks around to help her with a screenplay she's written and gets entangled in her life as she prepares for a comeback.

Swanson as Norma Desmond is superb and rightly earns the plaudits but I think the best thing about the film is William Holden. His character is so perfectly balanced — charming, dryly witty and not untalented but also shallow, selfish and greedy. He's young, but world-weary, and he pities Swanson and doesn't return her affection. Generally embarrassed by his situation, he's nevertheless happy to take her money and live the opulent lifestyle. Not that he's a particularly bad person; he's merely weak. When he does try to do the honorable thing and return to his life of debt and happiness, he quickly gets dragged back to the house on Sunset Boulevard. His relationship with sweet innocent Nancy Olson is another highlight: unconventional, almost unromantic, but very nicely played.

In many ways the film plays out more like a horror than a drama. Norma Desmond's palace is haunted by ghosts of her long-dead career and nowhere is this more true than in the case of her creepy butler, a fascinatingly bizarre character with some interesting twists in his backstory. Desmond is the monster, though, ensnaring the young writer in her manipulative web and subjecting him to her Busby Berkeley bathing suit recreation. But, like all the best monsters, you do feel sorry for her. And of course there's the rather morbid device of killing off the leading man at the start and having him narrate the film in flashback from beyond the grave. An earlier cut actually had his body in the morgue chatting to other occupants.

The script is superb, and not just for all the famous oft-quoted lines*. The storyline is clever, brave, tight and scathing of its chief target, the Hollywood machine which uses people for as long as they're profitable and then discards and forgets them. I'm wondering if time has actually diminished its message, though. There have been so many of these anti-Hollywood movies made in the last 60 years that we've seen it all before and know full well what lies beneath the tinsel. But when it was first released this caused quite a stir and people were shocked that they would bite the hand that fed them. Still, even if the central message has been diluted a bit over the years the film that remains is still wonderfully cynical, brilliantly made and just a lot of fun.

Oh, and you get to hear Buster Keaton talk in one of several cameos by silent-era film makers. He's playing bridge and his only words are "Pass".


* I will say, though, that the "You used to be big." "I am big. It was the pictures that got small!" exchange confuses me. If it was the pictures that got small and she stayed the same size then, in proportion to the pictures, she would have got even bigger and by her logic would be an even bigger star.