Cast: Gloria Swanson, William Holden

Director: Billy Wilder

Screenplay: Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder

Running time: 1 hr 50 mins

Genre: Drama/Noir



CRITIQUE:


The year was 1950. Hollywood had produced two glitteringly black celebrity satires that would not only become classics but continue today as the two most definitive studies on celebrity culture. On one hand, there’s Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s extraordinarily razor-sharp All About Eve and on the other, there’s Billy Wilder’s cold-blooded Sunset Boulevard. The two works battled it out at Oscars, and however colossal Bette Davis and Gloria Swanson’s performances were, they both lost out to a chirruping Billy Holliday in Born Yesterday. Where Eve was a tightly constructed drama about the obsession of fame, Boulevard explores the corrosive power of fame set against human decay and dark moralities via the noir alley. Not that Wilder is unknown to this sinister territory; he directed one of the greatest film noirs ever made, Double Indemnity. And here, he fuses the underbelly of noir whilst satirising Hollywood itself and its merciless ageism. William Holden’s decrepit screen scribe sells his talent and dashing good looks to Gloria Swanson’s faded silent movie star Norma Desmond, and becomes her boy-toy in her ivy-crawled, overgrown mansion. Poised for a comeback, she resurrects a script with him that would bring her back to the silverscreen. The only problem is that her lustre has faded “10,000 midnights ago”, and Hollywood has surpassed the silent era and moved to sound.


Norma Desmond is such a peach of a character, utterly submerged in her own glamour and delusions, and Swanson plays her with both vitriol and effusive sweetness. It’s easy to dismiss that Swanson plays her own personality, but in the subtext of Boulevard, her larger-than-life presence, melodramatic speeches – she embodies an archaic icon left behind from the fast chugging vehicle of modernity. She really is a Miss Havisham caricature, sunken in her own disillusionment and gloom. Holden, meanwhile, seem to underplay but only rightly so, as he alleviates Swanson’s overt histrionics. His Gillis is a calculating hero, believing he could manipulate Desmond into submission. And in the seedy world of noir, nothing goes right. When Norma descends from a staircase in what appeared to her as a return to the limelight, her audience know it’s her descent to madness.


VERDICT:

A ruthless deglamorisation of the movie factory that's built to give its stars their sparkle, Sunset Boulevard rebuffs Tinseltown as an all-glittering haven, and exposes Hollywood as an underworld lair of fading stars, decaying moralities and misguided talents. Wilder's bleak vision is at times ominous, darkly funny and unremittingly sad, with Holden and the has-been Swanson delivering biting, vindictive performances that lingers for long after the fade-out.



RATING: A