Sunset Boulevard

Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) was a legend. When silents were king, all the world loved her. But Hollywood hasn't made silent films in a long time, and today Norma Desmond lives as a recluse in her decaying mansion, screening her old pictures over and over, dreaming of the day she can again conquer Hollywood. A chance encounter brings her into contact with Joe Gillis (William Holden), a hack screenwriter with financial problems who allows Norma to hire him to help touch up the hopeless screenplay she's working on for her "comeback," and little by little, becomes kept by her. The mutually parasitic relationship between the older woman and the younger man works well enough until Joe becomes interested in a fellow screenwriter his own age (Nancy Olson), which the increasingly unstable Norma simply cannot allow; clearly, the situation cannot end well.

The late Billy Wilder, who died in March, was responsible over his five decades as a director for some of the greatest films in history, from twisty legal drama (Witness for the Prosecution) to warm comedy (The Apartment, Some Like It Hot), to war (Stalag 17), to romance (Sabrina), to noir-ish drama (Lost Weekend, Double Indemnity) and much more. And, in 1950, Sunset Boulevard: a story about two eras in Hollywood. To play Norma Desmond, the faded star of the silent screen, Wilder selected Gloria Swanson, who really had been one of Hollywood's top stars in the 1910s and 1920s. (The part may have hit too close to home for some of the other stars of Hollywood's Golden Age, including Mary Pickford, Pola Negri, and Mae West, who turned it down). While Swanson's fortunes since the advent of talkies had been a bit better than Norma's, she had only acted in a handful of films by the time Sunset Boulevard was made, and the viewer can see the parallels between the two women, one real, one fictional.

Holden, who was 32 when the film was shot and looked 40, was too old for the part of Joe Gillis, who clearly should have been in his mid-20s at best; honestly, it helps to picture Joe as being portrayed by a different actor. 22-year-old Nancy Olson, who plays Joe's fresh-faced girlfriend Betty, provides an easy-on-the-eyes counterpart to Norma Desmond's faded glory. Gloria Swanson was only 50 years old—the silent era, remember, had only been over for 23 years when Sunset Boulevard was made—but she's wonderful at evincing an obsolescence so total it defies age, her virginal screen presence in her silent films as remote as the Middle Ages. Norma Desmond is one of the great camp classic performances of American cinema, her overwrought mannerisms and theatrical emotionalism recalling the vaudevillian acting styles of the silent screen while at the same time vividly demonstrating why it could never work in the era of sound.

Some points to ponder:

• Look for: Jack ("Dragnet") Webb as Betty's fiance and Buster Keaton as one of the "waxworks" who come to play bridge (the others are Keaton's and Swanson's fellow silent stars Anna Q. Nilsson and H.B. Warner, who played Mr. Gower in It's a Wonderful Life).
• It's not spoiling anything to say that William Holden's character is revealed as being dead in the first moments of the film. Because he's also the narrator, this means he's narrating the film from beyond the grave. You may remember this device from American Beauty and, more effectively, Casino; the difference, of course, is that here, you know from the beginning that Joe is dead.
• Two great directors of the silent era appear in Sunset Boulevard: Cecil B. DeMille, who plays himself, and Erich von Stroheim, who plays Norma Desmond's faithful butler Max. Their fortunes on screen mirror their fortunes in real life. After establishing himself as the force behind such lavish productions as King of Kings and The Ten Commandments (1925), DeMille successfully made the transition to sound and continued directing sprawling epics like Samson and Delilah, The Greatest Show on Earth, and the 1956 remake of The Ten Commandments. Stroheim was similarly known for excess, but unlike the pious DeMille, his excess extended beyond the screen; a memorable chapter in Kenneth Anger's notorious Hollywood Babylon describes real-life orgies on the closed set of his 1928 picture The Wedding March. Also unlike DeMille, his excess did him in in the end: his seven-hour-plus epic Greed was cut to less than two hours by MGM editors without his input, and in 1929 he was fired from Queen Kelly by its star, Gloria Swanson, after shooting roughly a third of the 12-hour picture. (Queen Kelly was never finished, and parts of it are featured in Sunset Boulevard as a "Norma Desmond" picture.) His career as a director effectively finished after the Greed fiasco, Stroheim worked for the next three decades as an actor, usually playing cartoonish German villains in war pictures (he was an originator of the bald, bemonacled, impeccably-dressed Nazi stereotype later twitted by Werner "Colonel Klink" Klemperer in "Hogan's Heroes").