I am big. It’s the pictures that got small ✵ Sunset Boulevard - FEAR AND WONDER ✵ 1950–1959 - The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

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IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Drama

DIRECTOR

Billy Wilder

WRITERS

Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder

STARS

Gloria Swanson, William Holden, Erich von Stroheim, Nancy Olson

BEFORE

1928 Gloria Swanson’s silent movie career peaks with Sadie Thompson, a drama set in the South Pacific.

1944 Double Indemnity is Billy Wilder’s classic film noir about the double dealings at an LA insurance company.

AFTER

1959 Wilder shows his versatility with Some Like It Hot, a comedy in which Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon dress in drag to escape the mob.

At one point in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, faded silent-movie star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) flashes a look at the audience. “We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces!” she says, as her eyes shine with madness, sorrow, and fear. Norma’s cracked state of mind, and her fall from sanity and fame, can all be seen in that single close-up.

Sunset Boulevard is a blackly comic elegy to Hollywood’s silent age, and the movie is filled with faces from those glory days, including Buster Keaton, looking time ravaged at a card table, and legendary director Cecil B. DeMille, both playing themselves in wry, self-deprecating cameos. Norma’s servant Max is played by Erich von Stroheim, another famous director of the silent era. Swanson herself had been a huge star of the silent screen, so in taking on the role of the deranged Miss Desmond, she creates a grotesque parody of her celebrity self.

The movie tells the story of Joe Gillis (William Holden), a down-on-his-luck screenwriter who falls in with the reclusive Norma when she asks him to write her comeback movie. The aging diva is convinced that her millions of fans are waiting, “out there in the dark,” for her return to the silver screen. Joe reluctantly moves into the star’s creepy mansion on Sunset Boulevard, and Norma falls in love with the young writer, who is drawn into her delusions. Joe eventually tries to escape Norma and salvage what little dignity he has left, but we know things end badly for him because his story is told in flashback; at the start of the movie he is a corpse floating in a swimming pool. “The poor dope. He always wanted a pool,” is Joe’s narration—a gallows-humor gag told from beyond the grave.

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Wilder’s movie marked an extraordinary screen comeback for Gloria Swanson. She effectively retired from movies afterward.

Silent tribute

Wilder’s movies are celebrated for their cynical dialogue and one-liners—“You’ll make a rope of words and strangle this business!” is one of Norma’s most memorable lines—but there is also a suggestion of melancholia in Sunset Boulevard. Beneath his cynicism, Wilder’s reverence for a vanished era is obvious. Ultimately, while there is a glittering monstrousness to the deluded Norma, she is also a tragic figure. Wilder suggests that she may have a point about the movies: that they lost some of their magic when their stars began to talk.

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Joe dresses in white tie and tails for Norma’s New Year’s Eve party, only to find that she has invited no other guests and is trying to woo him.

BILLY WILDER Director

“Nobody’s perfect” is the final line of Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot. All Wilder’s movies are based on this simple truth—with characters whose flaws are fascinating, from Fred MacMurray’s Walter Neff in Double Indemnity to Robert Stephens’s detective in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970). As a filmmaker, Wilder himself was as close to perfect as it’s possible to get.

Born in Austria in 1909, Samuel “Billy” Wilder fled the Nazis to make his directorial debut in Paris. In the 1930s he came to Hollywood, where he wrote movies with Charles Brackett. Double Indemnity, his collaboration with novelist Raymond Chandler, is often credited as the first film noir. His later movies were mostly comic, but retained the cynical bite—and eye for human weakness—of his earlier tragedies. He died in 2002.

Key movies

1944 Double Indemnity

1945 The Lost Weekend

1950 Sunset Boulevard

1955 The Seven Year Itch

1959 Some Like It Hot

What else to watch: A Star is Born (1937) ✵ All About Eve (1950) ✵ Some Like It Hot (1959) ✵ Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)