SUNSET BOULEVARD
Reviewed by Steve Biodrowski
This well-known film is widely and rightly regarded as one of the great masterpieces to emerge from Hollywood. It's a classic piece of Hollywood Gothic, a sordid story about an out-of-work screenwriter named Joe Gillis (William Holden) who takes shelter in the mansion of Norma Desmond, a former silent screen star (Gloria Swanson) who ropes Gillis into her mad dream of making a big-screen comeback, hiring him to polish a script she has been writing as a vehicle for herself to star. Gillis knows the script is trash, but he is too desperate to turn down the work; unfortunately, his payment turns out to be less cash than room-and-board, and the relationship soon moves from professional to personal as Desmond sinks her claws deeper and deeper into Gillis. Finally growing disgusted with being a "kept man," Gillis tries to walk out on Desmond, but she won't let him get away that easily...
Widely regarded as a great achievement in film noir, SUNSET BOULEVARD is actually a horror film done up in high-class fashion dress. True, there is little in the way of suspense, thrills, or overt horror, but the basic situation and most of the imagery reeks of the horror genre in a way that is clearly deliberate.
On the lam, Gillis pulls a fast turn to escape some creditors and finds himself in unfamiliar territory, spooky territory. This is the classic horror movie set-up: the lost traveler who takes shelter in the old dark house.
In this case, instead of a castle in Transylvania, Gillis finds himself in a Hollywood mansion, but it's dark and strange enough to unnerve anyone. As if to set the tone, a funeral is in progress when he arrives -- not for a human but for a pet monkey. The ghoulish tone is established immediately, and the monkey also serves as a metaphor for what Gillis will become when he falls under Desmond's spell.
Norma Desmond herself is not a literal vampire, but she is a metaphoric one: she may not drink Gillis's blood, but she clearly seeks to rejuvenate herself by sucking the life out of him, taking his dignity with it -- a fact made clear in her bedside seduction.
Desmond is a sort of walking death who refuses to die, lurking within her mansion like Countess Dracula -- an artificially preserved artifact from another time, existing in isolation while the world outside her door changes. Driving the point home, she even has a sinister assistant, in the form of her butler-chauffer Max von Mayerling, played by the heavily accented Erich von Stroheim, a sort of sturdier, stouter version of Dracula's Renfield.
As if all this were not enough to qualify the film for inclusion in the horror genre, the story makes use of an outrageous dramatic device: Beginning with a scene of a man being shot and falling into a pool, the story is told in flashback, with a voice-over narration. Our growing suspicions throughout the running time are finally confirmed at the end, when it is revealed that the dead man in the pool has been telling us his story, apparently from the afterlife.
SUNSET BOULEVARD is about as close to a perfect film as one can imagine. The story is involving and the characters are fascinating and relatable, even if their actions are sometimes repulsive. Gloria Swanson's over-the-top theatricality perfectly embodies Desmond, and Von Stroheim is excellent in his understated glory as her henchman. William Holden seems a bit miscast in a role originally intended for Montgomery Clift: Holden's manifest strength and virility are not what one would expect in a character who is supposed to be lacking in backbone, but ultimately this visual anomaly only adds an extra layer to the already bizarre relationship between Gillis and Desmond. The script is loaded with memorable quotes, and as a director Billy Wilder offers up some equally effective visuals. Viewers inevitably remember Desmond final line, "All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up," delivered as she walks into the camera, obviously to the fact that she is not making a movie but being arrested, but just as good is the blackly comic moment when Desmond goes to a movie studio (under the mistake impression that famous director Cecil B. DeMille [playing himself] wants her to star in his new movie: as she sits in a chair on the soundstage, a boom microphone swings into frame, knocking her hat -- a visual reminder that Desmond's silent film stardom was destroyed by the coming of sound.
Lacking literal monsters, SUNSET BOULEVARD may seem to be an odd choice for inclusion in the horror genre, but as a portrait of madness and moral decay, seen through a filter of gothic, low-key visual stylings, it stands on par with Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO and Robert Aldrich's WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE and HUSH, HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE.
MEMORABLE QUOTES
Norma Desmond: "I am big. It's the pictures that got small."
Norma Desmond: "We didn't need dialogue; we had faces!"
Max von Mayerling: "There was a maharajah who came all the way from India to beg one of her silk stockings. Later, he strangled himself with it!"
TRIVIA
The film's strange dramatic device, of using a dead man to provide voice-over narration for the on-screen events, was borrowed for the 1999 Best Picture of the Year, AMERICAN BEAUTY.
