Sunset Blvd. (1950)

Directed by Billy Wilder.

Timelessly Zinging Hollywood

The best thing about watching old movies is discovering the ones that feel so modern that, with a few touches here and there, barely altering the original product, they could actually fit right in with the quality movies of today. That's how I felt after I watched Sunset Blvd., Billy Wilder's classic skewering of the repressing power of Hollywood. I watched this at the El Capitan theater in Hollywood when the old movie-house decided to pull out a number of films that had originally premiered there and present them on the glorious big silver screen. Apart from the fact that the movie wasn't in widescreen (it's aspect ratio is 1.37:1), this movie didn't lack any of the pizazz that the current releases could boast of. In fact, it could go one better and legitimately claim that it has something many of today's movies lack: namely, a brain in its head.

Quite a few things struck me as I watched this movie. First of all, it was funny! The movie operates with its cynicism level set to "extra thick." Billy Wilder had world-weariness down to a science, and his character of down-on-his-luck Joe Gillis was armed with more sarcastic quips than a stand-up comedian. Narrating the story from beyond the grave, Joe's commentary of the proceedings are sharp and biting. Meanwhile, the eccentricities of leading lady Gloria Swanson's now-legendary character, Norma Desmond, provided plenty of other humorous moments. Joe meets her when she has him mistaken for an undertaker... for her pet chimpanzee. When Joe goes upstairs, sure enough the close-up shows a shot of the face of a peacefully dead chimp. After the real undertaker arrives, there is actually a funeral for the animal, and Joe drolly observes, "It was all done with great dignity. He must have been a very important chimp, the great grandson of King Kong, maybe."

The cynicism is effective in tackling the real issue at hand: the soullessness of Hollywood. Wow, the more things change, the more they stay the same, eh? I was mostly reminded of Robert Altman's The Player. That was also a movie which featured real celebrities in cameos in the real studio playgrounds of Hollywood. Like Sunset Blvd., it featured crazy screenwriters, murder, and the utter coldness of the people who inhabited this world. I found Sunset Blvd. more entertaining as a whole. At first, Joe's sardonic narrative really makes us laugh at the eccentric characters we're seeing, but then we actually start feeling sorry for them. One scene that actually brings out this feeling is the card game, when Norma invites her friends to play cards with her in the evening. They, like her, are forgotten silent movie stars, and they are actually cameos by Anna Q. Nilsson, H. B. Warner, and Buster Keaton. It's the subject of another quip from Joe: he calls them "her waxworks." We smile, but then we also see their rather sad faces, victims of the onset of talkies and left behind by the institution which once nurtured them and made them stars. Buster Keaton's presence actually makes the scene more bittersweet today than it probably did in the year of the movie's release. Keaton's work was overshadowed by the very popular Charlie Chaplin; it wouldn't be until a little later when people began to re-appreciate Keaton's work as equal to and perhaps superior to Chaplin's. To see him sitting sadly at a card table as an anonymous has-been silent actor just seems wrong, and it hammers home the point that Hollywood forgets its own even harder.

Little by little, the quirky and eccentric characters of the movie reveal how trapped they are by Hollywood, even after they had long parted ways or are currently trying to part ways. Norma doesn't want to fade away, she wants to be a star again. Hence, she has written a screenplay. Joe, tired of the system and on his last legs, still finds hope in the potential partnering with a budding young screenwriter named Betty. We find Cecil B. DeMille, playing himself, trying to direct what appears to be an overdone, over-produced epic (in actuality, the set of Samson and Delilah). Norma's faithful butler, Max Von Mayerling, turns out to be one of her former silent film directors (and he was played by Erich von Stroheim, who really was a silent film director and had really directed Swanson in a silent movie called Queen Kelly, a clip of which is featured in Sunset Blvd.). He has stayed with her all this time because he was once married to her, and now finds himself so emotionally attached to her that he is unable to keep from taking care of her and supporting her in her mad quest to recapture the limelight. And she really does go mad, becoming delusional as she attempts to find again that false sense of security and self-worth that stardom provides. In the end, when Norma's equally obsessive interests in Joe prove to be too much for him, he tries to leave Hollywood and the wackos who run it and the wackos it creates. So what happens to him? He gets shot and killed. There is no escape.

Hollywood presents audiences with fairy tales and fantasies every year, and yet the people who are a part of it don't really return to the normal real world. The world they live in is almost every bit as manufactured as the worlds they present on film. They live in their own microcosm, one that consumes them and spits them out with no regard for their personal welfare. It's amusing to observe, and it makes a great subject for a satire as merciless as Sunset Blvd.. As movies like The Player shows, Hollywood has only become a more monstrous version of itself over the decades. Thus, Sunset Blvd. has not lost any of its significance; its humor is still fresh and its cynicism extremely biting. It was so easy and enjoyable to watch this movie. I don't think there'll ever be a need to remake this movie, although it would probably be very effortless to try. With better lines and dialogue than many of today's offerings, the script is right there, ready to go, as good as it was 50 years ago. (And they could get Tom Hanks to play Joe; I could swear that from more than a few angles, William Holden and Tom Hanks could be mistaken for each other!)

Rating: 10/10

©Jeffrey Chen, Aug. 1, 2001

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