Sunset Boulevard (1950) Still Shines After 75 Years
“Unique, Sinister Hollywood Drama” -Los Angeles Times
When Billy Wilder’s searing critique of moviedom, Sunset Boulevard, was screened in Hollywood, it sent waves through the community. The response was mostly praise and shock that filmmakers Wilder and writing partner Charles Brackett went as far to show Tinseltown’s underbelly. At an industry screening, MGM studio boss Louis B. Mayer chastised the director in front of several celebrities and powerful producers. Without missing a beat, Wilder said, “Go F**K yourself.” The razor-sharp edge Wilder flexed as a writer in the twenties was jagged (though accurate) by the fifties. Few filmmakers would have had the moxie it took to release a movie that lifted the veil, exposing human tragedy as a natural byproduct of the Hollywood Dream Factory.
“I am big, it’s the pictures that got small,” roared aging silent film star Norma Desmond, played by the incredible Gloria Swanson. Desmond was dressing down Joe Gillis (William Holden), a down-on-his-luck screenwriter who happened into an old Hollywood mansion, the kind that “crazy movie people made in the crazy twenties.” It was now 1950 and the film, despite its fictional narrative, is grounded so thoroughly in reality that fans and historians have studied it for generations. The turbulent transition from silent to sound film, the plight of writers, the weight of fame, and the delusions one maintains to relive the past. It’s all in there.
Referencing silent-ear stars like Rudolph Valentino, John Gilbert, and Douglas Fairbanks, Norma mourned, “They’ve taken the idols and smashed them.” Life wasn’t kind to many stars who didn’t make transition to the sound era. Many died young, while those that lived yearned for the glory days again. As Joe Gillis says of Desmond when he sees the alter she’s created to the past featuring pictures of her younger self, “She was still sleepwalking along the giddy heights of a lost career.” The film is haunting as we see the past meet the (then) present through Gillis.
Before Sunset Boulevard was released and eloquently exposed a piece Hollywood’s dark side, Swanson told the Los Angeles Times that the film “is NOT biographical.”[i] Even though Swanson had a similar trajectory to Desmond and struggled in the sound era, she did not want to be mistaken for the dark, diminished, and desperate character she portrayed. Swanson single-handedly proved to an industry biased against age that she still had it. A Chicago Daily Tribune profile described Swanson at 52 as a “titaness” whose “energy is boundless.”[ii] Swanson was, in many ways, different from Desmond in that she was not the extravagant Hollywood caricature we saw on screen. The Desmond residence was purposely overdone, the interiors of the home were shot on Stage 9 at Paramount. As the Los Angeles Times’ Philip Scheuer described the scene during production, the set had a “hybrid Italian-Spanish-Californian architecture and French-English-Moorish furnishings, in all its mocking connotation of the meaning of ‘going Hollywood.’”
The verisimilitude hit hardest with the commentary about how the industry often treated some of its first major stars. Nearly every review of Sunset Boulevard applauds Swanson’s incredible return to pictures after falling victim to the industry’s transition to sound (“out came talk, talk, TALK!”). In an era where “aging” talent was cast aside, The Hollywood Reporter wrote “Swanson Triumphs.[iii] We arguably wouldn’t have had the impressive late careers of Bette Davis or Joan Crawford without Swanson’s stellar performance.
Veteran film critic Edwin Schallert lauded the film as “one of the most remarkable pictures ever produced”[iv] Shallert saw that Paramount showed “daring” to even make a film that takes so many shots at its own industry, though Shallert noted that for all the bitterness the film is an “honest endeavor.” Audiences see very real references – everything from DeMille playing himself as we see the active set of Samson and Delilah, cameos from Buster Keaton, Hedda Hopper, and Louella Parsons, as well as a crack about the Black Dahlia murder – which has made the film a treasure trover for film historians.
While contemporary fans find themselves watching Sunset Boulevard routinely, legendary New York Times critic Bosley Crowther noted after the film’s release that audiences and critics were going back to see the film again. The reasons are the same for us today, after watching Sunset Boulevard the first time, the film remains “twisting and gnawing in our mind.”[v] Crowther applauded the story for being “ruthlessly candid,” as its popularity took a similar track as any juicy Hollywood tabloid. However, as Crowther observed, the sordid affair of a lunatic actress and a desperate writer are so revealing and frustrating as to keep us captivated. Desmond is a “horrendous spectacle of the extreme consequence of unbalance caused by limitless praise and wild success.”
Some critics didn’t love that the film’s narration was coming from a dead character, but I feel like these critics needed to find something to pick on. The Chicago Daily Tribune found the closing scenes “heavy handed and over-done.” The concluding scene, where Desmond descends the stairs and famously quipped, “alright Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up,” has aged well as it’s oft quoted by many who may not have even seen or heard of the film. The rave reviews and box office success at the end of September 1950 led Paramount to ad 400 cities to the Sunset Boulevard exhibition plan.
The Hollywood Reporter correctly predicted that the film “will be studied years hence” and “brought back again and again in revivals, in art houses, in schools, and studio projection rooms as a lesson in the art and science of the screen.” I’ve used the film countless times to introduce students to classic cinema. For many, it was their first black and white film. Giving students the historical background that once irked LB Mayer sets them up to see the power Sunset Boulevard conveyed at the time that has continued rippling through history. At 75, the film has lost none of its power and continues to serve as an adroit analysis of fame, power, and disillusionment.
[i] Scheuer, Philip K., “Gloria Swanson Bringing Old Hollywood to Life,” Los Angeles Times, May 1, 1949, D1.
[ii] Nangle, Eleanor, “Dynamic Gloria Swanson, at 52, is beautiful, slender, and a stranger to fatigue,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 24, 1950, a1.
[iii] “Sunset Boulevard Ranks Among All Time Greats: Swanson Triumphs in Notable Prod’n by Bracket, Wilder,” The Hollywood Reporter, April 17, 1950, 3.
[iv] Schallert, Edwin, Sunset Boulevard Unique Sinister Hollywood Drama, Los Angeles Times, August 25, 1950, 13.
[v] Crowther, Bosley, Hollywood Scandal: Some Further Observations on the Natures of Sunset Boulevard Popular Appeal Frustration, New York Times, August 27, 1950, X1.