Cynical Cinema

Paramount Home Entertainment is releasing three absolute classics on November 11th, and Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard is the best of the bunch. Sadly for the film, it was only the second-best movie released in 1950, and it lost out on the Best Picture Oscar to the magnificent All About Eve. It still managed to pick up three Academy Awards, for Art Direction, Score, and Story and Screenplay. Over time, Sunset Boulevard has become known as one of the greatest movies ever made. And it is. Do yourself a favour, and pick up this film today. It’s one of my absolute favourites, and it remains as brilliant today as it was in 1950.

Gloria Swanson gives one of the greatest performances in film history as Norma Desmond, a character who has, in the last fifty years, become a favourite impression for drag queens. When you see her for the first time, you understand. She fits the bill for a drag queen - flamboyant, gaudy, and just a little bit insane. While it may seem at first, to a modern audience, that Swanson is totally over-acting, she isn’t. You see, she’s playing a faded star from the silent film era, a woman who misses the limelight so badly that she has the delusion that she’s still in it. And being a silent screen actress, she maintains the tradition of silent film actors of flamboyant over-acting. Huge flashy gestures, overly dramatic facial expression and the striking of sudden poses was all part and parcel of acting in silent movies, before the addition of sound meant that you didn’t have to tell the story entirely through action.

The casting is a huge part of the classic appeal of this movie. William Holden is fantastic in one of his first major roles as a down-on-his-luck Hollywood screenwriter who gets trapped by Swanson in a bizarre world from which he can’t seem to escape. But it’s the other actors who are most important. Swanson herself was Norma Desmond, the character she portrays. Although of course she wasn’t as nutty or as deluded, she was a silent film star who had disappeared from the movie industry for years before appearing again in Sunset Boulevard. Her strange, confusingly devoted butler Max is played by Erich Von Stroheim, a director of some classic silent films, most notably Greed. He too had been out of the film world for a while, left behind with the advent of talking pictures, much like Gloria Swanson. And Norma Desmond.

There is a wonderful scene in the movie that uses both of them perfectly. Norma is so self-obsessed that when she shows a movie in her house, it is of course one of her own. The movie that Billy Wilder has Norma watch is actually some footage from a film called Queen Kelly, which was Von Stroheim’s last silent film. Most major studios had lost faith in him, and his huge-budget movies by the time he made Queen Kelly, and it was only through the financial help of the star of the picture - Gloria Swanson - that the movie was able to be made. The scene in Queen Kelly of Swanson praying at an altar became the most famous moment in the film, thanks almost solely to it’s inclusion in Sunset Boulevard. And a brief but fantastic later scene in the movie re-unites several of the silent screen stars who had faded into obscurity, among them Buster Keaton.

Other inside Hollywood jokes permeate the film - one of the best is a recurring joke, where the characters keep returning to Schwab’s Pharmacy. This was a very inside joke - Hollywood legend had it that Lana Turner had been discovered there, sitting at the counter drinking a milkshake. In the intervening years, the veracity of this tale has sort of faded away, unverified. For movie nerds and classic Hollywood buffs, the inside jokes in Sunset Boulevard are moments of great interest, and they are also quite funny. Paramount Studios let Billy Wilder have a lot of leeway on this movie. For a film that is one of the most bitter ever made about Hollywood and the people who populate it, it was remarkable that Paramount would allow Wilder to use their logo, their sets and their studios to make this point. Also remarkable is Cecil B. DeMille, the director of some of the biggest movies of the day, who portrays himself in the film in a fairly unflattering way.

But this film is one that works on every level, not just for rabid film buffs and nerds. It is set up like some of the classic film noir of the era - William Holden does a voiceover the whole movie, the way many detective flicks did at the time. We first hear Holden’s voice describing the victim of a murder, who is lying facedown in a pool. In a classic sense of ironic detachment, he comments about the poor sap always wanting a pool, and says “well, in the end, he got himself a pool”. It’s a remarkable opening scene, and while the final scene remains the most famous from Sunset Boulevard, the first scene deserves a lot of credit as well. Holden’s voiceover has a sense of understanding throughout the film that his character himself lacks. The disembodied Holden gets what’s happening, whereas the flesh-and-blood version sometimes doesn’t see the whole picture until he’s already stuck.

The dialogue is terrific throughout. Billy Wilder, while he had a sense of the way people talked, still made a lot of the language sound poetic. When describing the local shoeshine man, Holden says “Rudy never asked any questions about your finances. He just looked at your heels and knew the score”. As the movie begins, Holden is running from bill collectors and repo men. He hides out on the grounds of a gigantic mansion, one that he thinks is deserted. When he catches a glimpse of a woman in an upstairs window, he immediately makes a reference to Charles Dickens’ character Miss Havisham, from the classic novel Great Expectations, not realizing right away how apt that comparison actually is. It turns out that the mansion is owned by Norma Desmond, the former silent movie superstar. Holden recognizes her, and says “you used to be big!” One of the great lines in movie history is her response. “I AM big! It’s the pictures that got small!”

Before long, William Holden is stuck in that mansion. Intrigued by the offer of money, then seduced by the wealth, and finally trapped by immense guilt, he finds it impossible to escape. For most people, the sight of a mortician showing up at a house to bury a monkey might have been a signal that it was time to go. But Holden stays, lured by the promise of money. Despite the monkey burials. And the creepy tennis court. And the creepy swimming pool, the creepy bed, the creepy house, and the lighting that Billy Wilder often uses to make Gloria Swanson look like Mothra in a Japanses monster movie. This leads, inevitably, to a conclusion that I won’t give away, but one that ranks among the greatest final scenes in the history of cinema.

The special edition DVD of Sunset Boulevard, part of Paramount’s Centennial Collection (they’re getting a bit of a jump on their 100th anniversary celebration, which is still four years away), has a ton of good special features. And a few great ones. On the “Collector’s Edition” of Sunset Boulevard, released several years ago, there was a terrific feature-length commentary by Ed Sikov, the biographer of Billy Wilder. That commentary is included on this new set, and it is very much worthwhile. It features almost all of the interesting movie-world tidbits that I have mentioned here, and hundreds more.

There are also a bunch of new special features, all on a second disc. Sunset Boulevard: The Beginning, Sunset Boulevard Becomes a Classic, and The Noir Side of Sunset Boulevard are all short documentary pieces that are terrific. Also great is the featurette Two Sides Of Ms. Swanson, and Mad About the Boy: A Portrait of William Holden. Although there is a better feature on Holden on the Paramount DVD of Sabrina, also released today. That one is called William Holden: The Paramount Years, and it is a longer, more in-depth look at one of the great actors of all time.

Sunset Boulevard is funny, it’s sad, it’s dark, and it’s even scary at times. Gloria Swanson is the most unlikely femme fatale in screen history, alternating between looking quite attractive, and looking…like Mothra. Her performance really is one of the greatest in movie history, and I would suggest that Erich Von Stroheim and William Holden more than hold their own playing opposite this raving maniac. This film is deservedly called a classic, it is deservedly mentioned among the greatest movies of all time, and it is certainly going to be the best movie released on DVD today. Pick. It. Up.

I have already gone on at length about No Country For Old Men.  Without a doubt in my mind, it was the best movie of last year.  For the full review:  http://blog.rogersradiointernet.com/cynicalcinema/2008/05/10/no-country-for-old-men-best-movie-of-the-millenium-1010/  Now, Alliance Films is releasing it again, along with The Man Who Wasn’t There in a two-disc set.  A two-disc set everyone should buy.  Not only is No Country For Old Men the best film of the past ten years, The Man Who Wasn’t There is a very underrated classic.  Since I have already reviewed No Country, I’ll talk about that one here instead.

Billy Bob Thornton plays a barber who hates his life.  He tries to do something, anything, to relieve his boredom, and that something is blackmail.  He blackmails James Gandolfini, his wife’s boss, who is having an affair with his wife (Frances McDormand).  A fairly innocent, one-time plan at first, the whole thing, as with all film noir, spirals out of control, and before long, Thornton is involved with murder.  And then things get really weird.  The film is shot in black and white, set in the forties, and feels just like 1940s film noir.  It captures the tone, the feeling, and the pacing of great noir, and there are some great performances by Thornton, McDormand, Gandolfini, and Tony Shaloub as a high-priced lawyer.  Also terrific is Scarlett Johannson, who appears as a young ingenue piano player, and looks even hotter in black and white with a 40s hairdo.  And then there is the whole alien abduction thing.  Insane, but this movie is terrific.

The Coen Brothers have done some of the best movies of the past twenty years.  And two of them are packaged together today by Alliance Films.  Well worth picking them both up.