Word: boulevarding
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Sunset Boulevard. How a faded movie star (Gloria Swanson) attempts a comeback with the help of her kept man (William Holden); a sardonic commentary on Hollywood's manners & morals (TIME...
...Sunset Boulevard. How a faded movie star (Gloria Swanson) attempts a comeback with the help of her kept man (William Holden); a sardonic commentary on Hollywood's manners & morals (TIME...
...Sunset Boulevard is crammed with detail-witty, revealing, evocative, sometimes contrived but always effective. Much of it, as the camera roams the Desmond mansion, sustains the mood of a good ghost story: a pet chimpanzee is solemnly buried by candlelight; the wind sighs through a pipe organ; rats scurry across the bottom of an empty swimming pool. The modern Hollywood is reflected in a gallery of expertly drawn types. Actress Desmond's Hollywood of the past comes alive in the fantastic trappings of her house and in her visiting bridge companions ("the Waxworks"), played by Hollywood Oldtimers Buster Keaton...
...picture itself may strike some as a disturbing symptom of a jungle mentality that flourishes in the U.S. far beyond the boundaries of Hollywood. By making a gutless heel into a sympathetic, attractive, and pseudo-sophisticated "hero," Sunset Boulevard seems to say that the smudged line between right & wrong is about the same as the line of least resistance. Yet a good deal of the sympathy the "hero" arouses is the shamefaced, there-but-for-the-grace-of-God kind of sympathy aroused by any conscience-stricken, miserable human being...
...made-and lost, through wild extravagance and woolly business deals-several million dollars; she says she has lost track of just how many. She looks younger than her years, is still energetic enough to have taken on a three-month tour of 30 cities as advance agent for Sunset Boulevard. She insists, with justice (but probably in vain): "It is not the story of my life...