Word: boulevarding
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Sunset Boulevard (Paramount) is a story of Hollywood, mostly at its worst, brilliantly told by Hollywood at its best. A daring film by ordinary movie standards, it is the last collaborative fling by Charles Brackett & Billy Wilder* at a specialty they have made their own: playing hob with convention and getting away with it. It also brings Actress Gloria Swanson back to the screen, after a nine-year absence, in a performance that puts her right up in the running for the first Oscar of her 37-year career...
...shock effect of Sunset Boulevard is at least as high as that of such earlier Brackett & Wilder productions as the alcoholic Lost Weekend. The "hero" is a kept man, the leading lady a suicidal neurotic in her 50s, and their morbid liaison leads grimly on to madness and death. Manipulated less cleverly, the effect of these characters and their story would be oppressively decadent, not to say censorable. Indeed, for all the film's finesse, it may leave some moviegoers with a bad taste in their mouths. Yet, without sentimentalizing the characters or condoning their transgressions, the movie makes...
...young hack scripter (William Holden), broke, desperate, and pursued by his creditors, ducks his car up a Sunset Boulevard driveway and blunders into an eerie survival of an extinct world. In the moldering, overgrown grounds he finds a mausoleum-like Hollywood mansion, circa 1921, intact to the last monstrous detail. It is inhabited by two living relics: Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), a great star of the silent movies, still wealthy, with an arrogant grandeur once rooted in fame and now propped by delusion; Max von Mayerling (Erich von Stroheim), once a great director (which Von Stroheim was), now her devoted...
...preparation for her triumph, Holden sneaks away regularly to collaborate on his own script with a good friend's fiancée (Nancy Olson), a reader at Paramount. He and the girl fall in love. But by that time, he has become so enmeshed in the Sunset Boulevard snare that he cannot escape...
Silent Movie Vamp Gloria Swanson, 51, making a Hollywood comeback in Paramount's forthcoming Sunset Boulevard, revealed that she is also having a go at the literary life. Still at work on a book about "glamour over 40" for Prentice-Hall, she has agreed to write her autobiography for Doubleday...