Word: norma
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...Dear Norma...
...London the forgotten silent-film star Norma Desmond skulked around her overdecorated mansion like a female Phantom of the Opera, remote and unreachable. In Los Angeles, even as she rages like a deranged diva, she shows endearing glints of awareness of her own tawdry emotional blackmail. A single image encapsulates the difference. When London's Norma, Patti LuPone, got her seedy protege back, by a suicide attempt, she collapsed into his arms in maudlin gratitude. The Los Angeles incarnation, Glenn Close, ends the act by lifting her bandaged arms above his embracing form, her fingers curving like talons to take...
...Wilder first envisioned beginning in a morgue with sheet-covered bodies speaking in voice-over. Although that scene did not wind up in the movie, it helps explain why Sunset Boulevard can be called the film that invented camp. Egomaniacal Norma, her slavish chauffeur Max (who turns out to be her former director and ex-husband) and down-and-out screenwriter Joe Gillis, who falls into her orbit out of sympathy and a love of luxury, are all a bit ridiculous. Where the London staging took them seriously, the Los Angeles rethink sends them up. Yet it wisely manages...
...Norma propels the score, Joe Gillis carries the story. In London, Anderson seemed bloated and corrupt long before Norma got to him. In Los Angeles, Alan Campbell's selling out is much more of an emotional journey. As Betty, the budding screenwriter with whom Gillis has a professional rebirth and fleeting flirtation, Judy Kuhn can do no wrong. As Max, George Hearn finds charm and humor in an all-but-monocled Prussian stereotype...
...physical production is much the same, but the elaborate set movements mesh better. Designer John Napier has added one brilliant flash of wit. After Norma's epic mad scene ("I'm ready for my close-up"), a scrim falls and reveals an image of Close, looking girlish and made up in the beestung-lip style of the 1920s. It is, chillingly, the only time one sees Norma's legendary screen face...