Word: sunsets
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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...
...treatments in 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...
...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...