Sunset Boulevard

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Day 163 of 365 of my year long challenge Week 24: Lights, Camera, Action! ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Like Orlando, Sunset Boulevard is a film I had to study at uni. It was, in fact, the first I had to study and the only one to have really stuck with me. Sunset Boulevard also opened up "Old" Hollywood and "old" cinema to me in ways I'd never fully appreciated. So, to my excitable lecturer Duncan, you have my undying gratitude. We open with a body floating in the pool of a Sunset Boulevard mansion. Joe Gillis (William Holden) is dead but we flashback six months earlier to a time when he is on the brink of losing everything. A screenwriter struggling to sell his work, Joe's car is up for repossession forcing him on the run. Hiding in this same mansion, Joe comes across the former silent movie star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson). After learning who he is, Norma hires Joe to edit the script that will be her comeback performance. Moving him into her mansion, Joe and Norma become entangled in a vicious game of fantasy that ultimately takes a toll on them both. If I had to pick just one film to represent film as an industry, Sunset Boulevard would be the one. Made right at the end of the studio era, it straddles this very fine line between "Old" and "New" Hollywood. It's a satire, a critique and a voice of both past and present and just about every part of the film revels in it. Billy Wilder goes about creating a version of Hollywood that is so close to the real thing I can only imagine it hurt at the time. In fact, there are minor roles in which actors are just themselves (Buster Keaton as an extra anyone) and times when Swanson and Max von Stroheim slip into their own skins before returning to the exaggerated roles. It's an amusing, brave and insightful trick that does two things. First, it pulls back the curtain on Hollywood and exposes some of the inner clockwork, and second, it equally and conversely reinforces the mystique and glamour of Hollywood. However, you spin it, Sunset Boulevard is the quintessential movie about movies. Wilder's brave, sharp and cheeky writing is as good as ever here. Norma, Joe and everyone else are written with such awareness it's hard to imagine them as anything other than real people. Holden does a superb job as the man's man who suddenly finds himself locked in opulence. Whether he really likes being a kept man or not, Holden puts his all into this man with a dubious conscience. The powerhouse of things though is Gloria Swanson. Her own story fairly matches that of her character and from her entrance, the intensity never settles. She's bought into the Hollywood myth as much as her fans and every lingering stare and near parody melodrama builds towards her eventual craziness. She's a character of pity, adoration, intensity and ultimately fascination. Like Joe, we're trapped in Swanson's off-kilter charisma. It's a credit to Wilder that so many of his films have gone down as absolute classics and none other than the one about movies as the top of the lot. Every moment is measured, every word sharp, every look and action deliberate, it's like Sunset Boulevard knew that it would succeed upon release and ultimately, its only challenge would then be its measure of timelessness. Despite its setting, its context and the references strewn about, Sunset Boulevard, like so much else Wilder had a hand in, is as timelessly entertaining now as it was more than 60 years ago. That's the trick of any good film though isn't it. Every film ought to strive for something that will stand the test of time and somehow, Wilder find a formula for himself. Take away all the analysis and critiquing and all you're left with in Sunset Boulevard is a tight, sharp and utterly entertaining film. From end to end you're gripped and it doesn't matter how or by what, just that you are.