Every couple of months or so, my husband and I play a game called Movie Heaven & Movie Hell- in which we each pick 7 movies we’d love to watch, and 7 films we think will be terrible, then flip a coin to decide which one we’re watching. Yesterday, it was between my ‘Heaven’ choice of Sunset Boulevard and his ‘Hell’ choice of The ‘A’ Team Movie.
Fortunately for us, fate smiled and we got the noir classic.
We’ve had some bum runs during Heaven & Hell in the past, sacrificing a night of quality entertainment for tweenage vampire dross or try-hard stoner shenanigans. But finally, we lucked out, and won the flip for Sunset Boulevard, which neither of us had seen. As it’s directed by Billy Wilder, who also helmed one of our all time favourites Some Like It Hot, we figured we’d be in safe hands, and anyone’s whose clapped eyes on me in the last 18 months knows my sartorial interest in the early 20th Century- so I’d at least get some eye candy and wardrobe inspiration.
The film’s narrated by all-round heel Joe Gillis (Wiliam Holden), who starts the proceedings by being dead face-down in a swimming pool like he’s been partying at Michael Barrymore’s. He tells the story of the events leading up to his murder in flashback.
Joe’s a hack writer who is down on his luck. He’s behind on his rent and car payments, and a hot female reader at Paramount thinks his latest script is a lot of tot. Desperate to prevent the repo men taking his wheels, he hides his car in the garage of a faded mansion on Sunset Boulevard, inhabited by forgotten silent movie star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) and her bullet-headed butler, Max (Erich von Stroheim).
Never one to pass up an opportunity, grifter Joe quickly manipulates Norma’s enormous ego, and she enlists him to edit a (terrible) script she’s been working on for her big comeback (“I hate that word. My return!”). She moves Joe into her home without asking his permission and keeps him as a gigolo, much to his discomfort.
A gorgeous nightmare of arched eyebrows, turbans, clawed hands and snarling teeth, Norma’d be terrifying to run into on a moonless night. Her voice fluctuates between a hiss or malevolent growl, and she grabs your attention in the way that being locked in a room with an angry leopard would. She’s like a cross between the White Witch and a spider and her demeanour suggests she can eat men like Joe for breakfast. Her clothes are amazing and she’s crazy in the way the only the mega-rich can be. Needless to say, I have a huge crush on her.
But despite her fierce personality and formidable appearance, Norma is actually vulnerable, lonely, insecure, deluded and clingy. She lives in a fantasy world where she’s still adored by millions, the illusion aided by her butler, who drones out assurances of her stardom to anyone within earshot (“A maharaja traveled all the way from India to beg of her a silk stocking. He strangled himself with it.”). But this fantasy, like her pride, is frail as gossamer and when reality breaks through it’s to ruinous effect.
While not really a comedy, Sunset Boulevard has some great lines and is surprisingly morbid- at times, it almost feels like a classic horror movie. Despite being showered in gifts, Joe quickly begins to feel like a prisoner in the vast, empty mansion, full of looming shadows and rats in the pool, while Norma’s personality switches between Medusa and a lonely old cat lady in the blink of a heavily mascara’d eye.
Boasting cameos from huge stars of the silent era like Buster Keaton, and at times seeming quite close to the knuckle when it comes to Swanson and von Stroheim’s own careers, Sunset Boulevard is both poignant and keenly observed. Considering how fame obsessed the 21st Century is, it also feels really ahead of its time. In an era where we have people willing to eat a kangaroo anus on national television in order to put some shine back into their star, it’s worth revisiting to see what a really classy celebrity comeback looks like.
So finally, a Heaven choice! Come back tomorrow and see what good/terrible movie we ended up sitting through tonight!
