Billy Wilder's Sunset Blvd. was to 1950 what Robert Altman's The Player was to 1992: a wicked-mischievous director using a murder-mystery framework as a means of getting beyond the iron gates and showing us how Tinseltown really operates. Spoiler alert: it's even more fucked-up than you may have thought. The dead man is hack writer Joe Gillis (William Holden, chasing gigolo charm with a shot of alcoholic self-loathing), found floating facedown in a swimming pool, one more Hollywood casualty. The mystery is how he got there, which Gillis narrates himself. Over his final weeks - which Wilder and fellow scribes Charles Brackett and D.M. Marshman Jr. describe in flashback - he gets an education in how the movie business of 1950 works: agents who spend their days on the golf course, producers who feed cherished passion projects to the machine, hoping they'll come out as saleable Betty Hutton softball musicals, burnt-out talent banished to the Hollywood Hills, whether to be abused and exploited or to have their eccentricities indulged by a coterie of hangers-on. One such case in point: Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), siren of the silents, whose drive Gillis pulls into while fleeing his creditors. Norma has a glowering manservant (Erich von Stroheim, who in real life directed Swanson in 1929's Queen Kelly, quoted here), a pipe organ in the parlour of her mansion and - by way of extra Gothicness - a dead monkey lying in state in one of the bedrooms. (Bubbles, anyone?) As the blithely unfazed Joe assumes the role of Norma's new pet, entrusted with writing her long-imagined comeback vehicle, and thereafter moves from kept man into terminal codependency, the Austro-Hungarian Wilder - at this point relatively new in town - began to poke around in the Tinseltown shadows, bringing a fresh, wryly critical eye to an industry that had proceeded largely unchecked for the better part of fifty years. It was analysis of a sort: Hollywood forced to look at itself, to confront its own illusions and delusions.
No sight here is weirder - and more compelling - than Swanson, giving some of the most idiosyncratic line readings in the whole 1950s canon ("Cut away from ME?"); one of the enduring fascinations of this performance is trying to parse how much of it Wilder directed and how much the actress made herself undirectable, so determined to launch a real-world comeback that she shot off from this script at quite some tangent. In some respects, Swanson's choices are apt, and you understand why the savvy Wilder might have nodded them through: it's a rare example of a silent-era performance, wild-eyed and trembling, in a sound movie. One reason Norma Desmond faded away is that, like so many silent-era stars, she couldn't (and can't) move on. (And we can't take our eyes off Swanson, whether out of admiration or fear.) But then this is also an all-timer script, another from that run of Wilder miracles finding wit and wisdom in deeply unhealthy relationships: between man and bottle in The Lost Weekend, the press, public and the truth in Ace in the Hole, vulnerable hearts and cold, hard capitalism in The Apartment. The wisdom here isn't exclusively about the business, though there's plenty of that ("A dozen press officers working overtime can do terrible things to the human spirit", "Funny how gentle people get with you once you're dead"); it also pertains to any feckless, nihilist, self-sabotaging man, about women deranged by vanity and insecurity, what happens after the spotlight moves on and all people want you for is your car. Exiled from a world that considers them long-dead, Joe and Norma are trapped in a mansion that seems ever more like a chintzy mausoleum: old movies, old moviestars (the bridge night is still a jolt, haunted by ghosts of Hollywood's then-recent past), old cars, old songs. What year is this? (The dangers of nostalgia in both art and life: David Lynch borrowed the minor character name Gordon Cole for Twin Peaks, and would circle back this way for Mulholland Dr.) Over subsequent decades, brand Sunset has become a whole lot less weird: a point of reference for lesser films, the basis of endless Hallowe'en costumes and drag acts, eventually even an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. In its original state, Wilder's most expressionistic film, it remains a skinprickling synthesis of horror and noir: a projector-beam Rebecca, gossip with claws, a real dream-factory nightmare.
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