Sunset Boulevard

Steven Cohan

• Éditeur: British Film Institute
• Année: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781839024092
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Sous-sujet: Películas y vídeos

Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard was a critical and commercial success on its release in 1950 and remains a classic of film noir and one of the best-known Hollywood films about Hollywood. Both its opening, with William Holden as the screenwriter Joe Gillis floating facedown in ageing star Norma Desmond's (Gloria Swanson) pool, and lines such as 'I am big, it's the pictures that got small' are some of the most memorable in Classical Hollywood cinema. Steven Cohan's study of the film draws on original archival research to shed new light on the film's production history, and the contribution to the film's success and meanings of director Wilder, stars Holden and Swanson but also supporting actors Erich von Stroheim, Nancy Olson (who plays Betty Schaefer), Cecil B. DeMille, and Hedda Hopper, as well as costumier Edith Head, and composer Franz Waxman. Cohan considers the film both as a 'backstudio' picture (a movie about Hollywood) and as a film noir, and in the context of McCarthyism, blacklisting and the Hollywood Ten. Cohan explores how the film was marketed, its reception and afterlife, tracing how the film is at once a product of its own particular historical moment as the movie industry was transitioning out of the studio era, yet one that still speaks powerfully to contemporary audiences, and speculates on the reasons for its enduring appeal.

1 ‘A Most Unusual Motion Picture’

All right, Mr DeMille. I’m ready for my close-up.

I am big! It’s the pictures that got small.

Narrated in voiceover by a corpse floating face down in a swimming pool, Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) is, as Paramount’s advertising declared at the time, ‘a most unusual motion picture’.² The ghostly voice of Joe Gillis (William Holden) focuses most of the narrative with his voiceover commentary, as he promises at the start to reveal ‘the facts, the whole truth’ about his own death, because ‘an old-time star is involved. One of the biggest.’

Following the opening credits, with the film’s title represented by a shot of the street name stencilled on a kerb, Sunset Boulevard shows police cars careening to a mansion and shots of a young man’s body floating in the swimming pool as the homicide squad inspects and photographs it; but the story proper begins six months earlier, with Joe, an out-of-work and broke screenwriter who owes back rent on his tiny apartment and three months’ payment on his automobile, trying to elude the two repo men who have come to collect the vehicle. He goes to Paramount to pitch a baseball script, ‘Bases Loaded’, to producer Sheldrake (Fred Clark) but reader Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson) dismisses it out of hand as ‘just a rehash of something that wasn’t very good to begin with’. Joe then tries calling friends and ‘yes-men’ at various studios around town, again to no avail, and he fights with his agent, who tells him to find new management. Joe is driving on Sunset when the repo men catch sight of his car and a chase ensues, until Joe gets a blowout and pulls into the hidden driveway of a large, imposing mansion that looks old, unkempt and deserted. ‘A great big white elephant of a place,’ he describes it in voiceover. ‘The kind crazy movie people built in the crazy twenties. A neglected house gets an unhappy look. This one had it in spades.’

This neglected, unhappy house belongs to silent screen star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson). Her career ended with the arrival of sound two decades earlier and now she lives alone with just one servant, her butler Max Von Mayerling (Erich von Stroheim). They mistake Joe for an undertaker who is due to arrive for the burial of Norma’s deceased pet chimpanzee. When Norma learns that Joe is a screenwriter she wants him to look at ‘Salome’, a massive script she has written for her ‘return’ to the screen (not a ‘comeback’, a word she detests). Joe thinks that, just as he has outwitted the repo men by hiding his car, he can take advantage of Norma and earn a lot of money working with her on the script. ‘I felt kind of pleased with the way I handled the situation,’ he comments in voiceover.

But it soon turns out that Norma handles Joe more skilfully. Before he agrees to stay she has had Max prepare the room over the garage for him to spend the night. When Joe wakes the next morning he discovers that Max has also paid the back rent and moved all his things there; later, when it rains and the ceiling leaks, Max moves him into ‘the husband’s room’ in the main house. Norma lets the repo men take away his car, removing his independence. She buys him expensive clothes and gives him jewellery; but the only cash he ends up getting is some loose change she wins at her bridge games with what he calls ‘the waxworks’–Buster Keaton, H. B. Warner and Anna Q. Nilsson. On New Year’s Eve, Norma confesses that she is madly in love with Joe, and he flees from her declaration, hoping to take refuge at his friend Artie Green’s (Jack Webb) place.

Artie is an assistant director hosting a New Year’s Eve party with a large crowd of Hollywood’s below-the-line labourers and bit players. There Joe runs into Artie’s fiancée, who, as it happens, is Betty Schaefer. Feeling guilty for her harsh dismissal of ‘Bases Loaded’ in Sheldrake’s office, she has found in ‘Dark Windows’, one of Joe’s older stories, a six-page flashback that she thinks has the potential to expand into something good. The two engage in good-natured repartee until Joe learns that Norma has attempted suicide following his rejection of her earlier that evening. His guilt prompts a return to Sunset Boulevard, where he willingly becomes Norma’s gigolo lover in earnest.

Now Sunset Boulevard balances two intersecting plots about ambitious people on the margins of Hollywood. Norma has Max deliver her script of ‘Salome’ to the famous real-life director Cecil B. DeMille, with whom she had made many silent pictures. When she gets a call from Gordon Cole at Paramount, she assumes he is a DeMille underling; after waiting for the director himself to call, she finally pays a visit to DeMille at the studio, where he is directing Samson and Delilah (1949). Cole only wanted to borrow for another movie Norma’s expensive, hand-crafted foreign car, an Isotta-Fraschini, but she thinks DeMille plans to do ‘Salome’ with her starring. When Norma arrives at the soundstage the people working there remember her and cluster around in adoration.

Meanwhile, Joe, who by this time has settled into his role as Norma’s younger kept man, sees Betty walking to her cubicle on the lot and follows her there. He still refuses to collaborate with her on a script but soon succumbs to the temptation and, with Artie away on location and the studio deserted nights, the two work together in Betty’s tiny office on an untitled love story based on the ‘Dark Windows’ flashback. Each evening Joe takes the Isotta-Fraschini to the Paramount lot once Norma, fatigued from the rigorous beauty regimen she undergoes to prepare for her anticipated return to the screen, falls asleep, or so he thinks. As they work on their script, enjoying their collaboration, Betty and Joe fall in love and he believes that he may be able to keep her from learning about his relationship with Norma; but the jealous older woman has become aware of his night-time disappearances and finds in Joe’s coat pocket the typescript of his and Betty’s script. She telephones Betty to make her wonder about where, how and with whom Joe lives, hoping to scare off her rival. Joe intercepts this call and tells Betty to come to Norma’s mansion on Sunset Boulevard in order to see for herself.

Joe decides to do the noble thing. He confesses the truth about his relationship with Norma to Betty, who refuses to listen and orders him to leave with her immediately. After sending her back to Artie by pretending that he enjoys the benefits of being kept by a wealthy older woman, Joe packs the clothes he had when he first arrived, intending to return to his hometown of Dayton, Ohio, and his old job on the local newspaper. Hysterical and becoming crazed, Norma begs Joe to stay, declaring she will shoot herself if he leaves her. He refuses to give her threat credence but tells her the truth: that Max has been writing the numerous fan letters she has been getting all these years, and that DeMille was too kind-hearted to tell her that Paramount only wanted her car and has no intention of making ‘Salome’. These revelations cause her final breakdown. ‘No one ever leaves a star,’ Norma whispers. ‘That’s what makes one a star.’ Joe leaves despite her pleas and she shoots him twice in the back and once, when he turns around, in the stomach. His lifeless body falls into the swimming pool.

Joe’s death returns us to the film’s opening scene, with the police, reporters, gossip columnist Hedda Hopper and newsreel men clustered around Norma, now lost in a fantasy world. ‘The dream she had clung to so desperately had enfolded her,’ the ghostly Joe intones. To get her to leave with them, the police encourage her to think the person shooting newsreel footage is DeMille’s cameraman and that Max, positioned near him, is DeMille. As she makes her way down the staircase, writhing sensuously in character as the temptress Salome, she stops short because she is ‘too happy’ to continue, so delighted to be back at work. ‘You see, this is my life. It always will be. There’s nothing else–just us and the cameras and those wonderful people out there in the dark.’ Declaring she is now ready for her close-up, Norma moves towards the camera, her close-up blurring as a dissolve to the end title card and cast list.

Sunset Boulevard had its world premiere on 10 August 1950 at Radio City Music Hall in New York City, where it had a highly profitable seven-week run according to Variety. The following week it began a successful engagement at the Carlton cinema in London’s West End, and a week after that it opened at the two Paramount theatres in Los Angeles before rolling out to other major cities during September and October. Initially, the film did very well at the box office–at least until it went to smaller theatres ‘in the sticks’, as Variety put it, where it met a more lacklustre reception ‘in a number of minor openings’ (‘“Sunset” Looks to Music Hall Record’ 1950). In his favourable review James Agee mused that ‘this is essentially a picture-maker’s picture. I very much enjoy and respect it, but it seems significant to me that among other interested amateurs there is a wide difference of reaction, ranging from moderate liking or disappointment all the way to boredom, intense dislike, or even contempt’ (1950: 283). Nonetheless, in Variety’s listing of the ninety top-grossing films of 1950 in the US and Canada, Sunset Boulevard placed twenty-ninth with $2,300,000 in rentals, the amount returned to Paramount from theatres (‘Top Grossers’ 1951).

From the start, Sunset Boulevard was well received by critics and people in the industry, for whom invitation-only previews had become a hot ticket prior to its theatrical openings. As Edwin Schallert (1950) noted in his Los Angeles Times review, ‘“Sunset Boulevard” arrives well heralded in advance, and its excellence is fast becoming a legend.’ The praise culminated in eleven Academy Award nominations, including ones for Best Picture, for each of its main performers–William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim and Nancy Olson–and for Wilder’s direction and his collaboration with D. M. Marshman Jr and producer Charles Brackett on the screenplay. At the ceremony in April 1951 it won three: for the writing, Franz Waxman’s music score and the black-and-white art and set decoration.

Los Angeles Times, 20 August 1950, Part IV, p. 3

Los Angeles Times, 14 September 1950, p. 65

Today, Sunset Boulevard remains unforgettable as well as unusual. It is considered a prime example of film noir and its story of Hollywood is still one of the darkest and one of the best. Its many quotable lines of dialogue have entered popular culture’s lexicon. The two most famous ones, quoted at the start of this chapter, were ranked seventh and twenty-fourth in the American Film Institute’s 100 favourite movie quotes. Sunset Boulevard entered the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 1989 and the American Film Institute placed it sixteenth among the Greatest Movies of All Time. Its influence has been significant, too; subsequent films about the motion picture industry, such as Robert Altman’s The...

Table des matières

• Cover
• BFI Film Classics
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 ‘A Most Unusual Motion Picture’
• 2 Making Sunset Boulevard
• 3 ‘A Hollywood Story’
• 4 After Sunset Boulevard
• Notes
• Credits
• Bibliography
• eCopyright