Unlike its Tortured Villain/Anti-Hero Billy Wilder's wickedly funny Sunset Boulevard Will Always Remain Forever Young

It can be hard to believe that Billy Wilder’s 1950 Film Noir masterpiece Sunset Boulevard is seventy-two years old since co-writer-director Wilder’s sensibility remains so wickedly contemporary.

Nearly three quarters of a century later we still haven’t caught up to Wilder and Sunset Boulevard. We never will. Wilder will forever remain ahead of us. Seventy-two years of relentless parody, imitation, homage, canonization, deification, musical adaptation, quoting and misquoting have done nothing to dull Sunset Boulevard’s sharpness.

Wilder will forever be the most modern of classic filmmakers, even when his subject was Hollywood’s haunted past.

Sunset Boulevard is consequently an exceedingly hip, smart, cynical and edgy modern masterpiece that looked back at a bygone era of film with a combination of affection, mortification, pity and abject horror.

Sunset Boulevard occupies a place of distinction high in the pantheon of great Film Noirs and it would be impossible to talk about great movies about the film business (the subject of my forthcoming book The Fractured Mirror) without it being in the mix. Yet Sunset Boulevard is also a Gothic melodrama, the bleakest of black comedies, Hollywood Grand Guignol and a horror movie about the way the industry turns mortals into Gods for the sake of driving them mad and destroying them.

From the vantage point of 2022, Norma Desmond is shockingly young. In Sunset Boulevard, the living personification of the dying, half-mad dreams of the silent film world is only fifty years old. To put things into perspective, that’s a year younger than Jennifer Lopez’s current age. It seems safe to assume that Lopez would not be up for the role in a contemporary remake.

Madness, desperation and soul-sickness can age a person, however. They certainly seem to have aged Norma Desmond. In a hypnotic, iconic performance of great quality and quantity, silent screen legend Gloria Swanson plays Norma Desmond as a great beauty whose cracked personality and pathological, tragicomic need for validation and attention render her incongruously ugly, even monstrous.

Then again at fifty Swanson had the misfortune to personify a past Hollywood was already well on its way to forgetting since it no longer suited its purposes. In a world of sound and Technicolor, where film was locked in a seemingly life or death battle with the forces of television, the famous faces of silent cinema seemingly belonged in museums rather than onscreen in new movies.

Norma powerfully embodies one form of Hollywood desperation, namely the terror of having once risen to the highest heights of fame and glory, only to fall just as precipitously and dramatically into a deep pit of obsolescence and irrelevance.

Our devilishly funny anti-hero Joe Gillis (William Holden) represents a markedly different but overlapping form of soul-deep show-business angst. As Sunset Boulevard opens, his small-time screenwriter is staring down the spiritual death of having to finally and conclusively concede that his show-business dreams will never come to fruition and he will have to return to the Midwest in shame, just another pathetic dreamer who thought he had what it takes to make it in a business as brutal as movies and discovered otherwise.

Sunset Boulevard legendarily opens with its hero, narrator and protagonist’s bullet-riddled corpse floating lifeless in Norma Desmond’s pool. In a particularly audacious move, Wilder and co-screenwriters Charles Brackett and D. M. Marshman Jr. begin their bleak show-biz morality tale at the very end, by giving away the ending.

In an even more auspicious and successful stunt, Sunset Boulevard is narrated by a dead man so there’s never any question as to the character’s ultimate fate. Joe Gillis is even more innately doomed than most folks who try to make a living in film. He finally realizes his dream of living in a world of movie stars, swimming pools and mansions in the darkest possible sense.

In a bid to outrun creditors looking to repossess his jalopy for non-payment, Joe ends up ducking into a spooky, seemingly abandoned mansion. The handsome cynic with soul ends up getting mistaken for a monkey mortician sent to handle a beloved chimpanzee’s burial by Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), the lady of the house and her mysterious butler Max von Mayerling (Erich von Stroheim).

The writer with the grifter’s soul needs a place to hide out from the world and his creditors, a large enough influx of money to keep him from having to return to Ohio in disgrace and a job, preferably involving screenwriting.

Joe stumbles onto all of these things when he agrees to help Norma Desmond rework a script she is deluded enough to think will be her ticket back onto the Hollywood A-list. It’s based on Salome but it’s less a feasible blueprint for a movie than a flamboyant expression of its creator’s madness that no amount of re-writing and revising could turn into a passable screenplay.

But Desmond’s interest in Joe is more than professional. She wants something beyond a script doctor. The aging former movie star with the Texas-sized ego and even bigger insecurities wants someone to make her feel young and desirable, someone to love, someone to fill her lonely life with youth and sex and energy.

So our morally compromised anti-hero agrees to a Faustian bargain with his wealthy and howlingly mad new benefactor. Joe becomes the rich older woman’s kept man. In exchange for a cushy, albeit depressing life in the endless shadow of Norma’s long-ago fame, he allows Norma to hold onto the delusion that he nurses romantic feelings towards her, that he sees her as a desirable woman in her prime, not a sad old lady reduced to buying companionship.

Gender is another way in which Sunset Boulevard was ahead of its time. The central dynamic is antithetical to the norm of the time. Norma is the older, richer, more powerful partner who uses  money as a means of control while Joe is the young eye candy who looks great in a bathing suit and is grudgingly willing to trade youth and sex for money and gifts and comfort and a brief respite from struggling and hustling and always ultimately coming up short.

In a haunted house filled with framed images of her younger self that only highlight the cruelty of time and the subtle sadism of the aging process, Norma plays cards with fellow fading stars so ancient and lifeless that Joe witheringly refers to them as the “waxworks” whose likes include Buster Keaton, H.B. Warner and Anna Q. Nilsson, all titans of silent cinema just like Swanson and Von Stroheim, and watches her own movies over and over again, with Joe as her captive, pet and helper.

Joe periodically escapes the mausoleum/morbid Norma Desmond museum he reluctantly calls home to collaborate with Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson, in an Oscar-nominated performance), an ambitious script reader looking to segue into screenwriting and script development.

The former actress is engaged to Joe’s friend but that does not prevent their professional relationship from veering intoxicatingly and scarily into something more personal and romantic.

Working on a script that might actually get made brings Joe back into a world of light and youth and hope, that doesn’t reek of death and sadness and shattered dreams.

Norma has cinematic ambitions of her own, of course, and makes a disastrous trip back to her old home on the Paramount lot, ostensibly to talk to Cecil B. DeMille about the big comeback movie they will be making together.

Norma has only been offscreen for twenty years but Hollywood has changed so dramatically in that time that her time in the show-business wilderness might as well be two millennia.

Swanson does more acting here with her big, impossibly expressive eyes and hands over the course of a single scene than other actors accomplish with their whole bodies over the course of entire careers.

Swanson delivers a performance rooted in the outsized emotions and wild theatricality of the silent era. Norma grows more and more detached from a reality that has nothing to offer her but rejection and the horrors of time until she can no longer take the pain and suffers a total and complete mental break that renders her unable to delineate between the real world and the haunted movie palace of her imagination.

Like the faded diva she played so unforgettably, Swanson had not been a fixture of the silver screen for decades when she scored one of the greatest comebacks in film history playing a towering icon inextricably interwoven into the fabric of movie history.

So it’s a little surprising that after her Oscar-nominated triumph here Swanson only appeared in three more movies before her death in 1983 at 84, making her swan song with Airport 1975.

Then again no role or film could possibly measure up to Norma Desmond and Sunset Boulevard, particularly the ones a famously sexist and ageist industry might have to offer a woman of a certain age like Swanson post Sunset Boulevard.

Like Norma Desmond, Swanson was, in a sense, a victim of her own extraordinary success. In the sound film she will be remembered for, Swanson created an icon for the ages who occupies such a place of distinction in the minds of moviegoers everywhere that it can be hard, if not impossible, to see the legendary actress as anyone else. In our minds, Swanson will always be Norma Desmond, which is simultaneously a victory in that she helped create one of the most unforgettable heavies in film history and a tragedy because of the way it so thoroughly overshadowed everything else she accomplished over the course of her extraordinary career.

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