Blvd. of Broken Dreams

Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950)

The sun has set. The curtains have fell for the last show. And Sunset Boulevard is a mesmerizing experience. While it’s the perfect classic Hollywood movie, it is at the same time a critique of Hollywood. It is an examination of dreams and the death of it, grand illusions and obsession. Sunset Boulevard is in fact one of the famous streets in Hollywood flanked by the usual glitz and glamour that veils the decadence of hopeful dreams and the stars who continue to cling on to it.

Joe Gillis (William Holden) is writer whose latest project might have to be shelved. He is broke and he is hounded by car insurance agents who will relinquish his only possession, his car. On a chase along Sunset Blvd. the car breaks down and he is forced to park in an old mansion, where a psychotic silent movie star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), is wallowing in her forgotten stardom. She has written herself a screenplay that according to her would mark her comeback to the screen, “to the audience who would never forgive her for leaving them.” Truth is they don’t make those movies anymore. The audience has already discovered the wonders of the ‘talkies’.

Though the audience has forgotten about this sensation, one fan has truly remained loyal, the only one who still believes “that Madam is the greatest star of them all.” He is Max, the butler, whom we would later learn as Norma’s first director and the first of her three husbands. He has painstakingly supplied Norma’s delusions through daily fan mails that he himself wrote. He made her a star and he loved her that much, not leaving her despite the fact the Norma is already falling for Joe, who she commissioned to help her write the script for her comeback movie.

On the other hand, there is Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson), the personification of the Hollywood dream. She is a script reader but also an aspiring scriptwriter who hopes to make it big. Joe, who begins to feel the entrapment of the mansion and Norma herself, helps Betty draft her story during the wee hours. Betty falls in love with Joe during the process. But things are complicated for Joe. We are being hinted that he enjoys the perks being Norma’s apple of the eye but there comes a mixture of pity, patience and respect for the poor Norma.

What is brilliant about Wilder’s intimate examination of the characters and the nature of stardom in general is how it managed not only to be relevant and thematically contemporary but also by its noble attempts to be realistic as possible. The places and characters are real. Swanson’s Norma Desmond is perhaps one of the greatest performances of all time. Her eyebrow-raising and over-the-top facial expressions are indicative of a silent movie star. (She even did a Chaplin impersonation.) In fact, this might also be Swanson portraying herself, who was among the greatest silent stars of the time. Erich von Stroheim who plays Max, the one time director, may also be portraying himself. Von Stroheim is one of the great directors of silent movies along with D.W. Griffiths and Cecile B. De Mille. De Mille himself appears on the movie as the director who is being insisted by Norma to direct the script she’s writing.

The last ten minutes of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard is one of the best cinematic moments of all time, critics and film historians touted it to be. If I was a young film buff during the early 50s and was among the first to marvel at this magnificent storytelling, I wouldn’t have forgotten it and will remain in a top ten list or something like that. Who knows, if I live up to watch the movies that I should, it would probably be on the running. As of the moment, it already is.