Hollywood has a downside – Sunset Boulevard exposed it all

Xan Brooks, The Independent

In the autumn of 2012, a team of archeologists trekked into the Guadalupe-Nipomo dunes on the coast of California. Digging into the sand, they uncovered the ruins of a lost Egyptian city that included 21 giant sphinxes, a gate, a temple and four plaster statues of Pharaoh Ramses II. This excavation provided a fascinating piece of buried history, an insight into a forgotten world, although it proved nowhere near as old as first appearances would suggest. It was the mouldering set from The Ten Commandments (1923), a silent epic directed by Cecil B DeMille and subsequently abandoned in the desert for future generations to find.

DeMille, as it happens, appears as himself in Sunset Boulevard (1950), Billy Wilder’s classic portrait of Hollywood’s musty relics, which has itself been dug up and dusted down for its 75th birthday reissue. Sunset Boulevard is variously labelled as a noir thriller, a Gothic melodrama and an acid satire on celebrity culture, but it is also — at least in part — a comedy-horror about the accelerated nature of American time.

Its grotesque heroine, Norma Desmond, lives in a “grim sunset castle” — leaking and rat-infested — that was built in the suburbs not quite three decades before. “Norma Desmond? She must be a million years old,” marvels a studio employee to DeMille, when the woman is actually 50, around the same age that Angelina Jolie and Reese Witherspoon are today. Wilder’s film depicts a period in which the industry was moving at such a breakneck pace that the silent era already felt like ancient Egypt and the stars of the 1920s seemed as distant as the pharaohs.

Sunset Boulevard should by rights feel like a relic itself, but it’s nimble and supple and fairly springs off the screen. William Holden — a last-minute replacement for Montgomery Clift – plays the failed screenwriter Joe Gillis, locked in a mutually parasitic relationship with a faded movie queen. Gloria Swanson — herself a major 1920s star — embodies Desmond, who insists that she’s still big and it’s only the pictures that got small. Wilder’s ahead-of-his-time masterstroke was to juggle Hollywood facts with fiction and force the viewer to spot the joins. The veteran director Erich von Stroheim co-stars as Desmond’s doting butler Max (who is later revealed to have once been her director), while Buster Keaton is among the silent-screen antiques (“the waxworks,” Gillis calls them) who gather each week for forlorn games of bridge. When Desmond sits down to rewatch one of her old movies, the clip we see is from Queen Kelly (1929), an actual collaboration between Swanson and Von Stroheim.

Wilder initially envisaged his film as a romp, carefree and jokey, only for the tale to darken in the telling, veering from black comedy towards tragedy and grandeur to become as much a Hollywood totem as the 50-foot sign on Mount Lee. It’s a ghoulish tale of a recent past that won’t stay buried; a Tinseltown ghost story in which all the ghosts are alive, except for the young narrator, who’s lying face-down in the pool. “It’s funny how gentle people are with you once you’re dead,” he remarks, and this is presumably because dead people are safer, less embarrassing and less likely to rock up at Paramount Pictures, imperiously demanding to play the role of Salome.

Obviously there are many fine, upbeat movies about the business of making movies — Singin’ in the Rain (1952), Bowfinger (1999) and The Artist (2012) spring to mind — but the sour takes have a better strike-rate, possibly because they’re more interested in the truth than the lie, even when the truth is murky, disturbing and half-poisoned by fakery. Sunset Boulevard doffs its cap to F Scott Fitzgerald’s Pat Hobby Stories and Nathanael West’s savage 1939 novel The Day of the Locust in its portrait of the industry fringes, a tatty backstage world full of has-beens and also-rans, while simultaneously laying the ground for all the pictures that followed. These tell us that most Hollywood residents are hopped up on unrealisable dreams. Most feel overlooked and cheated. Some are teetering on the brink of madness.