Free from the timetable of classes and meetings, and more meetings, I have given in to the temptation of Dendy’s classics and gone to several movies on Monday morning, while Kate goes off to good works. Today it was “Sunset Boulevard” (1950) With Gloria Swanson, William Holden, Erich von Stroheim, and Nancy Olson, along with Jack Webb (of Dragnet) before he got his teeth straightened. To see it on television is nothing compared to the wide screen: Marvelous. A very excellent print that gives us the crisp light and dark and many shades between that only black-and-white can do.
Leaving aside all the lore and gossip, the parade of celebrities, the contrivances of staging that swimming pool scene, after all that it is Gloria Swanson who dominates everything, and not just the scenes she is in, but through her presence manifested in the house and its furnishings, in the soul of von Stroheim, and seen or unseen clutching always at Holden. It offers a parallel love story of two women and one man. The man is Holden and the women are the aging relic Swanson and the fresh-faced ingenue Olson. He disappoints both because at his core, well, he has no core, though Olson shows him the way out and after he sacrifices himself to drive her away, he seems resolved to break the cancerous link with Swanson. Or is he…. we will never know.
It is a talkie, of course, and Swanson has some remarkable lines penned by the one and only Billy Wilder, and she by turns spits, drawls, mumbles, hisses, and declares them, all with lift of the chin, the bulge of the eyes, and turn of wrist. An Oscar does not seem a high enough award. With her increasing histrionics von Stroheim is the perfect foil, a rigidly controlled man whose unrequited love drives him to accept every humiliation with the merest flicker of an eyebrow.
Hollywood eats its own, and in 1973 Holden reprised this film in reverse as an older man captivated by a much younger woman who barely notices him in “Breezy,” and it was directed by Clint Eastwood.
No one ever says it better than the dean of movie reviews Roger Ebert:
http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-sunset-boulevard-1950
Cut-and-paste the link above to see his comments.
Skip to content