- The mansion from Sunset Boulevard is my favorite cinematic house, hands down. It's partially the furniture, including the bedframe shaped like the prow of a ship and the chaise lounge chairs that adorn seemingly every room. But it's also the magnificent spiral staircase that overlooks the tile floor where Rudolph Valentino once danced. And the painting that can be hoisted up to reveal a movie screen, not to mention the pipe organ that wheezes with each passing gust of wind. And then there are all those portraits -- painted, photographed, and movie stills alike -- of silent film legend Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), back when she was in her prime. If you said that in front of Miss Desmond, she would insist that she was still in her prime and had never been otherwise.
- When we first meet the film's narrator, Joe Gillis (William Holden), he's floating dead in a swimming pool. But let's back up a few months, as the film does, to a time when Gillis was an alive-but-unlucky screenwriter who couldn't even afford his own car. While dodging the men trying to repossess said vehicle, Joe pulls into one of those old Hollywood mansions, you know, "the kind crazy movie people built in the crazy 20s." The movie person is Miss Desmond, naturally, and she's in the process of making funeral arrangements for her recently deceased chimpanzee. Never one to heed a warning sign, Joe sticks around and spends the night in the guest room so that he can assist Miss Desmond with her unwieldy spec script. The live-in butler, Max (Erich von Stroheim), notices everything but doesn't say much.
- Advance a few weeks and the seams are starting to show. Joe resents the fact that Miss Desmond buys him vicuna sportscoats and shows him off to her silent film-era friends, whom he wryly describes as "The Waxworks" (played by real-life silent film stars, including Buster Keaton!). Furthermore, Joe is skeptical that his 50-year-old benefactor is capable of a comeback -- sorry -- "a return to the millions of people who have never forgiven (her) for deserting the screen." The breaking point is a New Year's Eve party, complete with music, cake, and champagne, but with Joe as the only guest. He escapes to a party hosted by his friend Artie (Jack Webb), whose girlfriend Betty (Nancy Olson) once savaged one of Joe's scripts. But Miss Desmond has a way of keeping people in her orbit, and Joe soon finds himself writing for her during the day and sneaking off to polish scripts with Betty at night. Read into that what you will.
- The biggest surprise in Sunset Boulevard doesn't involve Joe, though -- after all, we discovered his eventual fate in the film's first five minutes. No, the biggest shock is delivered by the redoubtable Max, who we learn was originally a silent film director. The big reveal, however, is that he was Miss Desmond's first husband! Incidentally, Max has also been sending Miss Desmond fake fan letters and shielding her from the discovery that Paramount's interest in her has much more to do with their vintage Isotta-Fraschini automobile than with Cecil B. DeMille's devotion to her. Incidentally, DeMille plays himself in this film, although he is conspicuously absent from the film's final scene in which Miss Desmond famously announces to him that she's ready for her close-up.
- Between this film and Double Indemnity, it is a matter of scientific fact that Billy Wilder directed the best film noir (and that John F. Seitz was its cinematographer). I'm honestly not sure which film I prefer, although Sunset Boulevard better captures Wilder's famously cynical sense of humor, with Wilder and co-writers Charles Brackett and D. M. Marshman Jr. deploying such bon mots as "We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!" and "I am big. It's the pictures that got small." Of course, none of this would have worked without Gloria Swanson, who delivers one of film's most memorable, and often uncomfortably autobiographical, performances as an actress who simply cannot conceive of a world in which she is not a star. But let's not forget that the essence of Sunset Boulevard is also contained in that wonderful mansion, which "seemed to have been stricken with a kind of creeping paralysis. Out of beat with the rest of the world, crumbling apart in slow motion."
- I missed mentioning appearances by Fred Clark, Lloyd Gough, and Hedda Hopper, the last of whom played herself.
- And get me Gordon Cole!
