NFR Project: 'Sunset Boulevard' (1950)

 

NFR Project: “Sunset Boulevard”

Dir: Billy Wilder

Scr: Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, D.M. Marshan Jr.

Pho: John F. Seitz

Ed: Doane Harrison, Arthur Schmidt

Premiere: August 10, 1950

110 min.

It’s a monumental story; it’s no surprise it inspired a lavish Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. It’s operatic. It’s a noir. It’s a black comedy. It’s a character study.

That a film can do so many things at once is a tribute to its director, Billy Wilder. His ability to distill the exact amount of footage to tell a story richly, serious or comic, is legendary, and he is rightly featured many times in the National Film Registry.

Sunset Boulevard is a masterpiece. Richard Corliss called it a horror story; David Thomson notes its irony in that the guy who wanted a Hollywood swimming pool ends up face-down dead in his. There are a host of interpretations of the meanings to be found in Wilder’s film – so much the better for Wilder. The movie welcomes a multiplicity of thoughts, as a great film does.

It’s yet another “movie about the movies” story, about how Hollywood is all fakery and ego. Yet at its heart is a titanically tragic figure, an insane former silent screen goddess whose predatory claws turn everything around into death and waste. Norma Desmond is played by Gloria Swanson, who herself was a “forgotten” actress from the Silent Era, a great star who made millions and ruled as royalty in Tinsel Town.

Swanson here plays the role of her career. Norma is a monster of self-regard, insulated by wealth from reality, living cocooned in her past greatness. She lives in the decayed grandeur of her Hollywood mansion. Her narcissism consumes everyone around her, and into her orbit drifts lackluster young screenwriter Joe Gillis, played by William Holden in the first of his trademark “lovable heel” roles. Joe is a hack; he hasn’t sold a screenplay in years, he is behind on his rent, and he refuses to quit the movie business and go back to life as a copy editor in Dayton, Ohio.

Holden narrates the flashback from the afterlife, as his dead body is floating in Norma Desmond’s pool. It seems that Joe pulled in to Norma’s demesne one day, fleeing from men looking to repossess his car. She mistakes him for a funeral director; she is burying her pet monkey. Joe agrees to look over a script she contemplates as being for her big comeback (it is wretchedly awful). Norma is rich; she finds out he’s broke, pays off the landlord, and brings all his stuff to her house. She needs a new pet.

Slowly, Norma starts grooming him, taking him out with her, and eventually – yes, we are given to believe – sleeping with him. Swanson as Desmond is a grotesque caricature of a woman, but there are moments when you can see a ruined beauty in her tortured gaze. It is conceivable that Joe whores himself out, given his cynicism and self-contempt.

Norma is served only by her butler, Max, played by Eric von Stroheim (“the Hun you love to hate!”). Stroheim was a key director of the Silent Era; his comedown to playing a butler was not lost on studio viewers. Max writes fan mail to Norma on the sly, to keep her illusion alive. It later turns out that Max was a great director – and Norma’s first husband. (We watch Norma watching Swanson in Queen Kelly [1929] . . . which was directed by Stroheim! in her private theater.)

Joe’s lifeline to sanity is Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson), fellow screenwriter and fiancée of Joe’s best friend. She reviews (and pans) his latest work . . . but then declares she sees some good in it, and proposes that they work on it together. Gradually, they fall in love.

Meanwhile, Norma thinks she is wanted to star in a new film for director Cecil B. DeMille; actually, his production sstaff wants to use her vintage automobile. Self-deluded, she begins planning her big comeback.

Joe starts sneaking out at night to work on the screenplay. Norma finds out and calls Betty. Joe reveals that he is a gigolo, and claims to prefer it. In short, he drives Betty away. He angrily tells Norma the truth – she is a has-been. He then goes to pack and head back to Dayton – and Norma drills him three times with an automatic.

The coda to the film is the most memorable closing scene of all. Norma, now completely insane and surrounded by police, is coaxed down from her bedroom by newsreel cameras she mistakes for DeMille’s crew. Down the stairs she floats like a ghost, with a leering rictus of a face. “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up,” she says. And walks straight into the camera as the vision of her face diffuses.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Winchester ‘73.

NFR Project: 'In a Lonely Place' (1950)

 

NFR Project: “In a Lonely Place”

Dir: Nicholas Ray

Scr: Andrew P. Solt, Edmund H. North

Pho: Burnett Guffey

Ed: Viola Lawrence

Premiere: August 1950

94 min.

“I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived for a few weeks while she loved me.”

The French have a phrase for it: amour fou, crazy love, love that makes no sense and leads nowhere. Ostensibly a film noir, this movie is a treatise on dysfunction and obsession, the portrait of a potential murderer, an epic emotional tale for an unlikely heroine.

The protagonist is nominally screenwriter Dixon Steele, played by Humphrey Bogart near the end of his era of plausibility as a romantic lead. Dix is a down and out storyteller who hasn’t written a successful movie since before the war. He is caustic, cynical, temperamental, morbid. We are told he broke a woman’s nose. In short, he is a jerk.

He’s supposed to read a book for adaptation as a screenplay. He gives it to the hat-check girl to read. She reads it, and purports to tell him the story. He suggests they go to his place. They do, she does. Nothing unseemly occurs. The girl leaves, headed around the corner to a cab stand.

The next morning, it is revealed that the girl was murdered. Dix is a suspect until a neighbor, Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame), testifies to the cops that she saw her leave his place alive, and that Dix was in after that. Dix thanks her, and the two fall madly and immediately in love. Suddenly, they are blissfully together, and Dix is writing better than he has in years.

But Dix feels he is being watched. He lashes out as random people, to the degree of nearly smashing a man’s head in with a rock. His erratic behavior begins to disturb Lauren. She is terrified, and reluctantly accepts his proposal to marry her – right away. She plans on leaving him, but he catches her on her way out and strangles her. “I can’t live with a maniac!” she screetches.

Suddenly, the phone rings. It is the police; the real murderer has confessed. Dix is off the hook. But as Laurel says, “It doesn’t matter now.” It’s over. Dix slinks away, down her stairs, out through the entrance of their apartment building. Laurel has narrowly avoided death at the hands of her lover.

Bogart plays a true villain. Supposedly this kind of behavior was acceptable when you were a hard-drinking cynical screenwriter after the war. Dix has a friendly relationship with the policeman in charge of the case, Sgt. Nicolai (Frank Lovejoy), who refers to him as “major.” Obviously, Dix was in the fighting. Still, his nasty temper and suspicious mind poison the miraculous-seeming romance that ignites him and Lauren.

It’s only Ray’s fourth film, but he already infuses the story with a weary fatalism that would pervade his later On Dangerous Ground¸Johnny Guitar, and Rebel Without a Cause. Ray gives his actors room to breathe here. We develop our understanding of them just as they do of each other.

Ray takes the full measure of Bogart’s character, and gently moves him from hero to heel as the picture progresses. Gloria Grahame is at her most beautiful and empathetic here (Ray obviously loved her, though their marriage was dissolving at the time), and she gets to play at three-dimensional character -- a thoughtful young aspiring actress who falls for the good she sees in a needy and dangerous man. Dix smothers Laurel with attention while he displays his distrust of her. It’s a no-win situation.

The original script called for Laurel to be killed. Ray changed it, not wanting to go for the obvious ending. In this way, In a Lonely Place persevered as a story of two people fated to find each other for only a short time. In an instant, loves shatters in front of our eyes.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Sunset Boulevard.

NFR Project: 'D.O.A.' (1950)

 

NFR Project: “D.O.A.”

Dir: Rudolph Mate

Scr: Russell Rouse, Clarence Greene

Pho: Ernest Laszlo

Ed: Arthur H. Nadel

Premiere: April 21, 1950

84 min.

It’s a great, gritty little noir that has a unique plot – in which a man must find his murderer.

How does this work? Well, the man was poisoned. Innocent accountant Frank Bigelow (Edmond O’Brien) is slipped a toxic drink one night while he’s out on the town in San Francisco. Feeling ill the next day, he goes to the doctor and finds that he has only days to live. He is a dead man walking.

This pushes Frank into a frenzy of activity. Working against time, he tracks down the motive for his murder, thumbing through witnesses and trying to get a straight answer out of the people involved. On the way, he meets Beverly Garland in her first film role (billed as Beverly Campbell) as a tough dame; tough-guy Neville Brand gets his first credited screen appearance here as a psychotic enforcer for a criminal boss.

O’Brien is compelling as a man working against the clock to find justice. The filming itself is a little on the crude side – this was an independent production with a small budget. However, United Artists was impressed by it and distributed it. It sports an excellent score by Dimitri Tiomkin. Of most interest are the long tracking shots that director Mate captured on the sly in San Francisco. In them, the camera tracks O’Brien as he dashes down the sidewalk, upsetting unknowing passersby.

Does Frank find his killer? What does he intend to do with his last precious few hours? How can he explain all this to his beloved Paula (Pamela Britton)? The movie is lean and fast-paced – it’s a headlong rush through a criminal’s milieu that doesn’t let up until the last possible second.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: In a Lonely Place.