Ill-Informed Gadfly

Perhaps no movie so perfectly illustrates Billy Wilder’s genius and his limitations. First, the limitations: Man, is this movie talky. “Words, words, more words,” says Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), dismissing the dialogue-heavy pictures that made silent cinema obsolete. She could be talking about “Sunset Blvd.,” which tells its story verbally more often than visually, leaning not only on expository dialogue but on frequently redundant voice-over narration. In a way, it’s a brave strategy on Wilder’s part: He casts two legendary silent directors, Cecil B. DeMille and Erich von Stroheim (DeMille as himself and von Stroheim as a fictionalized version of himself), and he allows Swanson to wax nostalgic about the primacy of the image in silent films. Yet he makes it clear that he personally would be lost trying to direct a silent movie. (He worked on a couple as a writer but never did direct one.)

“Sunset Blvd.,” released in 1950, has a daring and legendary gimmick: narration from beyond the grave by the antihero, Joe Gillis (William Holden), whom we meet as he floats face-down in a swimming pool. Perhaps the novelty obscures how bad, how overripe and frequently unnecessary, the narration is. Even at the wondrous climax, Wilder can’t let it go. “Life, which can be strangely merciful, had taken pity on Norma Desmond,” says Joe, describing her descent down the staircase of her home, newsreel cameras rolling, in trite, “Dear Reader” prose that undercuts the poetry of the image.

And yet sometimes Wilder’s weakness becomes his greatest strength. He may rely too heavily on dialogue, but much of what he and his collaborators write (Charles Brackett and D.J. Marshman Jr. share credit for “Sunset Blvd.”) is brilliant. Few movies have as many memorable lines as “Sunset Blvd.” (”I’m not big. It’s the pictures that got small.” “We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces!” “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my closeup.” And my favorite, spoken by von Stroheim: “I was her first husband!”) Wilder even gets a dig at everyone who dismisses the importance of writing to a good movie: “Audiences don’t know somebody sits down and writes a picture; they think the actors make it up as they go along.”

But the one-liners are just a small part of a great screenplay. The scene near the end when Holden lays bare the psychology of the gigolo, giving the kiss-off to the woman he loves, has an acute and aching despair. And for Wilder even to get to this point is astonishing. He was incredibly daring, and his honesty about human sexuality was decades ahead of its time. I can’t imagine anybody else making a movie about a gigolo and ending it with the hard-earned pathos of tragedy, tinged with one final cynical barb (as Norma Desmond glides toward the lens for her “closeup,” Wilder smudges out her face to begin the closing credits).

Swanson was Wilder’s equal in bravery, allowing her aging face and physique to be cruelly exposed, playing a 50-year-old erstwhile silent-film ingenue who clings desperately to the dream of returning triumphantly to the screen. Only in such a role could Swanson be simultaneously arch and honest; she’s forever holding her chin up and casting her eyes downward, suggesting that somewhere in her demented psyche she thinks this severe posture will flatter her and soften her features. It’s a thrilling, galvanizing performance. Holden and von Stroheim are fabulous as well; Nancy Olson, as Holden’s love interest, is a bit square, but then her character, Betty Schaefer, is supposed to be down-to-earth and workmanlike. The scenes with Betty and Joe working together on a screenplay have a low-key charm that’s a welcome respite from Norma’s histrionics, both for Joe and for the audience. Plus, they lead to that killer, bitter breakup, when Joe tells Betty he’s comfortable with life as a kept man. Wilder even manages to close it out with some savvy mise-en-scene, when Joe closes the gated door behind Betty, enclosing himself in his cage, with Norma looming on the balcony above.

Wilder can be frustrating, but even in excessively verbal movies like this one he’s clearly a great and singular film artist. I think “Some Like It Hot” and “The Apartment” are his best movies, with “Double Indemnity” not far behind, but “Sunset Blvd.” is still fantastic — as dark and adult as anything made in the studio era.