I like Sunset Boulevard more than if I just didn’t like it all. But the difference comes to a sliver. I feel that in seeing the movie (twice, maybe three in all) I somehow did all right by myself. But I have no happy memories to go with the experience. Maybe someday I’ll see it again, you never know. Because it really ought to be good. There’s a nice checklist of standout elements: rotten Hollywood, Max the monkey’s funeral, a wealth of killer lines (“It’s the pictures that got small,” etc.), an original situation solidly devised, Gloria Swanson swinging into action. And one appreciates the extremes the movie takes, its rubbernecking of the dull depravities of human existence, its bold cartoon manifestations of individuals’ diseased personal choices. But the rubbernecking gives you a crick in the neck, the items don’t add up, and the bold cartoons sit in a movie that’s flat and leering, imbued with a small man’s superiority.
I can give a personal reason for why the film leaves me cold, and also a more ambitious, intellectual one. The personal reason: I simply don’t like seeing a younger man romancing an older woman. The two of them up against each other, nose to throat, creates a switch in my brain and the switch goes click, position off. As a result, experience turns flat while the two are on my mind; thus, the flat response is really my problem, I guess. But there’s another possibility. The film does flatter Cecil B. DeMille, and I think that sets its moral ceiling pretty low. Sunset Boulevard takes a long, hard look at how Norma Desmond travesties herself by crawling after her ego needs; tsk-tsk, we’re told. But then the movie puffs the ego of a powerful film producer, a potentate the moviemakers want to keep happy. In fact he gets to deliver the tsk-tsk. “You know, a dozen press agents working overtime can do terrible things to the human spirit,” DeMille says gravely. Whatever moral wisdom keeps a screenplay standing up instead of falling down, that ingredient appears to have been skimped on.
A small but decent thing about the script: It set up the male star’s ironclad predicament. Like Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie he must have his choices narrowed down to nothing until his only way out is the unmanning thing the script calls upon him to do (wear a dress, prostitute himself to an old lady). The movie writer who winds up in Norma Desmond’s mansion can’t look for work unless he has a car. Now the car’s gone and the repo men are after him. No wonder he’s stuck. No plausibility fixes are needed, just a bolster job as regards sympathy—yes, we’re assured, the guy works. Bathrobe over his chest hair, pencil in his mouth, he’s pounding at the typewriter, sitting on the edge of his bed. This is no daffodil who dawdles after inspiration; later he says as much to his dumb agent. The problems now encompassing the guy aren’t his poor choices added up. He has to get better at writing screenplays, but otherwise there’s not much to fault him for.
William Holden plays the fellow. The same year he was in Born Yesterday as the brainy journalist. Same year, 1950, and he was two different young men devoted to wordsmithing. Each one was definitely smarter than the lady character assigned him by the writers. But the Born Yesterday William Holden triumphed, and the Sunset Boulevard William Holden was chewed up and destroyed. This range of male experience as dramatized by Hollywood had William Holden at one end and William Holden at the other. He did fine either way; a good actor, I guess. But the women were the show and they got the Oscar nominations (Judy Holliday won for Born Yesterday). He was there to hand up the prima ballerina, which is useful work.
But I never liked Sunset Boulevard. If Billy Wilder was brilliant, it was because of what he said at the movie’s premiere. Louis B. Mayer was laying into him for making Hollywood look bad. Billy Wilder sized up the situation and replied with a certain blazing simplicity. “Fuck you,” he said. Fuck you, Billy. Together that remark and “those wonderful people out there in the dark” justify your time on earth. Throw in the monkey’s funeral and you’re golden. But I still find Sunset Boulevard kind of rinky-dink.
