Sunset Boulevard - The Centennial Collection

Gloria Swanson actually was able to get a second chance at a screen fame with this film. She also proved that being a silent screen star was no barrier to being a great actress in sound pictures. How she failed to win a Best Actress Oscar is beyond me! The writing is fantastic, Bill Holden is wonderful and Gloria Swanson is terrific. As an added bonus, Erich Von Stroheim plays Gloria's butler and ex-husband. The story is enchanting. I don't want to give too much away. One of the great films.

When Sunset Blvd came out in 1950 Varity reviewed it with the word `disturbing' and never was truer word spoken. I suspect many of us became familiar with this from the skits with Carol Burnett and Harvey Korman about a `has been' movie star and her servant, Max. But the film with Gloria Swanson and William Holden is so much more.

Done in a film noir style with Holden as the narrator, his character is a down at the heels writer who, on the run from his creditors, finds himself stumbling into a nearly abandoned mansion. The home of Nora Desmond who has been living there as if it was still 1929 and her career is still thriving.

Holden at first is hired to punch up the script Desmond has written for her return, but the relationship soon deepens as he becomes her kept man. At first she seems just nicely eccentric but by the New Year's eve party where a 5 piece combo plays in the ballroom and Holden is the only guest the `creep' factor starts to settle in as you watch Desmond unravel on screen.

Swanson, as Desmond, moves and talks in an exaggerated manner that seems almost laughable, but the laugh seems still born as you realize this woman is always `on,' always posing for the cameras that will never roll for her again.

This was not well received by Hollywood in the day, because they didn't like to be reminded of what could happen the big star who falls by the wayside. For the rest of us though, it is amazing and deeply disturbing. Holden as the kept man who fumbles around to find his independence within the gilded cage and Gloria Swanson, who really was a washed up silent era star, as Desmond is mesmerizing as she unravels before your eyes. You know from the start she's a little loopy but by the end you know just how far her trolley has gone off the rails and down the lane.

In the end Swanson gives one of the greatest performances of a crazy person on screen ever. The effect is amazing, magical and yes, deeply, deeply disturbing.

It certainly says something about the power of an icon and the glitter of a golden age in movie-making that "Sunset Boulevard" stands up so amazingly well as a bit of storytelling, in spite of its deranged silent-movie star character being parodied mercilessly by everyone from Carol Burnett on down. And curious it appears that at the time of "Sunset Boulevard's making, the silent-movie years were seen as something long-gone. Here was the faded star of that era, Gloria Swanson, as a deranged ghost, fluttering around the silent halls of a dilapidated mansion, and dreaming of making a comeback. The so-called `modern' Hollywood which produced a gem like "Sunset Boulevard" -- in the last days of the great studios, those dream-factories which churned out a steady stream of great movies, not-quite-so-great movies and a fair proportion of forgettable drek - that Hollywood is now just as much of a long-gone legend as the silents that came before. Gone the writers' department, the regular costumers and designers, the stagehands who worked on a cowboy movie one week and a film noir the next and a Biblical epic the day after that, the directors and actors who did pretty much the same thing, year in and year out, that Hollywood that was the background for "Sunset Boulevard'. They are all gone - leaving just the movie to amaze us, make us laugh uneasily, and to give us the creeps ... starting from the moment that a barely-employed, debt-ridden screenwriter, Joe Gillis, takes a turn into the wrong driveway. In the opening of the movie, he is already dead, floating face down in a swimming pool. The rest of the movie explains, with almost clinical precision, how he got that way.

I shouldn't need to say much about the plot; the movie has been around for so long and been such a part of popular culture, but the amazing and wicked "in-ness" of it all demands comment: all those Hollywood legends, playing themselves, or something very like themselves! Erich von Stroheim playing Norma's butler (and also first husband and movie director) - that's a scene from their disastrous and real-life collaboration "Queen Kelly" that Norma makes Joe watch. Gossip columnist Hedda Hopper plays herself, so does Cecil B. DeMille... and is that Buster Keaton as one of Norma's old pals, `the waxworks' as Joe derisively calls them? Why yes, it is - and as a lagniappe, here's an amazingly skinny and geeky Jack Webb as Joe Gillis' screenwriter pal. It's like a whole college course in Hollywood history, right there - a course in a lost celluloid world, as lost as Schwab's Drugstore, a famous and real-life landmark... and the location for a pivotal scene in the movie itself. (Lana Turner was supposed to have been discovered there, and F. Scott Fitzgerald had the first of several heart attacks there.) Another side note - Gloria Swanson actually looked amazingly good for the age that she was at time of shooting. She was deliberately filmed with very harsh lighting. She was also actually a very tiny woman, barely five feet; it is a tribute to her presence that she manages to dominate the screen the way she does.

Of the extras in this set, the most fascinating would have to be the interactive feature on the various locations, and a short feature with writer-policeman Joseph Wambaugh on the noir-ish side of Hollywood. All in all a wonderfully educational look at Hollywood that was, and an excellent presentation of a classic.

This review is for the November 2008 Centennial release. This issue is a mixed bag. The picture is sharp, but the contrast is quite a bit darker. In some scenes the effect is very good and in quite a few other scenes, I found it a bit too dark. The November 2002 release was done with the services of Lowry Digital, the same service that did the recent James Bond restoration work with excellent results. Comparing the two, The 2002 release done by Lowry Digital was very good and didn't really need any improvement since there was very little if anything to improve. Rather than re-shuffling the same product over and over, it has been quite some time since Paramount has done anything new with their classic catalog. Paramount has not released new product from their classic catalog in years. For those of you who have the 2002 release, there is no need to buy the Centennial, so keep the current copy that you have.

This film is a legend of a kind?
Certainly not a film you would take your children to?
Hollywood makes and breaks millions of people every generation.
Many after they have been successful ...
That, then, with no shame they would make a movie
(actually several of this kind I have seen, one recently about an old homosexual British film director)
about how things can go very very wrong
with their star system, shows that there is very little sense or heart in the film business.
That such a film should be acclaimed as a great film, is about as mad as the lady the film is about?