30 Years of Brilliance: 1930-1959
Swanson and Holden
Sunset Boulevard is widely accepted as a classic, often cited as one of the most noteworthy films of American cinema. Deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the U.S. Library of Congress in 1989, Sunset Boulevard was included in the first group of films selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. It is constantly in the top 20 of the American Film Institute's list of the 100 best American films of the 20th century, being number 16 on the 10th Anniversary edition published in 2007. Since its release, the movie has received constant critical acclaim. It was nominated for eleven Academy Awards and won three.
Norma is a flapper vampire, whose attempts to stay youthful into her fifties paradoxically make her seem a thousand years old. She is demented and holds a midnight funeral for her pet monkey, is planning an unlikely movie comeback, and wants Cecil B DeMille to direct her hapless version of "Salome". In attendance is a sinister butler Max von Mayerling (Erich von Stroheim) who used to be her favored director and, incidentally, her first husband.
Norma proposes Joe to move to the mansion and help her in writing the screenplay for her comeback, and the small-time writer becomes her lover and gigolo. When Joe falls in love with a young aspirant writer Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson), Norma becomes jealous and completely insane and her madness leads to a tragic end.
Swanson uses her repertoire of silent movie gestures--wildly-waving hand gestures and bulging eyes protruding so far from their sockets you fear they'll soon pop out--to make Norma be like her dilapidated, once-grand mansion, "out of beat with the rest of the world." Swanson's honest and unafraid performance is aided by the contrast of William Holden's naturalistic acting as the writer and von Stroheim's underplaying.
The picture has an unforgettable horror climax as Norma vamps towards a newsreel cameraman during her arrest for murder and declares that she is ready for her close up, even as the camera pans back to emphasise her isolation in insanity as the big carnival of a celebrity murder scandal begins. One of SB's ironies is that although Norma can't get away with her insanity, the industry allows and indeed encourages everyone else to act like a monster.
