1950 | 110m | BW | USA | Showbiz Drama, Satire | TSPDT #31
A hack screenwriter writes a screenplay for a former silent-film star who has faded into Hollywood obscurity.
DIRECTOR
Billy Wilder
SCREENPLAY
Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett, D.M. Marshman, Jr
OSCAR
Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett, D.M. Marshman, Jr (screenplay)
Hans Dreier, John Meehan, Sam Comer, Ray Moyer (art direction)
Franz Waxman (music)
OSCAR NOMINATION
Charles Brackett (producer)
Billy Wilder (director)
William Holden (actor)
Gloria Swanson (actress)
Erich von Stoheim (actor is supporting role)
Nancy Olson (actress in supporting role)
John F. Seitz (photography)
Doane Harrison, Arthur P. Schmidt (editing)
CAST
William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Erich Von Stroheim, Nancy Olson, Fred Clark, Lloyd Gough, Franklin Farnum, Larry Blake, Charles Dayton, Cecil B. DeMille
IMPRESSIONS
Full of ostentatious visual, usual for Wilder, and compositions that evoked the air of Phantom of the Opera, and Kane's Xanadu.
It's rather negative, and this is probably the reason I'd never seen the film - my father was a huge Billy Wilder fan but never introduced me to this film as he found it too depressing.
I love the huge close up of the white gloved hands as they play Beethoven on the wheezy pipe organ as the trapped gigolo flutters in the background. Wilder's acidic, yet nostalgic, traipse through the film industry's haunted house could certainly be re-watched endlessly.
You can't help but feel sorry for Norma (Gloria Swanson), the megalomanic silent movie queen, whose attempts to stay youthful into her fifties paradoxically make her seem a thousand years old. Norma lives in a decaying mansion on Sunset Boulevard, holding a midnight funeral for her pet monkey, scrawling an unproducable script, and dreaming of an impossible comeback ("I hate that word! This will be a return!").
Even Wilder gives strange affection to the has-been Norma, and the never-was Joe, with a somewhat sadistic use of such ravaged and frozen silent era faces as Buster Keaton, H. B. Warner and Anna Q Nilsson. I love Norma's line: "I'm big, it's the pictures that got small!"
The dialogue is beautiful and often poetic, especially Joe's narration of the story. There are some great one liners too, and I almost feel that this film in some ways will be just an enjoyable to read.
NO. 1
Sure we believe you, only now we
want you to believe us. That car
better be back here by noon tomorrow,
or there's going to be fireworks.
GILLIS
You say the cutest things.
As a side note to remember, for myself: I like the narration at the beginning "you've come to the right party" - another alternative would be an off screen monologue as the narrator tells another character - although this wasn't the case in this film.
SHOTS
GILLIS
Come to think of it, the whole place seemed
to have been stricken with a kind of
creeping paralysis, out of beat with the
rest of the world, crumbling apart in slow
motion ...
More screen shots below: See more...
NORMA
Thank you, Jonesy. And teach
your friend some manners. Tell
him without me he wouldn't have
any job, because without me there
wouldn't be any Paramount Studio.
DEMILLE
Of course you didn't. You didn't
know Norma Desmond as a plucky
little girl of seventeen, with
more courage and wit and heart
than ever came together in one
youngster.
1ST ASSISTANT
I hear she was a terror to
work with.
DEMILLE
She got to be. A dozen press
agents working overtime can
do terrible things to the human
spirit.
(to the set)
Hold everything.
GILLIS
That's the trouble with you
readers. You know all the plots.
GILLIS
May I say you smell real special.
BETTY
It must be my new shampoo.
GILLIS
That's no shampoo. It'smore like
a pile of freehly laundred hand-
kerchiefs, like a brand new auto-
mobile. How old are you anyway?
BETTY
Twenty-two.
GILLIS
That's it -- there's nothing like
being twenty-two. Now may I suggest
that if we're ever to finish this
story you keep at least two feet
away from me ... Now back to the
typewriter.
Billy Wilder
