It's still big

Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard

by Chris Fujiwara

SUNSET BOULEVARD, Directed by Billy Wilder. Written by Wilder, Charles Brackett, and D.M. Marshman Jr. With William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim, Fred Clark, Jack Webb, Hedda Hopper, and Buster Keaton. At the Brattle Theatre May 5 through 7.

Just by surviving, Billy Wilder has become all things to all people. As recently as, say, 15 years ago, when more of old Hollywood was still around, his name bore a distinctive, coherent set of connotations: wit, innuendo, craftsmanship. Now Wilder represents anything and everything that once-was-Hollywood: visual force, visual restraint, romanticism, meanness, subtle storytelling, broad storytelling, any kind of storytelling . . . Cameron Crowe's reverent recent Conversations with Wilder might as well have been called My Dinner with Heraclitus. There's no one left to contradict Wilder, and no one with the heart left to resist him. Even if Wilder were not great, he would now be great by default.

Wilder has an alarming number of certified classics to his credit, and Sunset Boulevard, which is now being reissued (not that it's ever been away for long since its release in 1950), is at the head of the list. For years, Wilder's detractors (including Andrew Sarris, before he decided he liked Billy) accused his overfamous films of being hollow and facile, of seeming to do too much while really not doing enough, and used them as foils for less renowned but more brilliant works. It's not that such evaluations were mistaken. Orson Welles's The Lady from Shanghai will always be better than Wilder's Double Indemnity, Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life better than The Lost Weekend, Frank Tashlin's Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? better than The Seven Year Itch. But with time, two things have happened to help Wilder. First, it's become clear that, for all the vast differences among them, Welles, Ray, Tashlin, and Wilder shared certain assumptions about what a film should be and do that are no longer held by Hollywood filmmakers and that look attractive for reasons other than just nostalgia. Second, something about Wilder, about Wilder in particular, has proved prophetic. Seeing Sunset Boulevard again may help us see what this something was.

Fleeing from repo men, broke screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) stumbles on the mansion of silent-movie queen Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson). Still living in the past, with the aid of her butler, Max (Erich von Stroheim), Norma plots her return to the screen in her own adaptation of the story of Salome. Joe helps Norma write the script and lets himself be her kept man, but he sneaks out each night to work on another script with the attractive Betty (Nancy Olson), a studio story-department reader. How this volatile set-up leaves Joe dead in the swimming pool from which he narrates the story is no surprise, but then Sunset Boulevard doesn't deal in surprise (unlike last year's cadaver-narrated American Beauty) but in a calm inevitability that's perfectly keyed to cinematographer John F. Seitz's gauzy interiors. The longevity of Sunset Boulevard as the quintessential insiders' movie about Hollywood has as much to do with Seitz's sluggish, despairing lighting as with the proto-Hollywood Babylon weirdness of Norma and Max.

The film's faults haven't vanished. The narration ponderously tells us what to think. Before we even see Norma, Joe likens her to Miss Havisham; he glosses the arrival of an animal undertaker as "comedy relief" and prefaces a key scene with the phrase "that sad, embarrassing revelation." And Wilder constantly telegraphs his supposed shocks, tracking in to a tight mouth-to-ear shot as a men's-clothing-store clerk tells Joe that as long as the lady is paying he should choose the costlier jacket, or heavily underlining Joe's reaction when he hears that Max was Norma's first husband. And nothing can pardon the sanctimoniousness of Wilder's deference to far-right Hollywood aristocrats Cecil B. DeMille and Hedda Hopper.

But Wilder grasped our age's characteristic morality: a readiness to believe the worst about everyone, including ourselves, while reserving the right, when it suits us, to assert that all the same we're basically okay. Each character of Sunset Boulevard is seen in this mixed light that sometimes flatters, sometimes renders sinister. The semi-slick opportunist Joe, sustained above the moral level of a Charles Willeford narrator only by his ineffectuality, is a contemporary figure despite the quaint opprobrium the film attaches to his willingness to be kept. Maybe Wilder never makes up his mind whether to see Norma as Countess Dracula, an eccentric free-spirited aunt, or a self-aware tragic heroine. But the scene of Norma's private show for Joe, in which she does impressions of a Mack Sennett Bathing Beauty and of Chaplin, is played so beautifully by Swanson that the charming wins out over the grotesque, without our ceasing to be aware that it is grotesque. In such scenes, the mixture of decadence and sentimentality in Sunset Boulevard is uncannily up-to-date. This persistent timeliness vindicates Wilder.