1964: Kiss Me, Stupid

Kiss Me, Stupid (Wilder, 1964) 9/10

With his renowned variety show, Dino (Dean Martin) is the star of the Las Vegas strip. He croons, he jests, he acts, he sings. He is a complete entertainer and an attractive draw for both sexes. The bright lights of Vegas however cannot mask Dino's blazing Hollywood aspirations. Placing his Sands' revue on hiatus, Dino absconds from the legions of beauties wanting "one for the road," hops in his Italian convertible and roars away to Hollywood for a profitable season of film shoots and television specials.

Along the desolate desert highway, Dino detours through the craggy hovel of Climax, Nevada. In this lifeless hamlet, two local struggling tunesmiths-paranoid piano teacher (Ray Walston) and sloven gas attendant Barney (Cliff Osmond)-sabotage the lounge lizard's sleek ride in order to peddle their infantile romantic ditties such as I'm A Poached Egg and I'm Taking Mom To The Junior Prom, Cos' She's A Better Twister Than My Sister. Adrift from the glitz of Las Vegas' bounty of casinos and his endless cache of booze and birds, the sleazy Dino salivates for some interim "action" to temper his cravings. Prowling for sex, Dino's arouses Orville's marital fears that his attractive wife Zelda (Felicia Farr) will soon be added to the crooner's bevvy of conquests.

Released in 1964 as the Production Code's moral leash began to slack, Kiss Me, Stupid acquired notoriety for its risque humour and moral ambiguities. Although tame by contemporary standards, Wilder's film, alongside Elia Kazan's Babydoll, was bestowed with a rare "condemned" rating by the Catholic League of Decency. Reviewers were scathing in their distate for Wilder's vulgar humour, theatre owners refused to run the film and audiences shunned United Artist's tacit release on its artsy Lopert imprint.

Viewed almost forty-five years after its brief original run, Kiss Me, Stupid emerges as a forward-thinking picture; a classic farce ahead of its time and its audience. British poet Philip Larkin may have chimed sexual intercourse began in 1963,but by 1964 it was openly visible. Unlike, the "safe" sex comedies of Doris Day and Rock Hudson, Wilder's film does not linger around the bedroom door,but rather breaks the door down. The repetoire of double-entendres at Wilder and co-writer I.A.L. Diamond's disposal are not disguised in coded layers; they operate with liberated abandon.

Sexual witticisms drench Wilder and Diamond's script in a manner akin to the innuendo adorned flavourings of Moliere and Shakespeare. Like the latter's Comedy of Errors,Kiss Me, Stupid hinges upon mistaken identities, infidelity and bawdy sexual humour to enliven the film's discourse on love, sex, greed and marriage. Furthermore, Wilder's film exploits Dean Martin's offscreen persona to create a credible early example of a celebrity engaging in cinematic self-parody.

In a role originally intended for Peter Sellers, Walston plays Orville Spooner; a nervy, suspicious eccentric whose wife Zelda is deemed the most beautiful woman in town. After five years of marriage, the wiry and disheveled Spooner still remains stunned that Zelda accepted his marriage proposal. Therefore, Orville treats Zelda's every word and decision with mistrust; fearing she will leave their penurious and rural homestead. The arrival of the sex-hungry and leering Dino emboldens Orville's selfish practices.

Isolated in a backwater desert community, Orville lusts for wealth, primarily as a security mechanism to ensure Zelda remains his. These chauvinistic and greedy attitudes shape Orville's conception of marriage. His worries about being able to provide for Zelda are informed by the material culture Dino represents, rather than the romantic notions his loving wife adheres toward; whilst his controlling nature strengthens his unconscious desire to be a strict patriarchal figure. Therefore, Dino is viewed as an antithetical figure representative of the carefree glamourous playboys viewed in other films of the period such as Fellini's La Dolce Vita.

Orville's response to local prostitute Polly the Pistol (Kim Novak)- whom he and Barney hire to placate Dino's urges-is interesting in that whilst the local piano teacher preaches devotion to his wife, he increasingly appears attracted to the doting, flu-rattled Polly, whose failed ambitions and eagerness to please appear better suited to Orville's clingy personality and brittle self-confidence.

Written by Wilder and his frequent collaborator I.A.L Diamond, Kiss Me Stupid is a raw, layered farce. Concocted as a comedy of errors, Wilder's film is a sharply tuned comedy of errors; cooly constructed around Orville's personality flaws which fate him to the collapse of his selfish web of deceitful ideas and plans. In using black and white cinematography, rather than colour, Wilder enhances the picture: capturing the drained, monotone environment highlighted by an unimaginative and dreary populace who spend their evenings crowded around the colour televisions in a local hardware store.

Walston's solid performance captures his character's hyperactive desperation and frenzied ways. Dean Martin simply adopts a cool demeanor in a role that requires the singer-cum-actor to simply be himself: allowing Wilder's stinging humour to poke fun at Martin and the Rat Pack's popular image. Yet, the genuine star of the film is possibly Kim Novak, who demonstrates a breadth and diversity often lacking in colder efforts such as the character of Madeline in Hitchcock's Vertigo.

Almost half a century from its initial release, Kiss Me Stupid appears not as a moral corrupting force, but as a wonderfully biting examination of modern values and ideas with regard to love, sex and marriage. Like in other Wilder films such as Sunset Boulevard, Ace in the Hole and One, Two, Three, the famed director demonstrates the shallow material desires and internalized greed of humanity. In doing so, Wilder formulates an investigation into the emptiness and disparity of modernity; themes often found in the 1960's Italian cinema in the films of Visconti, Fellini and Antonioni. But unlike the latter directors, Wilder's film adopts a less serious outlook, preferring to exercise his message and his analysis through comedic terms. The result is an overlooked comic gem.

* Kiss Me Stupid is available through MGM Home Video and is released in their Billy Wilder Collection box set.

Copyright 2008 8½ Cinematheque

1961: One, Two, Three

One, Two, Three (Wilder, 1961) 8/10

Coca-Cola is arguably the most recognized and culturally divisive American brand in the world. Originating in late 19th century Atlanta as a pseudo-medicinal beverage, Coca-Cola rapidly transformed itself into one of the world's most recognizable companies.

Over the past sixty years, Coca-Cola has become a political and cultural embodiment of Americana. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the company’s emphasis on mass advertising, pervasive consumption and global marketing acquired Coca-Cola the ire of post-World War II Europeans on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

As addressed in Richard F. Kuisel’s article “Coca-Cola and the Cold War: The French Face Americanization, 1948-1953,” Coca-Cola’s systemic growth in post-war Europe alarmed both communist and anti-communist forces. Coca-Cola became stylized in anti-American propaganda as a demagogue threatening the health of children and the economic survival of regional beverages. Lawsuits and legal discussions in Denmark, Switzerland and France attempted to stop the sale of the drink.

In Communist circles, the sweet-tasting drink soured the tastes of officials and intellectuals who viewed Coca-Cola as a capitalist elixir designed to turn Europe into a series of coca-coloniés. The term "Coca-Colonization" gained prominence amongst intellectual scholars in the Cold War to identify the spread of American cultural and economic practices abroad; attitudes held and expounded upon by Cold War era Coca-Cola executives.

Positioned during the Cold War as the ultimate commercial signifier of American culture and capitalism, Coca-Cola was subsequently the perfect economic institution to be employed by the legendary Billy Wilder in his superb 1961 Cold War farce One, Two, Three. Filmed in Berlin and Munich during the construction of The Berlin Wall, One, Two, Three is a rapid fire comedy eagerly praising and ridiculing America's cultural and economic expansion into Europe. The film stars James Cagney in his purported final role (he came out of retirement for 1981's Ragtime) as C.R MacNamara, a lifelong Coca-Cola executive, who has traversed the globe for the company: tapping uncharted markets and expanding the brand from the Andes to the Alps.

Stuck in Berlin, MacNamara sees an audacious opportunity to sell Coca-Cola in the Eastern Bloc nixed by his patriotic boss in Atlanta. Desperate to garner greater influence in the company, MacNamara reluctantly accepts Hazeltine's (Howard St. John) request for MacNamara to look after his teenage daughter Scarlett (Pamela Tiffin) when her whirlwind tour of Europe hits Berlin. Scarlett's arrival exacerbates the fractures in MacNamara's marriage to his undersexed loyal wife (Arlene Francis) and his affair with his lurid German secretary Ingeborg (Lilo Pulver). Furthermore, MacNamara's plans for his long-awaited promotion are put on hiatus, as Hazeltine's southern daughter reveals herself to be a sexually promiscuous, intellectual simpleton, who secretly elopes with an ideologically wooden East German Communist youth.

Released after the successes of Some Like It Hot and The Apartment, One, Two, Three was a brief return to the more caustic channels Wilder had previously explored in dramatic masterpieces such as Ace in the Hole and Sunset Boulevard. One, Two, Three operates a hyperactive comedic critique of both capitalist and communist cultures with plenty of Wilder's trademark snarl, but without the acidic bite. Sadly, the film was not a great box-office success.

Contrary to recent critical studies of One, Two, Three that have argued the film was a critical disaster, it should noted that upon the film's release Wilder received mostly positive reviews from major publications such as Time, The New Yorker and the New York Times. Most of the negative feedback customarily associated with One, Two, Three primarily came from later sources such as Andrew Sarris, Pauline Kael and the staff at Cahiers du Cinema

Their critiques have mostly focused on the perceived "vulgarity" and tastelessness of Wilder's humour. According to Wilder biographer Maurice Zolotow much of Kael's criticisms stemmed from Wilder's exploitation of unsavory characters and situations for comedic purposes. Yet, it is through his boundary pushing witticisms that Wilder demonstrated humanity's self-serving attitudes and practices. Like Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove three years later, Wilder's film attempts to show the absurdity of Cold War politics, yet in Wilder's case it is through quotidian individuals. In One, Two, Threeboth systems, regardless of their ideological leanings,feature arrogant figures desperate to advance through their respective system through bullying, conniving and favours.

The character of MacNamara is a playful interpretation of the "Ugly American." MacNamara's main desire is to increase company profits and sales, which in turn will increase his own greed and opulence. His tactics are aggressive and disregard the sanctity of foreign cultures. MacNamara even goes so far to proclaim he wishes to ensure each German has a Coke to drown down his Knackwurst. MacNamara's cultural insensitivity is only rivaled by the ignorant buffoonary of Soviet officials, who share MacNamara's fondness for sex, materialism and personal gain.

The casting of Cagney in particular is extremely interesting. Cagney's character is certainly a self-reflexive tribute to his image and iconography in the gangster genre. Noted for his career-shaping roles playing a gangster and a hoodlum, Cagney's portrayal of MacNamara is an extension of his earlier gangster entrepeneurs, who try to expand their market and protect their interests via whatever means necessary. One, Two, Three even features visual references to such gangster classics as The Public Enemy and Little Caesar. Naturally, unlike The Public Enemy's Tom Powers or White Heat's Cody Jarrett, violence is not a viable option. Instead MacNamara uses his cunning sensibilities to place Scarlett's lover Otto into the hands of the East German Secret Police, the Stasi. Violence is not a sensible business tactic, but as MacNamara continually notes neither is displeasing your employer.

In One, Two, Three, Wilder also investigates the labyrinthine and inefficient layers of Communist bureaucracy. He takes swipes at East Germany's informant culture and the lack of freedoms in the Eastern Bloc highlighted by MacNamara's commentary about East Germany's collection of unreturned Coca-Cola bottles in relation to the masses defecting to the West: black market Americana is in, whilst personal freedom is out along the nefarious Iron Curtain.

The director's sublime capabilities even allow a torture sequence involving repeated listening sessions of garish American pop music to retain a comedic touch. The wealth of cultural misunderstandings solidify the bursting humour of One, Two, Three. Even West Germans are not spared, as Wilder and co-writer I.A.L Diamond offer comedic jabs at the failures of social denazification and the rise of West German material culture. Ironically, the film gained a cult following in West Germany following its belated release in the 1980's.

Working within a brilliant, punch-line intensive script, One, Two, Three becomes more than a series of visual jokes and puns about cuckoo clocks, sex-starved wives and lingering Nazi habits through Wilder's manic direction. Even as One, Two, Three seemingly stalls in its final third, the film is further held together by Cagney's illuminating skills and his fervent energy; as MacNamara becomes a Henry Higgins to Otto Piffl's Eliza Doolittle: shaping Scarlett's lover from a stubborn communist into a stubborn capitalist through flashy clothes.

Yet in his denouement, Wilder skillfully denotes that material trivialities do not define one's character or content. One can simply not switch allegiances through consumerism. Rather, it is the spiritual and moral essence of individuals that determines and shapes their practices and perspectives. Only through an understanding of these terms, do characters such as Piffl and MacNamara realize the true Cold War is not between their souls, but within their own frosty hearts.

An underrated farcical gem.

* One, Two, Three is released through MGM Home Video and is available in their Billy Wilder Collection box set

Copyright 2008 8½ Cinematheque

1951: Ace in the Hole

Ace in the Hole (Wilder, 1951) 10/10


“Bad news sells best. ‘Cause good news is no news” (Charles “Chuck” Tatum)

"Fuck them all! It is the best picture I ever made" (Billy Wilder)

In 2003, New York Times reporter Jayson Blair was forced to resign from his esteemed American employer after he was caught fabricating evidence about the Beltway sniper shootings. Blair’s breach of journalistic principle smeared the New York Times’ reputation for accuracy: briefly inducing a public debate about media practices and the distortion of the truth for profit. Ironically the same publication fifty years earlier denounced Viennese director Billy Wilder for the creation of what Times film critic Bosley Crowther called a “preposterous” character: an immoral and opportunistic journalist who misleads the nation with his reporting of a mining accident in rural New Mexico.

In a brilliantly savage and astringent lead performance, Kirk Douglas stars as Charles “Chuck” Tatum, an ace reporter whose intoxicating behaviour has led to his dismissal from every major news publication from New York to Chicago. Arriving in a broken down convertible in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Tatum offers his services to editor Jacob Q. Boot (Porter Hall) for a fifth of his New York salary. Boot agrees on the condition that the openly alcoholic and reckless Tatum maintains his sobriety and adheres to the paper's chief policy: ”Tell The Truth.”

Believing in his own hype, Tatum expects his newly acquired Alburquerque position to last no more than a few weeks; before being once more snapped up by a large Eastern paper. One year later however, the increasingly agitated Tatum is still attached to his desk in a sweaty New Mexico office. Desperate for his break, Tatum begrudingly accepts his latest assignment: a report on an annual rattlesnake hunt in the baking desert. Along the way, he and the paper’s junior photographer Herbie (Bob Arthur) stop at a local gas station were the windswept monotony of the summer is broken by a wailing police siren heading toward a Native American cliff dwelling.

Following the police car, Tatum learns that the gas station’s propertier Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict) is trapped in a collapsed cave in a failed attempt to steal some burial pots. Climbing into the sacred cave in order to interview and photograph the local entrepeneur, Tatum sees that Leo’s legs are trapped under a mass of debris: rendering his escape from the mountain impossible without a rescue squad. Sensing his good fortune, Tatum builds a story around a Native American curse, a trapped war hero and Lorraine (Jan Sterling) his grieving wife.

According to the engineers who arrived on the scene however, the removal of Leo from the crevice is little more than a sixteen hour operation involving the butressing of the failing walls. Dismayed at this fact and dreaming of glory and financial gain, Tatum works in tandem with a corrupt sherriff (Ray Teal) and a servile former truck driver-turned-contractor to use an alternate drilling method, which will take days rather than hours to complete. Luckily, for Tatum, Leo’s cynical Baltimore-born wife equally wants her husband to remain trapped in the cave. Bored and trapped in their diminutive outpost, Lorraine tells Tatum of her hunger to head East and her desire to quench her sexual thirst for him.

Slightly intrigued by her sexual advances, Tatum quickly realizes that Lorraine’s planned desertion of Leo will hurt the appeal of his articles. With his stories producing a media frenzy, the remote outpost is quickly beseiged by tourists who fill the coffers of Leo and his parents small store and subsequently fund Lorraine’s temporary loyalty to her husband. Yet, as more vacationers enter the Minosa property, the quiet and somber desolation is replaced with vivaciousness. Sightseers begin paying a fee to visit the area, while the S&M Entertainment Company erects a carnival and a train service shuttles in more visitors; as the area turns into a media circus driven by profit and greed, rather than the desire to save a dying man.

Ace In The Hole is arguably the most caustic and cynical film ever to come out of the studio system. Wilder took his idea from a real life cave-in, which Douglas mentions in the film. In 1925, cave explorer Floyd Collins was trapped in a Kentucky mine for eighteen days. Before Collins’ death- almost three weeks after his intial entry into the mine- his story was told by a local reporter, who eventually won the Pulitzer Prize for his riveting accounts. Collins’ fateful foray was even fictionalized into a best-selling novel “The Cave” by “All The Kings Men” author Robert Penn Warren. Yet, as writer, producer and director, Wilder- unlike other Hollywood producers- was less interested in the human interest story, but the possibilities of the explotation of a human interest story. Fresh off his acclaimed Sunset Boulevard, Wilder was ready to continue with his interest in the more sadistic and immoral elements of human nature: greed, lust, betrayal and murder.

But in an era when critics held great sway and audiences expected even the most sinister of protagonists to acquire a degree of moral growth, Ace in the Hole was a bitter pill to swallow. Critics of the period derided Wilder’s treatment of their profession; while audiences were unable to accept the personal motives of one of cinema’s most repellant protagonists in Douglas’ Charles Tatum, nor the masses jocund lust for such a depressing story of turning tragedy into entertainment. Yet in an era when the private destructive streaks of fallen pop stars and minor celebrities become tabloid fodder and gossip channel filler, one can see that Wilder’s film was merely not in bad taste as his critics concluded, but simply far ahead of its time.

Flawlessly acted and directed, Ace in the Hole is a scathing, yet brutally honest delight: a gritty alternative to present-day Hollywood in which yesteryear's forum of images and ideas has now been replaced by a visually and contextually vacuous contingent of moribund plots and critical dormancy . Lauded at the Venice Film Festival and popular throughout Europe, the picture was Wilder’s first critical and commercial flop, which reduced his standing at Paramount as the film lost money despite a name change (Big Carnival) and radical attempts to briefly release the film on television. Whether, the screen was silver or small, audiences turned away in numbers: shunning Kirk Douglas’ star power and Wilder’s acidic vision.

Contrary to popular belief, Wilder’s sardonic approach to life was not a rarity in 1951. In the 1940’s Preston Sturges had created a bitter portfolio of films such as Sullivan’s Travels and Unfaithfully Yours; Orson Welles had directed two particularly abrasive films in 1942’s The Magnificent Ambersons and 1948’s The Lady From Shanghai, while Welles himself had appeared as the charming, yet immoral Harry Lime in Carol Reed’s 1949 film The Third Man. Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux and Hitchcock’s Rope both featured sinister characters comparable to Welles’ Lime. In Mark Robson's 1949 film Champion Kirk Douglas played a brutal pugalist, the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1950 was won by Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s biting All About Eve and even Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s Singin’ In the Rain is a masterpiece of alkaline perceptions and bittersweet sentiments.

And of course in 1950, Wilder himself had written and directed Sunset Boulevard: a film which bears striking similarities to Ace in the Hole. Both films featuring failed writers down on their luck who arrive at their respective unlikely destinations via a malfunctioning convertible. Each character attempts to use this improbable situation to get their careers back on track. For Gillis’ his job re-writing Norma Desmond’s infantile script is meant to provide him with the resources to pay off his creditors and perhaps through his job moonlighting at Paramount on a screenplay, he can revive his career. For Tatum, his job in Albuquerque is simply an attempt to revive his reputation and start anew back East.

However for both immoral protagonists, they are unable to escape this situation. Each becomes tied down to the financial and material gains extracted from their jobs, as well as the unwanted guilt which comes with it. Joe Gillis realizes he has a “long term contract, with no options” as Norma’s ghostwriter-cum-gigolo who is distraught by his attempts to leave her side; Tatum knows that his career rests on Leo’s fate, which produces sparse and pithy outbursts of emotional responsibility. Additionally, both mortally expire at the hands of the unwanted women who they have used for financial gain in return for sexual favours.

More so than Sunset Boulevard, Ace in the Hole also delves into the cult of celebrity and the perversity of human entertainment. Thanks to Tatum’s “way with words,” a small community springs up in the Mojave wasteland around the Minosa family trading post. On their way to a lakeside cottage, the grounds' first batch of visitors inform Tatum and Lorraine that they are simply passing through and wish to visit the cliffs for thirty minutes since the experience will be educational for their small children. Yet almost a week later, the family are still there: collecting Indian souvenirs, riding the Ferris Wheel and trying to promote the father’s insurance company.

The community spirit fostered in this event is as suitabilyconnected to the concept of celebrity as Tatum’s desire to maintain Leo’s struggle. By embarking on a journey to Escadero, the participants can claim their kinship with Leo, while failing to understand or appreciate his struggle. At the film’s finale, when travellers begin to cry their false tears represent a loss of the entertainment associated with this circus, rather than any pity for Leo. His plight is the catalyst for their journey, but not their reason for remaining longer than half an hour in an infertile area

It is in this barren state, that codes of morality disintegrate. Trapped and alone, Leo worries for “grieving” wife Lorraine. Yet, Lorraine is unmoved by Leo’s situation and only remains at her in-laws home in order to reap the financial benefits of the media circus and woo Tatum, as he spends boozy hours bartering contracts for his exclusive story. In Lorraine’s restaurant, the corrupt local sheriff brokers a partnership with Tatum for favourable sentiments in his articles: informing Tatum that the region’s only contractor owes his position to the sheriff’s baseless tactics. Meanwhile, as the media-hungry crowds outside begin to swell, Leo’s Hispanic parents and the local Native American tribe hold vigils and ceremonies for Leo. These attempts of goodness however are chastized by the racist and inept officers, as well as Lorraine who objects to Tatum’s insistence of going to a vigil/photo-op as “kneeling bags my nylons.” Thus, Wilder’s film becomes a critique of Western morality: prophetically showing a culture which kneels at the altar of celebrity and feeds off the rotting carcass of the human spirit for little more than fifteen minutes of fame.

One of the best American films from the 1950's

* Ace in the Hole is currently unavailable on DVD. Although Criterion is rumoured to be releasing a R1 edition in late 2007.

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque

1950: Sunset Boulevard

Sunset Boulevard (Wilder, 1950) 10/10

Before Billy Wilder’s 1950 masterpiece Sunset Boulevard there had been very few “backstage” critiques of Hollywood and film culture. William Wellman’s 1937 A Star is Born along with Buster Keaton’s 1928 slapstick comedy The Cameraman are some of the more acknowledged pieces prior to this period, which utilized Hollywood as its backdrop. Yet, unlike the latter two films, Sunset Boulevard represented a more scathing and fastidious position toward Hollywood, particularly in the divide between the Old Hollywood of the silent era and the New Hollywood of the sound era. The effect of Wilder’s film was clearly evident in the immediate creation of other “Hollywood backstage” films such as :Vincente Minelli’s 1952 film The Bad and the Beautiful; Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1954 film The Barefoot Contessa; Robert Aldrich’s 1955 picture The Big Knife; George Cukor’s 1954 remake of A Star is Born and Stanley Donen-Gene Kelly’s 1952 musical Singin’ in the Rain, which further ridiculed Hollywood’s silent era in a less spiteful manner.

Sunset Boulevard is the fullest and most dynamic example of Billy Wilder’s career filled acidic cruelty and satirical spite. Along with John Huston, Wilder was a director chided by influential American critic Andrew Sarris for his overarching cynicism. Yet, an examination of Sarris influential and exceptional American “auteur bible” The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968. demonstrates his distaste for directors whose work holds a defeatist or pessimistic outlook. In his classification of “who is and is not an auteur”, Sarris unconsciously endorses a cinematic language that requires and hones a redeeming factor in which the central characters can be cleansed of their sins and start anew. Such characteristics are prevalent in the work of Fritz Lang, which despite his distrustful attitude toward authority, always maintains a Christian element of salvation and repentance.[1]

Sunset Boulevard however is a rare Production Code era film that has no fuzzy ending or elements of remorse amongst its principal characters. Rather it is an astringent and downbeat critique of the antithetical forces of Old and New Hollywood. In the process, no-one is spared any mercy, whether they are lowly opportunist Joe Gillis (William Holden) or eminent director Cecil B. DeMille (playing himself). In the process, Wilder creates a film that embraces a multi-genre approach: the satiric and slapstick forms of comedy; psychological and monster horror characteristics; melodramatic dramas; and the mad criminals of crime capers. Minus the western and the musical, the dominant genres of the silent period are all here, while the World War II era progeny of Film Noir is added in the utilization of its themes, concepts and lighting.

The film begins with the camera peeling back from the gutter: a helpful element of foreshadowing representative of the film’s principal characters. The first is Joe Gillis (William Holden): a B-movie screenwriter from Ohio who is being hunted by the Repo Men for back payments on his sporty convertible. The second is Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson): a legend of the silent screen desperate to return to the spotlight and fulfill the wishes of “millions” who demand her return to the silver screen. The third is Max (Erich von Stroheim), Norma’s sad and conniving butler with a dark past. Each is at a low in their careers: stuck in a metaphorical gutter, which they hope by combining their forces with others, they can aid the resurrection of their individual careers.

After a shot reminiscent of a Warner Brothers gangster flick with an array of police cars hurdling down Sunset Blvd, we are introduced to Joe Gillis: drowned and floating in the pool of an enormous Hollywood mansion built by one of those “crazy people in the crazy twenties.”
The “crazy” individual in question is Norma Desmond, who first meets Joe in his flight from the Repo Men. A blown tire has fatefully driven him onto her estate. She thinks he is a mortician for her pet monkey; he recognizes her as a forgotten silent film star.

In their sparring chit-chat, Desmond hears that Gillis is a screenwriter and would like his assistance in assembling her lifelong work: a film about Salome, the daughter of Herod Philip who received John the Baptist’s head on a plate. Naturally, Desmond plans to star as Salome, despite being more than thirty years too old for the part, and hopes to obtain Cecil B. DeMille as director. In his head, Gillis concocts a plan to swindle Desmond out of money in order to pay off his debts and return to Ohio.

Yet, unbeknownst to Gillis, he is the one who is being used. As Max will reveal later in the film, Norma Desmond uses men for her own sexual gratification. Her materialism and vanity is apparent in the grandiose opulence of her home and her line of Norma Desmond photographs. Significantly, the only films shown at her home are Norma Desmond silent pictures. She is a figure distinctly from the silent era. Her actions and movements are wildly over-the-top in stark contrast to Joe Gillis’ New Hollywood subtleness. With its wheezing organ and cavernous walls the home is reminiscent of a Universal Horror film: a fact made even more prescient in Norma Desmond’s claw-like fingers and expressive make-up. Her home has become her own world: a representation of herself, which has become a safe-zone from a period that has abandoned her. Here, Chaplin is replicated, Valentino is reminisced and “The Waxworks” featuring silent stars such as Buster Keaton and Hal Warner play cards: it has become a shrine to the silent era and an abode for the dead and the forgotten.

When Gillis steps into this world, he turns it upside down. His virility and youthful energy are increasingly utilized less for screenwriting and more as a plaything for Norma. The effect is typified in a New Years celebration in which despite a sophisticated dinner and expensive orchestra, the only guests are Gillis and Norma Desmond. Yet, Wilder’s cruelty is often in the latter half of the film replaced by sympathy. Despite her narcissistic demeanour, Norma can be at times warm and appealing toward Joe Gillis. She buys him gifts, pays his bills and cultures him. Materially she offers Joe anything he wants, yet she cannot offer him the type of relationship he desires. The source of Norma’s fan letters is revealed in Max’s intricate plot to continue her stardom and prevent her from further suicidal “bouts of melancholy”: a blow made even more crushing when Norma is invited back to Paramount Studios not to make Salome with DeMille as she believes, but rather to borrow her antique car for an upcoming period piece. Even DeMille is not spared in this heart-breaking scene in which for fifteen minutes Norma regains her stardom, as he equally appears foolish and out of touch with the modern era.

Wilder does provide Gillis with an outlet to break free from Norma in the form of a script writing job with Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson). Yet, Gillis’ adulterous adventure with Betty turns out to be ruinous. It is also significantly one of the rare moments when the characters do exert moments of guilt and regret; yet it is only as a minute response to their own selfish greed. Ideas of fate and chance are abound in Sunset Boulevard. And its fate that Holden’s character reluctantly accepts not as a Hollywood scriptwriter, but as Norma Desmond’s solitary member of what “On Sunset Boulevard” author Ed Sikov refers to on the Paramount DVD commentary as ‘a male harem: a bordello of one.’

Sex was a taboo subject in 1950, yet Sunset Boulevard is dripping with ideas of sex throughout its 110 minute running time. The theme of power is a crucial element to Sunset Boulevard. Here power is manifested into the ability to control one’s sexuality. In the case of Joe Gillis he is unable to do so and thus is as much an emasculated servant as Max, without the uniform. Norma’s forceful clout as a star and material power allow her to obtain anything she wants, including Joe Gillis. After abandoning Norma’s genuine romantic advances at the New Years Party, he clearly ends his chances at having a relationship built on love and cooperation. His return after Norma’s suicide demonstrates his own capitulation. Although guilt holds some sway in his decision, Gillis’ lust for money draws him back to Norma Desmond, which results in Gillis prostituting himself even further.

Wilder gives the film an additional element of spite in his utilization of realistic locations such as Paramount Studios, figures and semi-autobiographical elements, most notably in the tense relationship between von Stroheim and Swanson, which was a touchy subject in itself considering their failed project Queen Kelly (the silent film shown in the picture at the suggestion of von Stroheim) effectively ended von Stroheim's career behind the camera.
Another director may have not tried to push his actors to the edge in a story with such personal undertones, yet Wilder’s ability to do so results in a subservient tension between the pair throughout the film. Yet, this tension not only represents the conflict between von Stroheim and Swanson, but also the conflict between the characters of the decayed and exaggerated mannerisms of Old Hollywood and the ungrateful, yet realistic tones of New Hollywood. The end-product is some of the most dynamic performances and cinema ever put to celluloid.

[1] See Fury or Metropolis for such examples

* Sunset Boulevard is available through Paramount Home Video

Copyright 2006 8 ½ Cinematheque.