1950 / 110 Minutes / Not Rated
Reviewed by Dale Nauertz

The kid from Poughkeepsie doesn’t always make it big. The shining starlet doesn’t always end up on top. The good guys don’t always win. The good guys, in fact, aren’t always that good.

Hollywood is a place where the dog does, in fact, eat the other dog. Sometimes it just devours the dog’s dreams and sends him back to Ohio with his tail between his legs. As the picture opens, we meet Joe Gillis. Joe is a writer who has carved a niche for himself in B pictures and had some moderate success. That success has apparently left him by the time we meet him. The first thing that happens to him during our acquaintance is that a couple of men arrive at his door to repossess his car. He tells them a lie to keep the car (a friend is borrowing it and has taken it out of town). He then gets cracking at finding a job so that he can keep his job.

He meets with an old friend who is the head of a studio. No soup. He phones his agent. Nothing. On his way to yet another encounter, he sees the men who are out to repossess his ride. Even worse: they see him. A chase ensues and, with a blowout and nowhere else to go, he turns into the driveway of a seemingly vacant palace of a house. It isn’t long before he discovers that it is not deserted. It is inhabited by Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson). Norma, it soon turns out, had a great deal of success back in the Silent Era. But now…not so much. She still receives a fan letter every day (her butler advises Joe not to look too closely at the postmarks) and still insists that she is “still a big star. It was the pictures that got small.”

Eager to make a buck and desperate to keep his car, Joe strikes an arrangement. He will help streamline Norma’s script to be turned in to Cecil B. DeMille. It will be her comeback, and she will support him until it is finished. There is something odd about this woman and the way she still insists in living among the ghosts of her glory days, yet Joe is willing to strike a bargain with even the Devil if necessary. He has no wish to return to Ohio, humbled, and no wish to lose his car or admit defeat.

To say that things do not turn out as planned is an understatement.

Why does it work? The script. The screenwriter has obviously been through Hollywood and knows it inside and out. He is familiar with how it can create a star one week and smash them to bits the next. It knows how a man who is desperate for work looks. It knows the delusions and facades of those who are no longer as big as their egos would have them believe. The direction is also first class. Billy Wilder has done a marvelous, sure-handed job here, giving us a movie unlike any made before it. A movie that has echoed on down through the ages. The characters are all amazing and he has selected the perfect actors to give them a pulse. William Holden is excellent as usual as the cynical, hungry screenwriter desperate to make something of himself. When he discovers the true motives behind Norma’s kindnesses, he is repelled at first and recoils. Yet he is too kind to entirely leave her. Or is it that? Is it just that he doesn’t have the backbone to admit defeat and takes an easier road instead? Holden plays it with a little of both operating at once. We root for his character, but he isn’t entirely sympathetic and he isn’t a totally nice guy.

The focus and insane heart of the film, however, is Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond. Gloria really was a Silent Star who the Talkies had cast aside. She really was having a true comeback here. No doubt this is what inspired her performance, and an inspired performance it is. Knowing, scary, poignant, larger than life and yet totally believable all at once. It takes you by the throat and drags you to the end. There is a sadness and a madness to Norma that Gloria captures and essays perfectly. There is a strength and a wounded pride, a need to be loved and accepted yet again. And perhaps a knowledge that her butler is not telling her the exact truth, but too much fragility to dash this lie to pieces. She is brilliant here. She is the life force of the film and a potent one she is.

Erich Von Stroheim is also magnificent as Max, the butler who safeguards Norma, perhaps unwisely, against the truth at all costs. He shields her from the harsh light of the world and has his own, hidden and somewhat admirable motives for doing so.

And the ending, well, WOW! It is literally one of the five best endings of any movie ever. (Others worth mentioning: “The Silence of the Lambs”, “Casablanca”, “Network”, “Vertigo”) and it shocks you and leaves you unsettled. It is perfect. It keeps in with the ironic dark humor of the film and yet trumps it at the same time. Holden’s narration is also a perfect touch, giving us just enough information but not too much that we don’t have room to think for ourselves. This movie is so cynical, so bitter, so utterly caustic about Hollywood and the way that it eats its young, the way it ruins everything it touches, that it is truly amazing that it ever got made in the first place.

That brings me to an anecdote that I feel needs to be passed along. At the first screening of this film, a studio executive was outraged. He was Louis B. Mayer of Metro Golden Mayer, one of the biggest execs in Hollywood. This exchange followed:

Mayer: “How dare this young man bite the hand that feeds him!”

Wilder: “Mr. Mayer. I am Billy Wilder, and go fuck yourself.”

The entire movie is an eloquent elaboration of this statement.

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