Celebrating fem-fATL Gloria Swanson

9.18 Sunset Boulevard | Billy Wilder | 1950 |110 min

Celebrating: Gloria Swanson
Synopsis: Billy Wilder’s classic black comedy/drama remains perhaps the most acclaimed, but darkest film-noir story about “behind the scenes” Hollywood, self-deceit, spiritual and spatial emptiness, and the price of fame, greed, narcissism, and ambition; it opened with a view of the posthumous narrator, down-on-his-luck B-movie hack screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden), who was sent to his doom and spoke beyond the grave as a dead man floating face-down in a swimming pool in Beverly Hills; he recounted in flashback with voice-over narration about a six-month period during which he struggled to produce screenplays to meet the demands of the industry and satisfy the thirsty illusions of immortality and comeback of aging, waspish, megalomaniacal silent film queen Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) in her decaying Sunset Boulevard mansion; after being showered with bribes (clothes, money, flattery and other gifts), he was quickly spoiled and ensnared in her web of delusion – and death trap; when Gillis first met Norma, she indignantly told him about the rise of the talkies and the end of the silent era: “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small” and later claimed: “We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces”; during an aborted New Years’ Eve party that she had hosted for him, she attempted to commit suicide by cutting her wrists with a razor when he left, and Joe felt obligated to return to her, thanking her: “You’re the only person in this stinking town that has been good to me”; inevitably, the jealous and delusional Norma retaliated against “kept man” Joe when he again threatened to leave and she cried out madly: “I can’t face life without you, and you know I’m not afraid to die” – but then shot him as he packed up and walked away toward the outdoor pool; when police arrived after the murder, the crazed and deluded woman was persuaded and coaxed to quietly come downstairs to a waiting car through a group of assembled reporters and cameramen – to surrender, only by being made to think that she was experiencing her longed-for return and shooting a film scene for famous movie director Cecil B. De Mille; disoriented, she spoke the film’s final words: “All right, Mr. De Mille, I’m ready for my close-up”