Tuesday, August 10, 2010

This Day in Film History (“Sunset Boulevard” Premieres)


August 10, 1950—Billy Wilder’s mordant melodrama about Hollywood, Sunset Boulevard, premiered at Radio City Music Hall, on its way to an all-time house record for a non-holiday release there with a box-office take of $166,000.

What audiences at the famous New York film palace didn’t realize, however, as they greeted the movie with rapture, was that the bitter satire had come perilously close to becoming one of the great Tinseltown bombs, courtesy of a preview audience that laughed uproariously—at all the wrong places.

The key scene in this regard was the opening, which can be seen now on recent DVD releases of the movie: “Conversing Cadavers.” In the Los Angeles County Morgue, we hear the voice of a corpse. Soon others are joining in, explaining how they got there, too.

Wilder loved this scene, but in Evanston, Ill.—chosen especially as an ideal Middle American audience that would serve as a lab test for the film’s racier themes—the audience was so busy laughing that they didn’t know what to expect from the rest of the film.

So Wilder and co-screenwriter Charles Brackett (this would be their last collaboration) huddled and came up with the iconic opening we know today: also featuring a corpse in voice-over, but this time alone, face down in a swimming pool. I don’t know if Wilder and Brackett had this in mind or not, but it echoed one of the closing scenes of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, where another young man pays dearly for his dreams by being shot in a pool.

Sunset Boulevard is a cinephile’s delight, of course, from its brilliant dialogue (“I am big. It's the pictures that got small”) to the multiple ricocheting ironies of the casting (Erich von Stroheim, playing the chauffeur who used to be Norma Desmond’s director, was star Gloria Swanson’s director in real life, and a scene from the disastrous production that short-circuited both their careers, Queen Kelly, is briefly glimpsed).

For me, however, the film gains much of its power as a study in desperation. Silent-screen star Desmond’s mad desire to get back into the movie industry, of course, drives the plot, but the two men who made the film work were Swanson’s director and male co-star, both of whom were intimately familiar with despair.

As a 20-year-old transplant from Vienna, waiting for writing jobs to turn up, Billy Wilder allegedly supplemented his income as a “taxi dancer”, or paid dancing partner, in Berlin’s Eden Hotel. He went into exile from Germany when Adolf Hitler came to power, and later his mother and grandmother died in the Holocaust. He knew all too well exactly what a human being would do to survive when hungry and/or hunted (Lena Wertmuller’s Holocaust film, Seven Beauties, would have been ideal subject matter for him—if it hadn’t been too personal).

If Wilder’s knowledge of desperation derived from a painful past, William Holden’s came from much more immediate experience. After his star-making turn in 1939’s Golden Boy, his good looks had become something of a liability, as he became continually cast in boy-next-door roles. He had taken to drinking heavily, and Wilder, none too impressed with the actor’s recent work, was not thrilled that Montgomery Clift’s rejection of the role of failed screenwriter-gigolo Joe Gillis had led him to this second choice. (Make that third choice—Fred MacMurray had turned down the role, too.)

Instead, Holden channeled all of his pent-up self-loathing into the role and revived his career, and he would go on to make two other films with Wilder (Sabrina and the actor’s Oscar-winning Stalag 17) that would make him one of the box-office champions of the 1950s.

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