This is part of the Great Villain Blogathon hosted by Speakeasy* Shadows and Satin & *Silver Screenings from April 20th – 26th 2014
“All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.”– T.E. Lawrence
“You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”- Mark Twain
IT’S ALL IN THE EYES! -THE LEGACY OF GLORIA SWANSON/NORMA DESMOND & GLORIA HOLDEN/COUNTESS ZALESKA
Are these wicked women? Do they exemplify the monstrous feminine? I dare say NO! They are sensual yet tragic figures!
Gloria Holden’s Countess Zaleska is a victim of her bloodline (literally)–her father Dracula’s legacy, desperately seeking out redemption and’ release’ from the torture of her relentless desires. (lesbianism in the form of blood lust) And Gloria Swanson‘s enduring Norma Desmond an aging silent screen star pushed out by talkies-a victim of a punishing Hollywood institution that forces older women into self-delusion. Though her beauty did not fade, the praise and recognition have.
Both women are literally immortal!
Ironically without realizing the connection, there are two threads of synchronicity that revealed themselves after I decided to pair both Glorias. A) Both women have male servants who show a stoic undying co-dependent worship of their mistress and B) Hedda Hopper appears in both films…
“She gives you that weird feeling!” –tagline from Dracula’s Daughter
Two Glorias, two dynamic forces on screen- Written about endlessly, on the surface spider women, vamps and villainesses perhaps… but to the thoughtful observer and film fanatic like myself… they are sympathetic figures in a cruel world…
“Cast out this wicked dream that has seized my heart.”- subtitle from one of Gloria/Norma’s silent films.
First, let’s begin with our ‘close-up’- on Gloria Swanson as the eternally mesmerizing Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder’s masterpiece! Norma is in actuality the one trapped in an orbit of ambivalence about her own primacy which ultimately devolves into a vulnerable, needy, discontented, and brooding personality whose dependency upon men and (one opportunistic man in particular) is self-destructiveness turned outward.
SUNSET BOULEVARD 1950
Written and directed by auteur Billy Wilder (Double Indemnity 1944, The Lost Weekend 1945, Ace in the Hole 1951, Stalag 17 (1953), Witness for the Prosecution 1957, Some Like It Hot 1959, The Apartment 1960, which won BEST PICTURE that year, beating out ELMER GANTRY!).
Considered the last motion picture in the film noir canon. The first is Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity 1944 with his notoriously sexified femme fatale Phyllis Dietrichson, who’s got a great pair of gams showcasing that diamond ankle bracelet, dark sunglasses, and Barbara Stanwyck’s cool exterior. And Wilder’s last noir, Sunset Boulevard, unofficially marked the end of classical noir’s heyday. Sunset Boulevard truly pushes the conventions of noir to its limits.
Written for the screen by Wilder and Charles Brackett (The Lost Weekend ’45, Edge of Doom, ’50, Niagara ’53).
Music by Franz Waxman (Magnificent Obsession ’35, The Invisible Ray ’36, A Day at the Races ’37, The Man Who Cried Wolf ’37, Gone With the Wind -uncredited, Humoresque ’46 I Married a Monster From Outer Space, Home Before Dark, there’s so much more– see IMDb profile).Waxman’s score is superb, from the exhilarating opening sequence that accompanies the flurry of police and newsreel camera trucks racing to the crime scene, the vibrant strings and strident horns that accentuate modernity, to the more subtle, poignant moments that underscore Norma’s internal agony.
John Seitz is responsible for the evocative and quirky noir-esque cinematography (Sullivan’s Travels ‘4I, Double Indemnity ’44, The Lost Weekend ’45).
The use of light in key frames showcases Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond who exults whenever she is either watching herself or is thrust into sudden illumination rendering her as somehow lost. The use of shadows and oddly lit spaces evoke the sense of her tragic misconstruction of reality.
Bruce Crowther on- Cinematographer Seitz who helped to define some of the memorable images of Sunset Boulevard– “Rarely does full light intrude upon this movie… Seitz handles the often cluttered sets using lighting to direct the eye to each scene’s key areas. Even when light is used fully, as when Norma steps into the beam of her home movie projector or when a lighting technician at the studio turns the spotlight on her, it serves a dark purpose… Here it shows with appalling clarity the incipient madness that will eventually destroy Norma.”
Arthur P Schmidt, the film editor, died at age 52 (worked on Ace in the Hole and Some Like it Hot with Wilder).
Art direction by Hans Dreier and John Meehan, fabulous mise-en-scène by set designers Sam Comer & Ray Moyer who both worked on (Read Window 1954, Vertigo 1958, Breakfast at Tiffany’s 1961) Which arranges the landscape of Norma’s World with Art Deco style furnishing, elaborate candelabras, wrought iron scrolled staircases, tapestries, and ornate lighting fixtures. Norma’s bedroom is something out of a Gothic fairytale with its superfluous ruffles and claustrophobic pageantry.
Wilder and his artistic design team create an atmosphere of decadence and decay. Using an ornate baroque visual style that puts emphasis on the surroundings which are careful set pieces of time-worn opulence. The scenes are filled with a cluttered and suffocating mise-en-scène. Sunset Boulevard reveals the conflict of the old grandeur of the silent era with the hollow clamor of modernity, as a ‘clash of styles and eras.’
Once Joe walks in from the brightly lit Los Angeles hustle and bustle, the tone turns darker, as he steps inside the confines of the mansion, crowded with the serpentine wrought iron staircase, large yet dim light fixtures, and ancient-looking columns that appear to be disintegrating in small scattered parts. Set against the crispness of Max’s white gloves and Norma’s black sateen lounging pajamas, it offsets the sense of a perishing house oddly and creepily. Again, this is where noir meets horror by the elements combined in the visual style.
Most effectively is the central character of Norma Desmond whose electrifying intensity and melodramatic flare projects an other-world style in contrast with the biting and cynical, dispassionate humor of the younger screenwriter from the age of talkies.
According to Sam Kashner and Jennifer MacNair, many of the film’s props came from own Swanson’s home and scrapbooks. “One shot pans across the table covered with Swanson’s film stills, the photographs in old frames capturing her young face and heavily painted eyes.”
The portrait in Norma’s living room was painted by Geza Kende. Wilder also borrowed a film clip of “Norma” in her prime from a Swanson film Erich Von Stroheim directed, Queen Kelly 1929.
From Foster Hirsch’s The Dark Side of the Screen- he cites Amir Karimi in Toward a Definition of the American Film Noir as the true period of noir beginning with Wilder’s Double Indemnity and ending with the same directors Sunset Boulevard 1950. He goes on to say that Wilder’s noir drama’s contain “the biting social comment, the stinging disapproval of the American way” Sunset Boulevard “transfers noir psychology to a novel setting, the decaying mansion of a once-grand film star. Wilder’s portrait of the megalomaniacal Norma Desmond is etched in acid; she is the embodiment of Hollywood’s rotting foundations, its terminal narcissism, it’s isolation from reality.”
Norma’s sensational costumes were created by prolific designer Edith Head, who resurrected Swanson’s silent era look, the exotic and exaggerated costumes and fashions of an ex-screen Goddess, which point back toward Swanson’s past. She wears a hat, adorned with a peacock feather, in the scene where she is reunited with Cecil B. DeMille. This is a visual homage to a headdress she wore in Male and Female 1919 one of the first films in which she was directed in.
The silent movie queen Norma Talmadge is reported as “the obvious if the unacknowledged source of Norma Desmond, the grotesque, predatory silent movie queen” – Dave Kehr, “An independent woman, nobly suffering in silents”, New York Times, 11 March 2010.
Sunset Boulevard could not have been cast with anyone better than the dynamic and grande actress who in 1919 was signed to a contract by Cecil B. DeMille.With this, her comeback role, Gloria Swanson ignites the screen with her eponymous Norma Desmond -star of the silent screen -Norma Desmond, the tragic central satellite of the story, who herself is dreaming of a comeback. Swanson’s performance is as much transfixing as it is exquisite.
Swanson herself was a very hard-working actress in the 1910s and 1920s with Mack Sennett before joining Paramount Studios. She started her own production company in the mid-’20s but only made a few talkies in the 1930s. She made six silent films with Cecil B. DeMille.
As Leo Braudy says in his insightful book, The World in a Frame: What We See– Aesthetically, Swanson faces into the film as the fictional character Norma Desmond and faces outward toward us as the star. He calls her role a ‘meditation’ on her screen image and the relationship between the old world of silent films and the new world of 1950s Hollywood. He refers to the other actors who were her contemporaries playing themselves as ’embalmed’ with her in the past, losing their relevance to the audience and ultimately their power.
Billy Wilder’s film is, as James Naremore says in his book More Than Night- Film Noir in its Contents, an “iconoclastic satire” and “a savage critique of modernity.” Much like Aldrich’s The Big Knife, it is a condemnation of Hollywood in the cycle of films released in the 1950s. Also notable is The Bad and The Beautiful 1952. Naremore points out that these films coincided with the blacklist and the decline of studio-owned theater chains, marking the end of an era. Norma’s character is a casualty of changing times.
Co-starring as the ill-fated, gutless, ‘big dope’, unemployed screenwriter who becomes Norma’s gigolo is smooth and sexy William Holden as Joe Gillis. Erich Von Stroheim plays Norma’s devoted butler and ex-hubby Max Von Mayerling. Erich Von Stroheim who had directed Swanson in Queen Kelly ’29 is perfectly suited to play her servant/ex-husband/devotee.
The film also co-stars Nancy Olson (Union Station 1950) as Betty Schaefer, Fred Clark as Sheldrake, Lloyd Gough as Morino, Jack Webb as Artie Green, Franklyn Farnum as the undertaker, and special appearances as themselves, Cecil B. DeMille, Hedda Hopper, Buster Keaton, Anna Q Nilsson, H.B. Warner, and composers Ray Evans and Jay Livingston.
The film is a Gothic, poetic nightmare in noir that so often evinces a sympathetic lens toward the forgotten characters who engage the audience like apparitions of another time in Hollywood. The unorthodox narrative embraces a vividly unstable noir identity that dwells within the constructs of American life, pushing the limits of social and sexual convention to a dark place of obsession and excess. However, Wilder scripted this as a black comedy, the noir stylization that had by now run through its recurring patterns still manages to create the incessant mood of bleak cynicism and a distant vulgarity.
Bruce Crowthers Reflections in a Dark Mirror- “Of the other German emigres who worked in Hollywood the most significant contributor to the film noir is Billy Wilder, whose Ace in the Hole perhaps the most cynical movie ever to come out of Hollywood, Double Indemnity with its mesmerizing manipulative spider-woman and Sunset Blvd with its atmosphere of brooding baroque insanity are classics of the genre.”
“Wilder introduces a creepy atmosphere of eccentric ruin that’s strange and destroys lives, yet hypnotically alluring and seductive from a lost indulgent age.”– Alain Silver & James Ursini from The Encyclopedia of Film Noir-The Directors
Wilder wanted stark reality and realism to pierce the veil of illusion and fantasy that was the dream factory of Hollywood in the 1950s. He portrays a corrupt landscape of used-up people, conniving agents, writers hustling to get their scripts sold, and the loneliness and alienation that permeates a world of broken dreams and perpetual struggle. Andrew Dickos in Street With No Name calls Wilder’s noir films “visions are steeped in cruel and corrosive humor, distinctive in its own right and its ability to function apart from the noir universe.”
In this provocative masterpiece, Billy Wilder masterfully evokes a shudder in us, “by emphasizing its verisimilitude, though, Wilder reveals the hidden truths of the world’s cruelest company town- from the isolation of forgotten celebrities to the crass efficiency of producers. Not only a thrilling and strange piece of entertainment, the film also is an indictment of Hollywood.” –Kashner & MacNair
Louis B. Mayer, at a private screening of Sunset Boulevard, was furious with Wilder for his cruel portrayal of the industry that supported him. At the party before the various celebrities, he reproached him, “You have disgraced the industry that made and fed you! You should be tarred and feathered and run out of Hollywood!”Wilder kept the script hush-hush using the innocuous code title A Can of Beans. Wilder and Brackett feared that Hollywood would respond negatively to their damning portrayal of Hollywood.
He offers us the very typified archetypes of classical noir with his doomed anti-hero, the dangerous femme fatale, and the good girl redeemer. Also present are the familiar themes of entrapment, claustrophobia, instability, corruption, flawed character, psychological crime melodrama and even the police procedural with it’s thrilling opening sequence as the newsreel cameras and police cars, their sirens blaring, tear up the streets as they speed toward the murder scene.
Originally, Billy Wilder wanted the legendary & incomparably sexy and suggestive writer/actress Mae West to play Norma. West declined because she found the story to be ‘too dark’. She also didn’t want a film that portrayed the relationship between an older woman and a younger man that reflected itself as hideous. The two approached Greta Garbo, who also declined the offer. Wilder also approached Mary Pickford , who was appalled by the offer, and they had to apologize to her. It was George Cukor who suggested Gloria Swanson. Wilder asked Gloria Swanson to screen test for the part in 1949, and she almost said no. She had worked with Wilde, who had adapted the screenplay for her film Music in the Air 1934. Norma is a larger-than-life film character, though an exaggeration of reality, considering Swanson wasn’t ancient, she was only fifty at the time!
Wilder had contracted Montgomery Clift to play Joe Gillis. Clift left the picture, finding it too uncomfortably close to his own life, because of the younger man’s relationship- he allegedly had an affair with Libby Holman, a popular singer of the 20s whose career was ruined by the scandal surrounding the shooting death of her husband. Clift had spent time with Holman, who also lived in a sprawling mansion much like Norma’s. Wilder worried that the age difference between Swanson and Holden wasn’t big enough; Swanson was fifty, and Holden was thirty-one.Wilder hadn’t been impressed with some of Holden’s more mediocre films of the ’40s, even though he had starred in Rouben Mamoulian’s Golden Boy (1939) with co-star Barbara Stanwyck. Sunset Boulevard made William Holden’s career. While I find Joe Gillis to be a dismissive, smarmy ass who sort of had it coming to him, in this picture, I let it be known that I’m a huge fan of William Holden!- he did a superb job of playing it cagey, opportunistic, and sarcastic as hell.
Wilder mirrors Joe Gillis’ from his own start as a shaky Hollywood writer having moved from Germany to America after Hitler’s rise to power, He used to be a “˜taxi dancer’ who would dance with any unattached older women who were willing to pay for his services.
One of the most iconic scenes from Sunset Boulevard, aside from the film’s fever dream climax where Norma descends the grand staircase, plunging into her gathering madness, is the scene that illustrates the withering passage of a lost era. The three fading silent film stars play bridge in the parlor of Norma’s decaying Gothic mausoleum. During the scene with the old stars playing bridge, the collectors come and take Joe’s car away, the only passport to freedom he has.
“˜The wax works’ cracks-wise, struggling snarky screenwriter Joe Gillis, referring to Norma’s bridge party guests. Wilder envisioned this scene as purposefully macabre, or as Kashner and MacNair call it, “ghastly.” See figures gathered around the table, as the sequence unfolds, it is revealed that these actors are actually playing themselves. Silent screen actress Anna Q. Nilsson and H.B. Warner, who had played Christ in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1927 picture The King of Kings. And the Legendary actor of silent cinema, Buster Keaton, is there too. Kashner and MacNair describe his features ravaged by alcohol abuse.” Even Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond in a way is paying tribute to herself by recalling the bridge game in the parlor scene-“Came close to giving us all the creeps.”
Like the bridge guests, DeMille plays himself with scenes shot on the real set of his 1949 motion picture Samson and Delilah. Erich Von Stroheim, himself a once great director, Wilder uses him poignantly as Max, who mourns his former life. Wilder touches on the fact that Stroheim in real life had a rough time with his career, often going over budget and ultimately making box office flops.
As I’ve pointed out here in this piece for The Great Villain Blogathon, I am using Norma Desmond to argue that she isn’t the psychotic spider woman or villainess that she’s been referred to and that the film neither makes fun of her, yet creates a sense of sympathetic apology to this grande dame mostly revealing her as quite a tragic figure. I neither see her as washed up nor grotesque, but a beautifully powerful woman possessed of intensity. She is the one who is ‘trapped’ in the web of an unforgiving culture that demonizes women for their sexual primacy. Norma is possessed of desire. The desire to still be adored. The desire to make a ‘return’ to motion pictures. The desire to be loved as a great star. The desire to be loved by Joe.
It’s Joe Gillis that is not a very likable guy, who is uncaring, weak, too shallow, and powerless. Let’s face it he’s a self-acknowledged heel. Ironically, sadly it is Norma’s story that is being told through this guy’s voice and perspective yet another way that her character is silenced, her personae distorted and perverted through the male gaze.
Once again Silver & Ward point out eloquently-
“Norma herself as portrayed by Gloria Swanson is a tragic figure. imbued by Wilder with powerful romantic presence… A woman obsessed, she clings to her vision with a tenacity that must ultimately be granted a grudging admiration and she is the only character in the film with the possible exception of Erich Von Stroheim’s fanatically loyal Max, who inspires genuine sympathy. Watching herself on screen in an old movie, she leaps into the projector’s murderous blast of light and cries, ‘They don’t make faces like that anymore!’ It is difficult for the viewer to favor Joe’s cynicism over her fervor, however misguided or self-centered it may be…”
THERE’S A MONSTROUS FEMALE IN OUR MIDST- SOME CHARACTERIZATIONS OF NORMA: