![]() Her career was long, too: she first appeared on film as a teenager in 1914 she was precisely 50 years old when she gave her tremendous performance in Sunset Boulevard, and she lived until she was 84. She had been a great beauty and clothes horse as a young woman – and her devotion to healthy eating and high fashion kept her chic and active to the end of her life. Swanson made a successful transition into the talkies, and then went on to be a successful business woman, remaining a very public figure. The character of Desmond borrows some biographical details from Swanson: she too worked with DeMille and Von Stroheim ( it’s their 1928 Queen Kelly on the cinema screen) and Swanson recreates her Chaplin impersonation from Manhandled (1924). It should go without saying, of course, that Swanson was no Norma Desmond. Even if all Paramount can supply that day are the compact cameras used for shooting TV newsreels.įor all its humour, Sunset Boulevard is a bitter and queasy film, and the figure of Desmond is its greatest grotesque, a woman of 50 striving to be 25, surrounded by images of herself and entranced by her own face on a cinema screen. After all she has hired a writer, she already employs a director (Max) and in the film’s final seconds, her palatial home becomes – at least in her mind – a movie set. Paramount and DeMille may not wish to make her extravagant Salomé film, but it is feasible that Desmond, with her funds, could produce it herself. Meanwhile, at 10086 Sunset Boulevard, in Desmond’s mad mansion, there is always champagne and caviar to hand, and enough money to cater to her every whim and to turn Gillis into a kept man. Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard Photograph: C.Everett Collection/Rex Features Paramount producer Sheldrake is ill with stress Gillis is broke and only one rejection letter away from quitting show-business for “a copy-desk in Dayton, Ohio” his friend Artie is stuck on a disastrous shoot in Arizona Betty the script-reader is optimistic that she can make films that matter, but even she has been through the mill, rejected as a wannabe starlet, with the rhinoplasty scars to prove it. They live cheaply and crack wise about the industry, seemingly cynical and smart enough not to be fooled by it.Ĭrucially, however, the film industry in Sunset Boulevard is shown to be on its last legs. ![]() Her eccentric behaviour, her unwieldy plans for an epic comeback project (“I hate that word!”) and unstable mental health contrast with the brisk and breezy behaviour of Gillis and his young pals. ![]() Perhaps he is projecting his own recent lack of success, but he is right that Desmond is deluded about the scale of her fame (the fan letters she receives are fake) and her importance to the modern movie industry (whatever she thinks, Cecil B DeMille is not waiting for her call). He compares her house to Miss Havisham, “given the go-by”, and clearly thinks Desmond has been rejected too. Although he will ultimately be her victim, Gillis initially feels pity for Desmond, “still proudly waving to a parade which has long since passed her by”. She ensnares him to become her script editor as well as her lover, until, as we already know thanks to a flash-forward at the film’s opening, he will meet a violent end. Desmond lives in dusty seclusion on the aptly named Sunset Boulevard, with her butler Max (Erich von Stroheim), until a young screenwriter, Joe Gillis (William Holden) stumbles across her house one day.
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