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The opening moments of this film show a street, Sunset Boulevard to be precise, where the best people in Hollywood live. The film is about Hollywood, not the glamorous side usually in films, but the other side, the people that either don’t make it onto the A-list or lose their place on it.
The principal characters are thrown together by the life of Norma Desmond, the film’s principal female, who was once a great star. Like many in Hollywood in the ‘20s the advent of “talkies” killed her career, by the 1950s when the film is set, she is all but forgotten. The fact that no one wants to tell her this sows the seeds of the tragedy that is the film. Most of it is told in flashback, explaining how a B-film writer came to be in her pool and is narrated by him.
Norma’s attempts to get back into films become more desperate as the film goes on, and cost Joe Gillis (her dependent-boyfriend) his career and happiness. It’s his body in the pool; Norma hires him to work on the script for her “return”, a very bad version of Salome she wrote. The other major characters, Betty, a reader who wanted to be an actress, and Max, a butler who was once a great director, both are pulled into Norma’s world and give up their happiness as a result.
The film is a detailed portrait of Hollywood in the ‘50s, with many real locations used in filming, and cameos by several silent movie stars and director Cecil B. DeMille. This film is also memorable because of its script, with quotations you may well know even if you’ve never seen it, many delivered by Norma. The tone of the film is set in her first scene, “I am big, it’s the pictures that got small,” followed by a brilliant speech against the addition of talk and Technicolor to films. Norma, compared to Dickens’ Miss Havisham, is determined to turn the clock back, to before Hollywood forgot her.
The reason this is a film for New Year’s is the pair of parties that are held on New Year’s. One is glamorous, Norma has an Orchestra, a huge buffet and a floor fit for Valentino, whilst Joe’s friend Arty has a bowl of punch (the recipe includes cough-drops) and a piano in a tiny flat. One party is empty, the other overflowing. Arty’s party is stuffed with people waiting for Hollywood to give them their 15 minutes, whilst Norma spends much of the evening alone. This is the night of Norma’s revelation that sparks her final decline and one of the film’s darkest moments. This section alone would be enough to make it memorable, yet it is not for this the film is remembered. It is remembered most of all for the grand finale, (for maximum effect watch it in darkness), which is one of the most stunning moments in cinema, and has to be seen to be believed.
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