Sunset Boulevard (Centennial Collection)
December 2008 Reviewed by: Charlotte Meyer Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

This DVD would be a swell gift for the film buff on your list. Packaged in a stylish slip case, it’s a meticulous digital transfer of a legendary film by a legendary director, a one-of-a-kind in the noir style. It includes a second disc with seven special features that provide all the background anyone needs to understand this film’s importance. No one should consider his or her education complete without having seen Sunset Boulevard.

Wilder co-wrote and directed it at the height of the film noir movement. Most of the classic noir elements are there, from the pessimism in the voiceover commentary by down-and-out Hollywood screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) to the shadowy Sunset Boulevard mansion of the has-been silent-screen star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson). Now an eccentric recluse, she gnashes her teeth with hatred for the talkies yet fantasizes her comeback. The story opens and closes with the requisite film noir murder: the body of Gillis floating face down, eerily shot from below, in the mansion’s swimming pool. Add in the creepy old butler Max (Erich von Stroheim), Norma Desmond’s only companion in the vast mansion, and you have the noir recipe complete.

But Billy Wilder’s screenplay is its own genre -- noir comic. When Gillis randomly turns into Desmond’s driveway to escape the men trying to repossess his car, he assumes the mansion is deserted. Then the sinister butler appears and seems to have been expecting him. "If you need any help with the coffin, call me," he says, directing Gillis upstairs. It’s the first of many dreamlike encounters. In her room, Swanson’s character scolds him for being late and pulls an ornate shawl off the corpse of a chimp. They have assumed Gillis to be a pet mortician. Many other wry throwaway moments like this one lighten the film. Bizarre and funny it may be, but later Gillis dreams of "an organ grinder, the organ draped in black, a chimp dancing for pennies." It’s the plot in miniature: Broke and hopeless, he lets himself be captured by Norma and dances for pennies she throws at him.

The casting choices underline the film history behind the plot. Cecil B. DeMille plays himself, as the director whom Swanson’s character visits at Paramount to see about her "next picture." DeMille actually directed Gloria Swanson in a string of silent movies in the ‘20s and ‘30s. Hedda Hopper, the infamous gossip columnist of the ‘30s and ‘40s, also plays herself. She refuses to give the phone up to the policeman at the murder scene before she can call the story in to her editor. William Holden was a lucky choice. He is wonderfully handsome and plays Gillis with a casual sophistication against Swanson’s mania.

Swanson’s mania may give this film another life. She plays it with fixating excess, her eyes bulging, her mouth grimacing. A young audience could read her as camp. The film itself has a gothic mood (rats in the empty swimming pool) and plenty of quotable lines. ("You were big once," Joe says when he recognizes who she is. "I am big. It’s the pictures that got small," she retorts.) If it were rediscovered, it’s easy to imagine it gaining cult status. However it may, let Sunset Boulevard live on.

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