MY MOVIE SHELF: Sunset Boulevard

 

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 164  Days to go: 116

Movie #274:  Sunset Boulevard

A lot of my introduction to older classic films came by way of the 1998 AFI list, 100 Years … 100 Movies. Back then there were no DVRs or whatever, and the internet was still pretty hit or miss, so I took a legal pad and wrote down the title of every entry, then marked all the ones I’d already seen and crossed off the others as I got to them. Being something of a student of the Oscars, I’d heard of Billy Wilder, of course, but watching Sunset Boulevard was what, for me, validated and justified his grand Hollywood reputation. The movie is a masterpiece.

In addition to Billy Wilder’s well-earned reputation as one of Hollywood’s best and most revered filmmakers of all time, another thing Sunset Boulevard makes abundantly clear is the very definition of film noir. One could hardly watch it and call it anything else. In a move that seems to me like it would’ve been revolutionary at the time, the film is narrated by a dead man. It opens with our hero, Joe Gillis (William Holden) floating face down in a pool, shot three times. His narration then takes us back six months, at what may be called the beginning of his downfall, like a P.I. narrating his latest case and how some dame got him into a tight jam. Everything is shadowy and the situation surrounding Joe grows more and more off-kilter. He falls in with former silent film star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), and though her home is luxurious, it’s filmed instead to look cavernous and empty, lonely and desolate and dying. As is Norma herself, in fact, on top of being more than a little crazy. It seems only natural that this atmosphere of deterioration would lead to someone’s death.

Joe himself is something of a waste, too, a man who starts out down on his luck, worms his way into what he thinks might be a pretty great scam, and winds up hating everything about himself and his life. Even when a sliver of hope crosses his path in the form of Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson), he ultimately sabotages it. A man like him doesn’t deserve any happiness.

The script is tight and gripping, the tone is ominous, and some of the shots are exquisitely framed — odd angles, fascinating closeups, shifting focus. Norma’s face, in particular, is often filmed either from above or from below or at an angle where she’s looking away from the camera, but her reflection looks directly at it, as if Norma herself is unlike normal people, forever presenting a reflection, always askew.

And of course, the performance of fading and forgotten silent film star Norma Desmond by faded silent film star Gloria Swanson is a lovely and poignant piece of authenticity — an idea only reinforced by the incredibly inside-baseball feel of the filmmaking and script writing shop talk. When Joe talks about writing screenplays, he doesn’t just talk about characters and stories, he talks about what is easier to shoot or how much it might cost — a full complement of production concerns. The cameos, too, are authentic. Cecil B. DeMille appears as himself on the set of an actual film he was directing. Hedda Hopper is on the scene in the closing moments, ready to fill the gossip rags with the tales of this latest Hollywood scandal. Even Norma’s ancient friends — dubbed by Joe as “the Waxworks” — are played by actual former silent film stars, including Buster Keaton, which seems both hilarious and kind of mean. Then again, so is any story about the inner workings of Hollywood — hilarious and kind of mean.

Norma Desmond might be one of the scariest non-horror villains of film, but she’s also one of the most intriguing. She might even be the movie world’s first bona fide cougar, moving in on a man half her age because why not. Why not have a kept man and an absurdly devoted servant named Max (Erich von Stroheim)? “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.”

If I were rich and old and lonely, I’d definitely be tempted to live a Norma Desmond lifestyle. I probably wouldn’t kill anyone, though. Which is why no one is ever going to make a movie about me.

 

MY MOVIE SHELF: The Apartment

This is the deal: I own around 350 movies on DVD and Blu-ray. Through June 10, 2015, I will be watching and writing about them all, in the order they are arranged on my shelf (i.e., alphabetically, with certain exceptions). No movie will be left unwatched . I welcome your comments, your words of encouragement and your declarations of my insanity.

Movie #21: The Apartment

When I was young, I didn’t like old black and white movies. Or I at least assumed I didn’t. I wouldn’t actually have known if I liked them or not because I never watched them. Just by virtue of being black and white, I considered them boring and awful, without knowing another thing about them. I watched Gone with the Wind with my mother once, staying up late into the night together on the couch. I loved it immensely, but it was the exception. Plus it was in color, so it didn’t count. Right? And sure, I loved The Wizard of Oz, but these were both classics — everybody loved those. Okay, Miracle on 34th Street too, but not any others. Except Sound of Music, of course, but, again, color, and that’s the end of the list. I think.

So what I’m really saying is that I was irrationally close-minded as a pre-adolescent and missed out on seeing a lot of great movies that I would probably love. I’m still working on correcting that. (180 days ’til Christmas! The 50 blu-ray set I want is really going to crank up the time crunch of this project, though.)

I didn’t see The Apartment for the first time until probably eight years ago, and I could kick myself for not getting to it sooner. A sweet and sorrowful comedy, it might be one of the most perfect films ever made. It’s funny and touching, yet sad in places, and it burrows itself right into the center of your heart and stays there forever. Go watch it and see if it doesn’t.

Jack Lemmon (wow, was he ever handsome in 1960) plays C. C. Baxter, a friendly and amenable office worker for a giant insurance company in Manhattan who has been bulldozed by certain executives in the company into loaning them his bachelor pad after work most nights so they can have secret trysts with their mistresses. In exchange for letting them take advantage of his good nature, they hold over his head the promise of a recommendation for advancement.

When Baxter finally gets called in to see the personnel director Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray, far removed from his upstanding roles in My Three Sons and The Absent-Minded Professor — the only other things I’d ever known him from) (oh yeah, I also liked The Absent-Minded Professor), however, his promotion comes with the caveat that Mr. Sheldrake also wants in on the apartment deal and wants no one else to know about it. So while the other executives are fairly open with Baxter about who they’re rendezvousing with in his apartment, Mr. Sheldrake’s young lady is an unknown.

Meanwhile, Shirley MacLaine plays Fran Kubelik, an elevator girl in the building, back when elevators needed people to operate them (I submit that my former office still needs them), who Baxter has a bit of a crush on. And if you can’t see where this is going, you must’ve never watched a movie before. Indeed, Fran and Mr. Sheldrake had been an item over the summer, then split up for six weeks after his wife and children came back to town, and now he’s after her again and complicating everyone’s lives. She still loves him, of course, and he plies her with his insistence that he loves her and is planning to divorce his wife, but when it turns out to be untrue, her emotions are in tatters.

I can’t possibly stress enough how captivating Shirley MacLaine is in this movie. My aversion to old films being what it was, I never knew her as anything other than an eccentric older woman, starting with roles like Ouiser Boudreaux in Steel Magnolias (Terms of Endearment was still a little before my time). In The Apartment, however, she is young and positively gorgeous, witty and sweet and kind, but impossibly sad. The sadness over her heartbreak and the impossibility of her situation is all-encompassing. She’s personable, but quiet, and largely keeps to herself. Her eyes are striking, but always slightly glassy, as if threatening to overflow with tears at any moment. And the compact she carries in her purse is broken, but she keeps it because “it makes me look the way I feel.”

One of the beautiful things about The Apartment — the thing that makes it unique — is that it doesn’t shy away from the seriousness and the sadness of Fran’s and Baxter’s situations. It’s a comedy, yes, but the rampant adultery is definitively framed as demeaning — to the women who are used and lied to and strung along, and to Baxter, whose neighbors look askance at what they mistake as his irresponsible behavior, and who at one point sleeps on a park bench in the rain because one of the executives has scored himself a tipsy Marilyn look-alike and all-but threatens Baxter’s good standing in the company if he won’t give up his apartment in the middle of the night.

Things come to a head at Christmas when Baxter accidentally finds out that his crush Fran Kubelik is the woman seeing Mr. Sheldrake, and Fran’s gift from Mr. Sheldrake is a one-hundred-dollar bill, which she quips — dead-eyed and emotionless — doesn’t make her feel cheap at all, since $100 is a lot of money ($15 more, in fact, than Baxter’s monthly rent in Manhattan). Sheldrake leaves her on Christmas Eve, in a hurry to catch a train back to his family, and she stays behind in the apartment to compose herself. Despondent, she notices a bottle of sleeping pills in the bathroom, and she takes them.

The movie doesn’t shy away from that either, but rather treats it as the devastating act of desperation that it is. When Baxter finds her, he’s told by his neighbor the doctor that if he’d come home thirty minutes later, it would’ve been too late. He warns Baxter to keep an eye on her, because she might try it again, and while Baxter is worried to death about her, his call to Sheldrake makes it perfectly obvious that Sheldrake is not concerned for anything but his own hide. So Baxter takes care of her as she’s laid up in his apartment, recuperating from her very close call. In these close quarters, Baxter confesses that he, too, was once suicidal about a breakup. How his attempt was foiled is very comical, but the connection, the intimate understanding of each other’s feelings, and the hopeful message that things get better, are quite sincere.

It’s hard to come out and say, “Watch this sad and touching romantic comedy about a suicide attempt,” without kind of sounding like a lunatic, but maybe that’s what makes the movie itself so rich. I’ve always held up “paradoxical” as my favorite word, both for its aesthetically pleasing virtues as well as the idea it contains, that two opposing forces can exist together in a single entity. No one is ever just one thing, and The Apartment isn’t just one thing either; it is many things, with many layers. It’s light and airy, yet authentic in its representation of pain. It’s warm and inviting, but frustrating and difficult. It smoothly glides back and forth between funny and sad, blurring the lines around them, over and over and back again.

I could recommend this movie because it won five Oscars, or because it was written and directed by Hollywood legend Billy Wilder. There are worse reasons to watch a movie. But the real reason to watch this movie is its content: its exquisitely nuanced performances, its tight and seamless script, its timeless relevance. Watch The Apartment because it is perfectly balanced and perfectly executed. Watch The Apartment because it is perfect.