The Best Movies About Movies (part 5 of 5)

Finally! Decisively! Definitively! Inexorably! Eventually! Irrevocably! Inescapably!

We have reached the end of our countdown of the best movies ever made about the movies.

So who has earned this title of distinction, this term of endearment, this crowning of achievement, this...

Ok, I'll stop now.

Sunset Boulevard

Look out, she's craaaazzzzy!

Allow me to be honest here for a moment. Sunset Boulevard is really the reason I come up with this whole "best movies about the movies" thing. This is not to say there haven't been a bunch of great movies about the movies. There have, obviously. A few of them didn't even make the list (a fact I'll have to rectify at some future point).

But really, it begins and ends with Sunset Boulevard.

Co-written and directed by one of my favorite co-writers and directors, Billy Wilder, the story of Sunset Boulevard is really two stories. On the one hand is Joe Gillis (William Holden), a down-on-his-luck hack screenwriter evading collection agency stooges who want to repossess his car. Unable to sell a script, Gillis is close to moving back to his hometown with his tail between his legs to restart his career as a newspaperman.

On the other hand is Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), a silent screen star whose fall from grace has left her teetering on the edge of madness. Cooped up in her crusty Sunset Boulevard mansion, tended to by her protective butler (and former director and husband), Desmond broods delusionally about what's happened to her.

On the verge of bankruptcy and unable to raise quick cash from anyone he knows, Gillis finds himself literally on the run from the repo men when he blows a tire and swerves suddenly into the driveway of what he assumes is a deserted mansion. Only it's not deserted. It's the home of Norma Desmond.

Dun dun dun!

Desmond sees Gillis and calls him into the house, assuming him to be (and this should tell you something) an undertaker sent to prepare her recently deceased pet chimpanzee for burial. After talking to her for a minute, Gillis recognizes her, setting up this famous exchange:

Gillis: You're Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big.

Desmond: I am big. It's the pictures that got small.

Forgotten in Hollywood, Desmond has been plotting what she has come to believe will be a triumphant return. And as soon as Gillis tells her he's a screenwriter, Desmond immediately tries to hire him to write a movie she's been plotting. She still has plenty of money, but though Gillis is aware of the weirdness of the situation, he's too desperate to avoid a sure payday.

He accepts.

Note: this sound effect doesn't actually play in the movie.

This leads to the creepy second half of the movie, where Gillis, unable to go back to his apartment, moves into a spare room over the garage and begins working with Desmond on the script. Desmond begins to dote on him, buying him clothes and food, at first over his objections and then not. The spare room floods during a rainstorm and Gillis moves into the room of the house where Desmond's husbands once lived.

You see where I'm going with this.

Finally Gillis realizes she's in love with him, and he rejects her coldly. He flees to a friend's apartment, but when he finds out Desmond's tried to slash her wrists, he comes back voluntarily, finally surrendering to the notion of being a kept man.

All the while, Desmond meets with famed director Cecil B. De Mille (playing a much nicer version of himself). She thinks it's about her and Gillis' awful script, but all De Mille really wants is to use her old, expensive car in a movie he's planning.

Believing DeMille's evasions to be confirmation of a deal, Desmond throws herself into a grueling beauty regimen. Meanwhile, a friend of Gillis' is a script girl at Paramount who's desperate for a break and begs him to work on a story with her. They have chemistry, and when Desmond finds out she flies into the jealous rage of a 14-year-old, calling the girl, threatening her and telling her about where Gillis spends his nights.

The resulting confrontation -- what Gillis does and what happens after -- I dare not reveal, only to say it leads to one of the most famous scenes in the movies; Desmond descending the stairs among a haze of reporters and news cameras, so finally and completely insane she thinks she's on the set of a De Mille movie, beckoning towards the camera and "all those wonderful people out there in the dark" (us).

It's the source of that picture up there, if you're wondering.

Anyhow, Sunset Boulevard is the best movie about the movies because it's one of the few to unflinchingly explore the sad and crushing reality of one minute being a big star and the next minute being a has been. The other movies on this list talk about it's cutthroat nature, or the zany pseudo families it creates, but Sunset Boulevard dares to explore the really icky side of it's sudden and ruthless abandonment.

The movie sees with such clarity and honesty we cringe at times. Desmond's sanity is held together with packing tape. Her loyal butler (played by has-been filmmaker Eric Von Stroheim) writes fake fan letters for her to read. Desmond doesn't (or can't) realize that the handwriting is the same in every one.

She screens her own movies every night. Her house is covered up in pictures of herself. All the door locks and knobs have been removed from the house because, as the butler notes ominously to Gillis early on, "the madam is prone to fits of melancholy."

Swanson's performance as Norma Desmond is one of the best performances I've ever seen from anyone. It's a true high wire act, as she slams, in the flamboyant manner of a silent movie actor who can't stop acting like one, from arrogance and self importance to wounded pride and helpless, pitiable agony. And that final scene. Oh, man.

It helped that Swanson knew her character inside and out. After all, she was a silent movie star who'd had a fall from grace once the talkies came in. When Wilder finally asked her to screen test (after being aggressively rejected for the part by the likes of Mae West and Mary Pickford), she refused, claiming in a way that reminded Wilder of Norma Desmond that she'd done twenty pictures for Paramount and no longer needed to test for anyone. It took famed director George Cukor to finally convince her, telling her "if they ask you to do ten screen tests, do ten screen tests, or I will personally shoot you."

Holden's Joe Gillis, on the other hand -- a hack writer without prospects, finally giving in to an easy life -- represents a wholly different colony of Hollywood failures. The battle with Hollywood to make it has worn his principles completely away, and his act of surrender to Desmond makes me think of a man on a battlefield who decides he doesn't want to fight anymore, so he looks up, sees someone charging at him and drops his weapon with a shrug, welcoming death.

He nearly pulls himself back from the brink as he works on the script with his friend's girlfriend, but he can't even do that without fucking things up. First of all, it's a stupid idea for a movie. And secondly, they fall for each other. So Gillis then not only betrays himself, he betrays his friend. And when forced to choose, he betrays his friend's girl, too.

Wilder, once of the best (and most cynical) writers and directors around, treats these two deeply flawed people with a measure of sympathy. Poor Norma, we say to ourselves. Poor Joe.

Of course, it's also not lost on me that one of the movie's main characters is a failed screenwriter named Joe who gave up on the journalism business for dreams of Hollywood and struggled to the point of giving in.

Maybe that's why I look at Sunset Boulevard as a horror movie, where instead of fighting zombies or aliens people fight their own failures and personality flaws as they simultaneously fight the exploitative nature of Hollywood. It's a sobering, brilliant movie, and as I look ahead to what awaits me out there in the town o' tinsel, I can't help but hope I'll meet the trials, tribulations and, yes, humiliation, better than Joe Gillis did.

Because, as the movie proves, the cost of failure can be steep.