‘Ready for My Close-Up’ review: David M. Lubin on ‘Sunset Boulevard’

For a long time, President Trump’s lists of favorite movies have consisted of golden age classics like “Gone With the Wind” and tough-guy fare like “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” and “Bloodsport.” In recent years, though, a new title has entered the mix: He’s been routinely praising the 1950 noir “Sunset Boulevard,” with various reports saying he’s screened it on his private plane as well as at the White House and Camp David.

What these stories mostly miss is what so enchants him about the film. Which character does Trump relate to most, do you think? Is it Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond, the obscenely wealthy-but-faded star obsessed with comebacks and raining contempt on anyone who doesn’t approach her with abject fealty and admiration? Or William Holden’s Joe Gillis, the opportunistic screenwriter content to compromise his morals for a payday? Or Cecil B. DeMille, the Hollywood kingmaker whose friendly exterior disguises his determination to preserve his industry’s institutional sexism?

The staying power of “Sunset,” 75 years on, is due in large part to its ability to contain such multitudes. It’s a movie that at once celebrates Hollywood and savagely critiques it, that’s blackhearted yet sparkles with glimmers of romanticism. Critic David M. Lubin adeptly recognizes those nuances in “Ready for My Close-Up,” his history of the film. And though the book has its shortcomings, he rightly sees the movie as a kind of passkey into the history of the first half-century of Hollywood itself, warts and all.

In many ways, the film was a sublimation of the career-long anxieties of its director/co-writer, Billy Wilder, and co-star Swanson. Born in Austria-Hungary, Wilder struggled to break into Germany’s silent film industry while working as a paid dancer for hire. Arriving in Hollywood in the ‘30s, he soon mastered glittery Lubitsch-style meet-cutes while also embracing dark themes in films like “Double Indemnity” and “The Lost Weekend.”

Swanson, for her part, knew all about the fading stardom that Norma symbolizes: In the ‘20s she was earning $20,000 a week, but she didn’t survive the rise of the talkies, and her first marriage, to actor Wallace Beery, was abusive. The ferocity with which she delivers her classic line — ”I am big, it’s the pictures that got small” — was hard-earned.

Lubin is alert to the various ways that “Sunset Boulevard” doesn’t just observe Old Hollywood but serves as its mausoleum. Indeed, an early cut of the film opens with a scene in the L.A. County morgue, as Joe Gillis suddenly sits up among the fellow corpses to relate his tale. (Wilder removed the scene after test audiences laughed in response to it, wrecking the film’s somber vibe.) Gloom presides in Norma’s mansion. The infamous “waxworks” scene captures silent-era figures like Buster Keaton playing cards, their faces pure funereal alabaster. Erich von Stroheim, playing Norma’s butler, ex-husband and emotional support beam, was once a giant among silent-era directors. In the film, as Lubin nicely puts it, he and Swanson “are the equivalent of celestial stars, whose light reaches our eyes long after they have ceased to emit it.”

Author David M. Lubin

(Daniela Friebel)

But Lubin also recognizes that while the themes of “Sunset” are dark, it works in a variety of registers. Remove Holden’s wry voice-over patter, or his flirtatious banter with an aspiring screenwriter (played by Nancy Olson), or his life-of-the-party pal (played by a pre-”Dragnet” stardom Jack Webb) and the soufflé collapses. “Part of what makes ‘Sunset Boulevard’ such a pleasure to watch is that it’s always on the verge of tipping one way or another into comedy, mystery, melodrama, social satire, or horror,” Lubin writes.

True, but Lubin doesn’t engage much with a related question: Why does “Sunset Boulevard” endure now? It survives in adaptations, spoofs, pop-culture references, and, apparently, the White House screening room. But a four-page chapter titled “The Legacy of ‘Sunset Boulevard’” hardly seems to do the matter justice. It’s not only that Norma symbolizes our corrosive need for attention — “an archetypal figure that embodies our compulsive search for fame and acceptance,” as he puts it.

Holden, in a voice-over, gets closer to what “Sunset Boulevard” reveals better than most movies: fear. “The plain fact was she was afraid of that world outside,” he says. “Afraid it would remind her that time had passed,” he says. And she’s not alone. He fears for the loss of status a lack of a screenplay represents. The waxworks are horror-show images of the consequences of fear of decline. Norma, fearful of her own mortality and irrelevance, papers it over with all the money and pages of her terrible screenplay she can muster.

And us, the audience — all those wonderful people out there in the dark, as Norma calls us, staring directly at us at the film’s end — we’ve found our fears captured too. The film challenges us to confront our mortality, and watching it on a giant screen offers a kind of reassurance. Look: Even the famous and powerful are mortal. It’s a big picture, and for as long as it’s playing, it lets us feel big too.

Athitakis is a writer in Phoenix and author of “The New Midwest.”