The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, January 4-10
Sunset BLVD. (1950)
Directed by Billy Wilder
It’s hard to imagine Norma Desmond, the exiled, bygone silent era star who spends everyday mooning over her comeback, played by anyone other than Gloria Swanson, but Pola Negri, Mae West, and Mary Pickford were Billy Wilder’s original preferences. In many ways, Swanson’s life paralleled Norma’s: a former silent actress coaxed out of retirement to play the role she was born for, a seamless amalgamation of truth and legend.
William Holden is career-best as Joe Gillis, a down-on-his-luck screenwriter who happens upon Norma’s desolate mansion as he’s trying to evade bill collectors. Norma’s butler, an unflappable Erich von Stroheim (who also happens to be her first husband), leads Gillis into the parlor where Ms. Desmond lures him into the murky chasm that is now her life. She gives Gillis room and board, a new career opportunity, and trinket by trinket corrodes their professional relationship into one of emotional dependency. In order to keep Gillis after he’s frightened by her advances, Desmond attempts suicide, pulling him beyond just a kept man, making him an appendage.
With cameos from silent-film stars, an enduring scene with Cecil B. DeMille himself, a piquant script and impeccable photography and authority, Wilder’s tawdry tale of egomania in a world now forgotten remains unrivaled in its perfected disillusionment and melodrama. Samantha Vacca (January 7, 8, 11:30am at the Nitehawk)