The New Pictures

Sunset Boulevard (Paramount) is a story of Hollywood, mostly at its worst, brilliantly told by Hollywood at its best. A daring film by ordinary movie standards, it is the last collaborative fling by Charles Brackett & Billy Wilder* at a specialty they have made their own: playing hob with convention and getting away with it. It also brings Actress Gloria Swanson back to the screen, after a nine-year absence, in a performance that puts her right up in the running for the first Oscar of her 37-year career.

The shock effect of Sunset Boulevard is at least as high as that of such earlier Brackett & Wilder productions as the alcoholic Lost Weekend. The "hero" is a kept man, the leading lady a suicidal neurotic in her 50s, and their morbid liaison leads grimly on to madness and death. Manipulated less cleverly, the effect of these characters and their story would be oppressively decadent, not to say censorable. Indeed, for all the film's finesse, it may leave some moviegoers with a bad taste in their mouths. Yet, without sentimentalizing the characters or condoning their transgressions, the movie makes them believable, pathetic and, in a horrible way, steadily interesting. Around them, Producer Brackett and Director Wilder create a vividly atmospheric, sardonically observed Hollywood.

A young hack scripter (William Holden), broke, desperate, and pursued by his creditors, ducks his car up a Sunset Boulevard driveway and blunders into an eerie survival of an extinct world. In the moldering, overgrown grounds he finds a mausoleum-like Hollywood mansion, circa 1921, intact to the last monstrous detail. It is inhabited by two living relics: Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), a great star of the silent movies, still wealthy, with an arrogant grandeur once rooted in fame and now propped by delusion; Max von Mayerling (Erich von Stroheim), once a great director (which Von Stroheim was), now her devoted servant and the dedicated guardian of her self-centered daydream.

Holden becomes a pawn of Norma Desmond's ruthless obsession: to regain her lost glory both as an actress and a woman. In need of a haven and money, he is maneuvered into joining the menage when she offers him the job of patching up the terrible scenario she has written for her comeback as Salome. Weak and reluctant, but never reluctant enough, he stays on as her gigolo.

Neither he nor Cecil B. DeMille (urbanely played by Cecil B. DeMille), to whom she brings the script, can bring himself to puncture her confident illusion that her return to the screen is imminent. While she undergoes a strict course of beauty treatments in preparation for her triumph, Holden sneaks away regularly to collaborate on his own script with a good friend's fiancee (Nancy Olson), a reader at Paramount. He and the girl fall in love. But by that time, he has become so enmeshed in the Sunset Boulevard snare that he cannot escape.

Sunset Boulevard is crammed with detail--witty, revealing, evocative, sometimes contrived but always effective. Much of it, as the camera roams the Desmond mansion, sustains the mood of a good ghost story: a pet chimpanzee is solemnly buried by candlelight; the wind sighs through a pipe organ; rats scurry across the bottom of an empty swimming pool. The modern Hollywood is reflected in a gallery of expertly drawn types. Actress Desmond's Hollywood of the past comes alive in the fantastic trappings of her house and in her visiting bridge companions ("the Waxworks"), played by Hollywood Oldtimers Buster Keaton, Anna Q. Nilsson and H. B. Warner.

The picture is more than a brilliant exercise in moviemaking techniques; it is also a blistering commentary on Hollywood manners & morals. The film shows Hollywood as a jungle stronghold of anarchic opportunism, where success is the highest end, to be pursued by any means and at any price. It also suggests that the movies have their honest craftsmen and--derisively labeled "the Message Kids"--their idealists.

The picture itself may strike some as a disturbing symptom of a jungle mentality that flourishes in the U.S. far beyond the boundaries of Hollywood. By making a gutless heel into a sympathetic, attractive, and pseudo-sophisticated "hero," Sunset Boulevard seems to say that the smudged line between right & wrong is about the same as the line of least resistance. Yet a good deal of the sympathy the "hero" arouses is the shamefaced, there-but-for-the-grace-of-God kind of sympathy aroused by any conscience-stricken, miserable human being.

Actor Holden plays the picture's most difficult role to perfection. Von Stroheim is equally right as the onetime brilliant director, conveying as much by swallowing hard or tilting his head as he does with any of his lines. Actress Olson is an engagingly unaffected ingenue who can act.

Gloria Swanson, in a role which, at first blush, seems to hew ticklishly close to her own lifeline, gets a chance to mimic a parasol-twirling Mack Sennett bathing beauty, to impersonate Charlie Chaplin (as she did in 1924's Manhandled) and to burst into dazzling emotional pyrotechnics. It is as juicy a part as any actress could hope for, and Actress Swanson squeezes the last drop from it.

A 51-year-old grandmother, Gloria Swanson has made 63 movies, five marriages (all ended in divorce) and even two or three comebacks. She has also made--and lost, through wild extravagance and woolly business deals--several million dollars; she says she has lost track of just how many. She looks younger than her years, is still energetic enough to have taken on a three-month tour of 30 cities as advance agent for Sunset Boulevard. She insists, with justice (but probably in vain): "It is not the story of my life."

Like Norma Desmond, Actress Swanson worked for Mack Sennett and Cecil B. DeMille (who always called her "young fellow," as he does in the film), and lived in a 25-room mansion off Sunset Boulevard during her heyday in the '20s, when she was an adored and emulated symbol of glamour. Unlike Norma, she made one of her biggest hits (The Trespasser) after sound came in, kept constructively busy during the years that she pined for another screen career. Her role in Sunset Boulevard has already brought her a gnawing problem: How can she top it?

Panic in the Streets (20th Century-Fox) puts an exciting new twist into a thriller about a manhunt in New Orleans. The City's police have just 48 hours to head off a deadly epidemic of pneumonic plague* by finding the unknown and unwitting carrier--a murder accomplice with every reason to stay out of their way.

Scripter Richard Murphy's screenplay skillfully exploits not only a good story idea but a colorful New Orleans background: docks, slums, warehouses, sleazy restaurants, a seaman's hiring hall, the French Market. Director Elia (Boomerang!) Kazan filmed his picture with vigor and imagination. Though authentic settings have become a cinematic commonplace, few directors can match Kazan at filling them with people whose behavior seems equally authentic. The combination of a real city and Kazan's knack for closely observed human detail (e.g., the table manners of a thug pawing at his food) charges the picture with such pungent atmosphere that the moviegoer can all but smell it.

Richard Widmark plays a doctor in the U.S. Public Health Service who signals the manhunt when an autopsy shows that the corpse of an unknown murdered man is full of plague bacilli. He warns the police that the man who dumped the body into the river may also be infected, gives them a deadline based on the disease's incubation period. Skeptically, a police captain (Paul Douglas) sets his men scouring the city. With little to go on, they face the added handicap of keeping the news from the public and avoiding a panicky exodus that might spread the plague all over the U.S. The film builds up a full head of suspense by showing how the murder was committed and then alternating between the progress of the police and the movements of the murderer and his henchmen.

The climactic chase is overlong and a little too ingenious; it gets so bound up with the machinery of a coffee warehouse that it becomes unintentionally funny. Some quiet interludes of Hero Widmark's home life, intended to give him romantic interest and deeper motivation, seem grafted onto the plot and gain nothing from the mannered acting of Barbara Bel Geddes as his wife.

Widmark's role gives him a chance to show the versatility of his considerable talent. Douglas, typecast as the gruff but good cop, delivers his usual sound performance. But moviegoers may be most impressed by Nightclub Comedian Zero Mostel's straight portrayal of a sniveling grifter, and the striking debut of able Villain Walter Palance, a onetime prizefighter with a face like a Halloween mask.

* To spread their talents, Paramount has split the moviemaking partners and is now using them separately.

* The pulmonary (and worst) form of bubonic plague--the medieval Black Death.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.