#150 - Sunset Blvd. (1950)

First things first: I've never seen the movie Born Yesterday, but Judy Holliday must have given one hell of a performance in that movie if she beat out not just Bette Davis and Anne Baxter in All About Eve (one of my favorite movies of all time, which includes some of the best acting ever) but also Gloria Swanson as an aging silent film actress, hoping for a last hurrah in the talkies, in Sunset Blvd., a performance that is easily among the greatest of all time.  Call me skeptical, Judy, but methinks you beat vote-sharing between the two AAE cast members, and some stuffy people who mayn't be fond of the backhand Sunset Blvd. gives the motion picture industry.

What I had going into this film were a lot of expectations: it seems that everyone I know who likes good movies loves this film.  And I have to say that once I got past the first two minutes of first-person narrative and figured out that this technique wasn't a distraction, but a great way to present the film, I was hooked

I must admit that when the two main characters meet for the first time, I had a sense of "this is really a stretch", but something in the way this scene is filmed, with the simultaneous admiration and disregard of decay, with Holden sort of dictating the feeling of his surroundings.  It's a bit of "tell, don't show" at first, but with the exquisite look of the surroundings melded with his voice-over narration, it's a terrific effect.  We already know a lot about Swanson's character before we meet her, and she plays it up terrifically.

A pair of smaller, but no less important and influential figures in the movie are Max, Norma Desmond's consummately loyal caretaker/butler, who we find out is the man who "discovered" the young starlet all those many years ago, and Nancy Olson, the erstwhile scriptreader who befriends Joe and wants him to get the one good story in his head out to the masses.  But, really, everything revolves around the relationship (such as it is) between Joe and Norma.  It's strange, eerie at times, and incomprehensible to the audience in the way it plays out, and that is the strength of this film.  Everything works just so, and we are lead on the strange and mystical journey Joe takes through the eyes of Joe himself.

Score: 9.5/10