Sunset Boulevard

Billy Wilder · 1950

This week we’re showing one of Billy Wilder’s many masterpieces, Sunset Boulevard, on TUESDAY, April 22nd at 8pm.

Here is the link to RSVP. Doors will be at 7:50 and we’re starting the film at 8:10!

Some movies we program at the From Below stem from long-shared appreciation, and others come from a line of investigation we’ve been following, but sometimes a screening starts from the line “you know, I’ve never actually seen that.” Sunset Boulevard is a movie to be seen and seen again, a razor-sharp and deeply strange noir-satire on the entertainment industry that still carries a deeply felt, if complicated, love for the culture of the silver screen it skewers.

Billy Wilder, born Jewish in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, found his way to Hollywood as he escaped from the Nazi Party, and that experience gave him an incisive perspective into the American Dream and the myths it uses to swaddle itself away from some of the harsher realities of the world, whether that be mediated through the setting of the news industrial complex (Ace in the Hole), the workaday capitalist society (The Apartment), military society (Stalag 17) or gender identities (Some Like It Hot). Sunset Boulevard is the most self-incursive of the bunch, taking stock of the first 50-odd years of film history and the unique neuroses of the soul that it has progenated in its short history. Starring William Holden as unsuccessful screenwriter Joe Gillis, the film sees him being pulled into the decaying fantasyworld of Norma Desmond, played to perfection by Gloria Swanson, an aging silent film star planning her comeback in the age of the talkies. The rest of the cast is presented on stage with a hearty helping of metatextuality (Erich Von Stroheim, the director of half-lost classic Greed among other silent film classics, stars as Norma’s butler—Von Stroheim gave Swanson one of her own early starring roles [and keep an eye out for cameos by other luminaries such as From Below fave Buster Keaton]).

Sunset Boulevard is remarkably prescient in its portrait of the past and future of Hollywood, and we can’t wait to watch it with you this Tuesday. It also presents an opportunity to present a certain counter-narrative to the flashy streets often presented as the heart of Hollywood, whether it be Sunset Boulevard, Mulholland Drive, the Strip, or Beverly Hills. Nestled in-between the glitz and glamour of these legendary lanes and titillating terraces is a much more modest byway with the name of Wilcox Avenue, named after the founder of Hollywood, Harvey H. Wilcox. Those that come to the screening on Tuesday will be the first to be able to read a printed recollection of how the Minnesota Wilcoxes intersected with the Hollywood Wilcoxes. See you on Tuesday!

Stefan, Charlie, Stark