Gloria Swanson’s theatrical manner can make a boast sound painfully necessary. We admire her extravagance in Sunset Boulevard: she gives us reasons to care about a woman the screenplay sometimes seems too eager to humiliate.
Fi1m perspective
In Sunset Boulevard (1950), Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond speaks as though being important ought to settle the matter. Her insistence that the pictures have become small is funny because she gives it such force, and troubling because she seems to need it to be true. We laughed, then felt uncomfortable: Swanson makes the boast sound like something Norma cannot afford to surrender. The acting comes close to being too much, but its size is what lets us hear the desperation.
That expansiveness had served the glamorous women of her silent films, including her work with Cecil B. DeMille in Don’t Change Your Husband (1919). Her expressive face and gestures were part of the appeal, alongside the elaborate costumes of the DeMille films. She went on to produce and star in Sadie Thompson (1928) and Queen Kelly (1929). Her singing and dialogue in The Trespasser (1929) made a convincing start in sound. The decline in the 1930s that preceded her return in Sunset Boulevard should not be mistaken for an inability to speak on film.
Billy Wilder gives that manner useful resistance in Sunset Boulevard, especially through William Holden’s Joe Gillis. Holden sounds at home in ordinary conversation, so Swanson need not set the volume of every exchange. Erich von Stroheim’s reserve is more unsettling: his quiet attentiveness suggests how much has been accepted without requiring an explanation. These restrained performances allow Swanson to be expansive without becoming exhausting.
The film is less sure of itself when the screenplay by Charles Brackett, Wilder and D.M. Marshman Jr. supplies lines so polished that we hear the writers before the character. It also sometimes makes Norma’s demand to be noticed an easy invitation to laugh at her. Swanson’s achievement is to make her need recognisable even when her behaviour is extreme; she keeps us interested in the woman after we have enjoyed the spectacle. We would start with Sunset Boulevard and follow it with The Trespasser.
Biography
Gloria Swanson was an American actress. Born Gloria May Josephine Svensson, she began her career as a teenager in silent films, appearing in shorts and features for studios including Essanay and Mack Sennett before becoming a prominent star of the 1920s under directors such as Cecil B. DeMille.
She received Academy Award nominations for Best Actress for Sadie Thompson (1928) and The Trespasser (1929), the latter marking her successful transition to sound films. In 1950 she played Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, directed by Billy Wilder, earning her a third Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe Award. She later appeared in films such as Airport 1975 (1974) and worked in theatre and television.
