Sunset Boulevard vs Mulholland Drive

i think SB is also one of Lynch's top 5 favourite films ever.

― Zeno, Tuesday, October 20, 2009 12:06 PM (4 years ago)

yeah, for sure. from an interview with Lynch in the book Lynch on Lynch (Lynch! Lynch!!!):

Q: I understand that you screened Sunset Boulevard for everyone before you began filming Eraserhead. Why that movie?

A: Sunset Boulevard is in my top five movies, for sure. But there wasn’t anything in particular about it that related to Eraserhead. It was just a black-and-white experience of a certain mood.

xp in 1978

not sure any other Golden Age star did so... even at sixty

^ RIP.

Morbs would be jovially disappointed in me for not ever having seen Sunset Blvd but I plan to remedy that in a couple of weeks - there's a 16mm print screening in Hackney.

Bill Holden? He’s been dead for…oh.

I second his recommendation of the film Fedora, not to be confused with the erstwhile restaurant of the same name. https://www.nycgo.com/articles/fedorable-slideshow

well i finally saw it, in a glorious (actually not glorious) 16mm reduction print, with optical sound track, at the Castle Cinema. actually the quality was not terrible. What a film. Holden's curdled rejection of love at the end was genuinely shocking to me. and Gloria Swanson, i mean what is there to say. I get it now. All the amazing lines, sure ("we didn't need dialogue then! we had FACES!") but she travels across the lines like a spirit animal, just amazing. probably the greatest single moment for me is when she stands up during the private screening of one of her own movies, with the light flickering across her face, she holds up a claw-like hand, i don't even remember what she was saying, but that image, the memory of cruel command, still lingering like an aftertaste, the light washing over her.. sheesh

Famous image, I think.

https://www.denofgeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/sunset-boulevard-1950-wallpapers-2.jpg?resize=768%2C432

yes, that scene but there’s an eerier shot where it’s just her and the light is actually strobing over her as she speaks, and the effect is like a horror movie, like the bride of frankenstein or something

IIRC it's an "I'll show them all" moment as she's running up the Salome project.

she’d make such an incredible salome!!

Her Chaplin impersonation was first-rate too.

^^^^ favorite part of Waxman's score there, too

yeah, incredible. she had it down.

i DIED during her parasol bit. in a bathing costume, standing on a side table, twirling and twirling and jumping into bill holden's disgruntled lap. oh she was so happy.

i'm sure acres has been written on holden's cynicism - 'pictures that mean something? oh, that was last year' and you're rooting so hard for him to snap out of it that you're even rooting for him to steal his friend's girl. but he's too honorable for that - or too cynical? that you don't know where one stops and the other begins is part of the genius of the ending.

paris review interview with wilder re: SB here: https://cinephiliabeyond.org/sunset-boulevard-billy-wilder-charles-bracketts-sobering-exposure-dark-side-hollywood/

as well as an early script where the first scene would have been set in a morgue, with holden's 'spirit' conversing with the other corpses.