Sunset Boulevard & Singin’ in the Rain: Two Sides of the Same Story
One is a darkly comic film noir. The other is an evergreen Technicolor musical. Yet taken together, Sunset Boulevard and Singin’ in the Rain form a consistent narrative about one of the greatest innovations to hit the movie industry: recorded sound.
In 1929, Charlie Chaplin said in an interview for Motion Picture Magazine:
“They [the talkies] are spoiling the oldest art in the world – the art of pantomime. They are ruining the great beauty of silence.”
Two years earlier, The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson was a box office smash for Warners and other Hollywood studios were scrambling to catch up. Chaplin held on to his principles for as long as he could but, as it turned out, the vast majority of the cinema-going public didn’t agree with him.
Even the silent comedy legend eventually had to get with the program. While Modern Times (1936) is considered the last great silent picture despite featuring some sound, Chaplin eventually relented with The Great Dictator (1940), his first official film with dialogue.
Although he was initially reluctant to adapt to the new era of talking pictures, Chaplin fared better than many silent actors who were unable or unwilling to make the transition as the dawn of sound recording in motion pictures altered cinema forever.
It wasn’t doom for everyone. Some stars flourished when they made the leap to talkies. Greta Garbo (“Garbo Talks!”) was one of the biggest Hollywood draws of the ‘30s, earning three Oscar nominations. Laurel and Hardy improved their act considerably as their distinct accents and goofy dialogue added another dimension to the slapstick. Joan Crawford, merely a starlet in the ‘20s, flourished into a major screen presence.
Many didn’t make it. Mary Pickford received an Oscar nomination for her first talkie, Coquette (1929), but further success eluded her and she retired from screen acting in 1933, becoming alcoholic and reclusive. Holed up in her lavish mansion, she would only receive guests by telephone towards the end of her life. Her second husband, Douglas Fairbanks, also faded into the margins before dying from a heart attack in 1939. Clara Bow declared that she hated talkies and struggled to adjust to the new equipment needed for sound recording. Suffering from mental illness, she spent some time in a sanitorium and her career was prematurely ended at the age of 25.
Despite the naysayers and teething problems, Hollywood boomed in the ‘30s and ‘40s while many of the stars of the silent era faded from memory. By the early ‘50s, two great masterpieces reckoned with that evolutionary change in cinema from very different perspectives.
The first was Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) starring William Holden and Gloria Swanson. Swanson herself was a refugee from silent cinema. Prior to the premiere at Radio City Music Hall in New York, she had toured the United States by train to drum up publicity for the picture. Visiting 33 cities in two months, it seemed that she was determined to make the film a comeback that Norma Desmond, her imperious and bitter on screen character, never received.
Two years later, Stanley Donen’s Singin’ in the Rain also opened at the same venue. Buoyant and bursting with colour, the musical starring the infectious trio of Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, and Donald O’Connor. Taking a lightly satirical approach to the difficulties faced by many stars making the switch to sound, it couldn’t have been more different from Wilder’s noir-ish tale of faded glories, long-awaited second chances, and murder. Yet taken as a double-bill and viewed in non-chronological order, Sunset Boulevard almost plays like a sequel to Singin’ in the Rain. It’s all too easy to think that Norma Desmond’s fate will be shared by Lina Lamont, the comedy antagonist of Donen’s exuberant musical.
When it comes to the all-time greats, Singin’ in the Rain is something of an outlier. If you want to know what I mean, take a look at Sight & Sound’s Top 250. Sitting pretty at #10, it is fittingly flanked by two silent masterpieces: Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) and Vertov’s Man WIth a Movie Camera (1929). Chosen by critics and directors, films that make the top end of the list tend towards deeply serious, introspective, and more meditative examinations of the human condition. Among a generally sombre selection, Singin’ in the Rain shines like a ray of Technicolor sunlight. It is a movie that wears its genius lightly and it stands proud as one of the purest expressions of joy captured on celluloid.
Its origins were surprisingly piecemeal for such a perfect romantic musical comedy. MGM producer Arthur Freed conceived the film as a showcase for a catalogue of songs he’d written with Nacio Brown over the two previous decades. Many of them, including the title tune, had appeared in earlier MGM musicals. The only new pieces were “Moses Supposes” and Donald O’Connor’s knockabout showstopper, “Make ‘Em Laugh.”
With a selection of cracking songs already at his disposal, all Freed needed was a story to string them together. Betty Comden and Adolph Green, a collaborative writing partnership that spanned six decades, were drafted in to create the screenplay. Together, they decided that since most of the songs came from the dawn of the talkies, the plot should revolve around that tricky period in Hollywood history. Howard Keel, who had made a name for himself in the Broadway hit Oklahoma! was earmarked for the lead role, prompting the screenwriters to envision a story involving a silent western star making a comeback as a singing cowboy.
Yet they kept coming back to the idea of an arrogant matinee idol in the swashbuckling mould of Douglas Fairbanks who is forced to fall back on his beginnings as a vaudeville song-and-dance man to survive the leap into talking pictures. For that, Gene Kelly was better suited, although he was currently tied up making An American in Paris (1951) with Stanley Donen.
Once An American in Paris was complete, Kelly and Donen received the screenplay for Singin’ in the Rain and immediately signed on, diving into the process of streamlining the story and cutting a few extraneous musical numbers.
Kelly was born in 1912 in East Liberty, a tough Pittsburgh neighbourhood. His mother enrolled him in dance classes when he was eight years old along with his brother and three sisters. He was more interested in playing baseball for the Pittsburgh Pirates when he grew up, and dancing landed the Kelly boys in trouble with local bullies who called them “sissies.”
He dropped out and didn’t dance again until he was 15, but those formative years perhaps informed the style of dancing for which he would become famous. While Fred Astaire, Kelly's senior by 13 years, was elegant, slender, and almost asexual, Kelly’s approach was athletic, powerful, and very masculine. He looked like a guy who could take care of himself in the clinches, even when he was dancing with Jerry Mouse in Anchors Aweigh (1945), gliding on roller skates in It’s Always Fair Weather (1955), or swinging from lampposts in Singin’ in the Rain. And Kelly’s irrepressible joie de vivre was perfect for the role of Don Lockwood.
For Kelly’s love interest, 18-year-old Debbie Reynolds was cast as Kathy Selden, a young dancer who harbours her own dreams of stardom. Reynolds was plucked from a talent contest by spotters from Warner Bros. and MGM. The story goes that Warners won the right to her signature on a coin toss, but she switched to the latter after two years when Warner Bros stopped making musicals.
Reynolds had no background as a dancer and keeping up with two formidable hoofers like Kelly and Donald O’Connor was a daunting task for the teenager. Kelly was mean about her lack of experience and it fell to Fred Astaire to help get her up to speed. Finding her crying under a piano after Kelly had insulted her, the older dancer gave her coaching. Reynolds later credited Kelly with making her a star, although she also said that “Singin’ in the Rain and childbirth were the two hardest things I ever had to do in my life.”
Reynolds’ voice also didn’t pass muster in some cases. Ironically, for a story that revolves around her character dubbing the voice of a bigger star, Reynolds’ singing was dubbed by Betty Noyes for some numbers.
The central trio was rounded out by Donald O’Connor as Cosmo Brown, Don Lockwood’s childhood pal. Unlike Kelly, O’Connor was from a real vaudevillian background. His mother was a bareback horse rider and his father was a circus strongman and acrobat, and they started him dancing in front of audiences when he was just 13 months old.
O’Connor never went to school and learned his trade on the vaudeville circuit, incorporating slapstick into his style of dancing. The O’Connor Family toured as an act, which got young Donald his first break in movies. When he was 11 years old, they appeared in Melody for Two (1937) credited as a Speciality Act. The following year, he signed for Paramount and he had a busy career before landing his most famous role in Singin’ in the Rain.
With his athleticism and wit, O’Connor was the perfect foil for Kelly. It’s a delight watching them dance in perfect sync with such raucous energy in numbers like “Fit as a Fiddle” and “Moses Supposes.” Kelly wanted O’Connor to have his own standout moment “Make ‘Em Laugh” is one of the movie’s comic highlights. O’Connor literally danced himself to a standstill making his big moment count: He smoked four packs of cigarettes a day and overexerted himself so much that he was hospitalised for a week afterwards.
The central trio are wonderful, but the movie’s secret weapon is Jean Hagen as Lina Lamont. She steals every scene as the preening, vindictive, and none-too-bright prima donna whose vanity outweighs her limited talent. To make matters worse, she has a voice like a bag of kittens in a cement mixer. Yet she is also more streetwise and cunning than she looks and sounds, and our protagonists make the mistake of underestimating her.
Hagen had made her screen debut only a few years earlier in the Spencer Tracy-Katherine Hepburn vehicle Adam’s Rib (1949) before impressing Arthur Freed with her performance in The Asphalt Jungle (1950). Singin’ in the Rain screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green envisaged Judy Holliday in the Lina Lamont role, but they needed someone less high-profile after Holliday won an Oscar for her performance as a ditzy showgirl in Born Yesterday (1950).
To win the part, Hagen dropped a spot-on impression of Holliday during her audition - if you don’t know the movie already, check out this clip to see where the inspiration for Lina came from. More classically beautiful than the button-nosed Reynolds, Hagen has an absolute hoot playing the villain of the piece. Her brilliant comic turn was rewarded with a nod for Best Supporting Actress at the Oscars. Bizarrely, Singin’ in the Rain only received one other nomination that year for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture.
Although Lina is set up as the antagonist and her role is played for laughs, she deserves more respect and sympathy than the screenplay or the other characters give her. She’s demanding, jealous, and utterly graceless, but she is also routinely insulted and humiliated by Don, Cosmo, and R.F. Simpson (Millard Mitchell), the head of the studio.
Her accent, although comical, hints at a tough upbringing. Like many women actors at the time, Lina no doubt had to work hard while suffering various indignities to reach the level of fame that she has. Now she’s a big movie star and she initially seems too complacent to realise that sound means curtains for her career; surely her adored screen partnership with Don Lockwood is too big to fail. That illusion is shattered when the studio’s first attempt to use Lina’s real voice ends in disaster and threatens to make them all a laughing stock.
Mistaking her onscreen romance with Don for the real thing ultimately leads to Lina’s downfall. She’s outraged when Don falls for a girl half his age, and suffers further indignity when the new object of his affections hits her in the kisser with a cream cake. She gets Kathy fired, but once the young dancer is persuaded to provide a face-saving voiceover to cover for Lina’s screeching voice, Lina survival instincts fully kick in. She sees not only a chance to prolong her screen stardom, but get revenge by locking Kathy into a contract dubbing for her in future movies. It’s a ruthless move, but why shouldn’t she look after number one? After all, none of the other characters treat her with the slightest respect or kindness.
But Lina is that bad guy of the piece and she is vanquished as such. At the premiere of The Dancing Cavalier, Lina steps out to address her adoring audience – only for Don, Cosmo, and R.F. to team up again and reveal that Kathy was dubbing for her all along.
We don’t know what happens to Lina next. The last we see of her, she is running off stage as we switch back to Don and Kathy for their happy ending. We’re left to assume that Lina’s career is over. Perhaps she will fall back on her millions and retreat to her Beverly Hills mansion, dreaming of her days as a major Hollywood star. Maybe she would be neighbours with Norma Desmond…
Billy Wilder was born in 1902 in Sucha, a small town in what is now Poland. His birth name was Samuel, but “Billy” stuck because of his mother’s fondness for Buffalo Bill Cody, the Wild West showman who toured Europe in the late 19th Century. For many audience members on the continent, it was a rare glimpse at exotic Americana at a time when the Old West was dying out, soon to be immortalised in the new medium of moving pictures.
As a young man, Wilder worked as a sports journalist in Vienna before relocating to Berlin in 1926 to cover the crime beat on a newspaper. Around this time, he became fascinated with Hollywood movies and the luminous stars of the silver screen. With his love for cinema, he gravitated toward working as a screenwriter and producer for a number of German films.
When Adolph Hitler rose to power in 1933, Wilder realised that, with his Jewish heritage, it would be prudent to head to America to avoid the clutches of the Third Reich. It was a wise choice - several of his family members, including his mother, did not survive.
Wilder spoke very little English when he first arrived in Hollywood, but there was already an expanding German-speaking community in the entertainment industry as many artists fled the Nazi regime. Among others, there was Fritz Lang, Fred Zinnemann, Hedy Lamarr, Conrad Veidt, Paul Henreid, and many of the little people who played the Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz. Also in town was Peter Lorre, with whom Wilder lived as he learned English and found his way in Tinseltown.
Wilder formed a rewarding screenwriting partnership with Charles Brackett, teaming up for the first time to work on Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938) with fellow emigre Ernst Lubitsch. Together, Wilder and Brackett wrote 14 back-to-back hits and received Oscar nominations for Ninotchka (1939) and Hold Back the Dawn (1941).
Wilder made his directorial debut with The Major and the Minor (1942) before collaborating with Raymond Chandler on the screenplay for Double Indemnity (1944), one of the cornerstones of American film noir. The following year he made The Lost Weekend, which earned him his first Oscars for Best Director and Best Screenplay (shared with Brackett).
During his time in Hollywood, Wilder had seen the grand old mansions belonging to those famous faces he loved as a movie buff back in Berlin. Some of them had disappeared from the public eye and he began to imagine what life was like for these relics, still incredibly wealthy but marooned behind their gates and walls as the movie industry carried on without them.
This gave Wilder the germ of an idea. In 1948, he and Brackett started working on a screenplay about a faded silent-era star making an unlikely comeback. Their original concept was a comedy, but it evolved into a darker tale of celebrity, codependency, deluded grandeur, and opportunism that takes a noir-ish turn into murder. It wasn’t quite working out until they brought in reporter D.M Marshman Jr. to help out. He introduced the crucial character of Joe Gillis, a down-at-heel screenwriter who reluctantly the fancy man for the story’s ageing and washed-up prima donna.
Casting was the same merry-go-round of famous names that it is today. Although Norma Desmond wasn’t specifically based on a real-life actor, it was important for the integrity of the film’s themes that the person playing her was the perfect fit. Wilder originally wanted Mae West playing opposite Marlon Brando, who was a virtual unknown at that point. West turned it down flat and later quipped in typical style:
“It was a part for an older woman. And you think I’d ever have let Bill Holden leave me? He’d have been too tired to get from my bed to the swimming pool.”
Greta Garbo also rejected the role, as did Clara Bow, Mary Pickford, and Norma Shearer. They contacted Pola Negri, another big star of the ‘10s and ‘20s who had disappeared from view, but her Polish accent was too strong – part of the reason she never made it in talkies.
Finally, George Cukor suggested Gloria Swanson. Swanson had been such a superstar that she had once turned down a $1 million-a-year contract with United Artists and started her own production company. She had made several pictures with Cecil B. DeMille and later received two Oscar nominations (both for talkies) before her film career gradually petered out. Unlike Norma Desmond, however, she hadn’t retreated into pampered reclusiveness. She had moved to New York and began a successful stage career instead.
Swanson wasn’t especially seeking a comeback, but the paycheck wasn’t bad and George Cukor convinced her that Norma Desmond would become the role she would be remembered for. Nevertheless, she displayed some of Norma’s haughtiness when she was told that she would need to perform a screen test. Wilder remembered her saying that she’d “made 20 films for Paramount. Why do they want me to audition?” Cukor was forthright with his advice: “If they ask you to do ten screen tests, do ten screen tests, or I will personally shoot you.”
As for the role of Joe Gillis, Montgomery Clift initially signed on but backed away from the project just before filming began. He cited playing a similar character in an earlier movie and personal reasons, which may have been something to do with the story being a little too close to home. At the time, Clift was having an affair with Libby Holman, a socialite, actress, and singer 17 years older than him.
Wilder turned to William Holden, an actor who was beginning to establish himself in Hollywood. He looked older than his age and Swanson refused make-up to look more like 60, which threatened to dilute the glaring age gap of the unhealthy relationship between Joe and Norma. Wilder resolved the problem by making Holden look younger instead.
Wilder also scored some notable stars for smaller roles that overlapped with real life. Erich von Stroheim, who had directed Swanson in Queen Kelly (1932), played Norma’s loyal butler Max, an ex-director and one of her former husbands. Swanson’s complaints on Queen Kelly had led to von Stroheim being fired, and the role must have stung the once-great director.
Like his screen counterpart in Sunset Boulevard, he had also faded from his status as one of the great filmmakers of his generation to become a jobbing actor. Cecil B. DeMille played himself, providing a through-line from Swanson’s successful collaborations with him and Norma Desmond’s famous tragic and deluded final line: “Alright Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close up.”
Elsewhere, Wilder gathered three other old Hollywood stars to play themselves for a small but important scene when Norma’s few remaining pals show up for a bridge game: H.B. Warner, who had portrayed Jesus in DeMille’s King of Kings (1927) and played Mr. Gower in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946); Anna Q. Nilsson, another actress whose career sharply declined with the advent of sound; and Buster Keaton, the silent comedy great whose fatal mistake was signing for MGM in 1928, relinquishing creative control over his movies.
Norma Desmond is one of cinema’s great characters and Swanson is incredible in the part. She is the Miss Havisham of Hollywood, hiding away from the real world in her decaying mansion surrounded by relics of her fame; she has pictures of herself everywhere and the only films she watches are her own. Max diligently fakes fan mail to keep up the pretence that she is still a big star, which only enables her delusions as she feverishly works on a grandiose screenplay for Salome, her intended comeback vehicle.
Joe knows that the movie will never get made, but he’s willing to work on the script if it will stave off packing in his Hollywood dreams and heading back home in failure. Before he knows it, he suffers an indignity of a different sort, allowing Norma to possess him.
Joe doesn’t return her affections, yet, like us, he is drawn into Norma’s web of self-deception. For all her pomposity and eccentricity, she is still an intoxicating figure. It’s fascinating how Swanson plays her; although it is a talking part in a talking picture, she portrays Norma with a silent-era theatricality to her facial expressions and hand gestures. She is still acting the role of screen idol although her audience has been reduced to just Max and Joe – as Gillis says: “Poor devil, still waving proudly to a parade which had long since passed her by.”
Ultimately, Joe is a victim of his own cynicism and weakness. He tries to use Norma and allows himself to be used in turn, forming a vicious cycle of codependency that can only spell disaster when he starts falling for Betty (Nancy Olson), a smart young screenwriter around his own age. Like Lina when she finds out about Don and Kathy in Singin’ in the Rain, Norma is outraged and jealous, and we all know how it ends – Joe floating dead in the pool and Norma, her mind snapped, advancing towards the camera for her final close-up as the police arrest her for murder.
I was thinking about Sunset Boulevard for much of the interminable three hours it takes to watch Damien Chazelle’s Babylon. That movie spends about 90% of its running time telling us how ugly, cynical, and debauched early Hollywood was before taking a strangely sentimental U-turn at the end. Jack Conrad, Brad Pitt’s alcoholic leading man, wistfully muses, “It was the most magical place in the world, wasn’t it?” Then we end with another character in nostalgic tears as he sits alone in a theatre watching Singin’ in the Rain.
That change of heart came across as utterly bogus and it reminded me of why Sunset Boulevard is still the greatest film ever made about that period of Hollywood history. Billy Wilder, viewing Tinseltown through the eyes of an outsider, recognised cinema for what it is: Flickering images on a wall, a fleeting escape from reality, the stuff of dreams, but also a cruel industry that chews people up and spits them out. It is an illusion, but the transient spell it casts means so much to so many people. For Norma Desmond, far too much.
So there you have it, a look back at two of the greatest movies about movies ever made. Which film do you prefer? Does anything else come close? Let us know your thoughts!
