The allure of fame

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Friday, November 14th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: two old Hollywood films that proved every spotlight casts a shadow.

BROWN: WORLD film critic Max Belz takes us back to 1950—a year when the movie business turned the camera on itself and didn’t blink.

MAX BELZ: First up is Sunset Boulevard—directed and co-written by Billy Wilder.

CLIP: As I drove back towards town I took inventory of my prospects. They now added up to exactly zero.

William Holden plays Joe Gillis—a struggling screenwriter. We learn right off the bat that even though he is the narrator of the movie, he is dead in a swimming pool. This detail is troubling but it pokes fun at the all-knowing role of the narrator in older movies.

The rest of the movie is a flashback of Joe’s story: He can’t find work and is on the run from the repo man. During a car chase, he blows a tire and pulls into the garage of an eerie mansion.

CLIP: It was a great big white elephant of a place. The kind crazy movie people built in the crazy 20s. A neglected house gets an unhappy look. This one had it in spades.

The house belongs to the silent movie star Norma Desmond—a forgotten icon of time past, surrounded by portraits of herself. When Joe arrives, she’s burying her pet chimpanzee. She is eccentric and mesmerizing.

CLIP: You’re Norma Desmond. Used to be in silent pictures. Used to be big. I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.

Norma is desperate. She wants to get back on the big screen and wants to be loved again. Joe is desperate to make money. So they strike a deal: Desmond hires Gillis to write a screenplay for her. She’s planning a comeback and bends the ear of legendary director Cecil B. DeMille about teaming back up. Though she is an aged star, she clings to the hope of a second chance that never comes.

CLIP: A dozen press agents working overtime can do terrible things to the human spirit.

Norma insists that Joe stay in the old house as a guest and she spoils him with clothes and unrequited attention, but stifles him with her neediness.

As a result, he sneaks away at night to write his own scripts…but as if pulled back by a mysterious power, returns to Norma, setting up a dramatic and memorable ending.

CLIP: You see this is my life. It always will be. There’s nothing else. Just us. The cameras and those wonderful people out there in the dark.

Sunset Boulevard is in the American Film Institute’s top 100. It shows the flimsiness of fame, both in the audience’s tawdry appetite and the performers’ vainglory. It’s striking too that the director Billy Wilder immigrated to the U.S. as an adult and so accurately lampooned American celebrity culture.

Another movie from 1950 that took on the problem of fame was All About Eve, written and directed by Joseph Mankiewicz.

CLIP: Margo is a great star, a true star. She never was or will be anything less or anything else.

If Sunset Boulevard is about regaining star status, All About Eve is about characters competing for it.

Here we have Bette Davis as Margo Channing, a brassy stage veteran.

CLIP: Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.

One night a fan named Eve finds her way into Margo’s dressing room to meet her hero. Eve wins over everyone in the room, but she has designs of her own.

CLIP: She’s quite a girl, this What’s-Her-Name. Eve. I’ve forgotten they grew that way.

Her devotion to Margo is ingratiating and Margo is put off by Eve’s meddling.

CLIP: Like she’s studying you. Like you was a play or a book or a set of blueprints. How you walk, talk, eat, think. I’m sure that’s very flattering, Birdie. I’m sure there’s nothing wrong with it.

Once Margo turns on Eve, the verbal exchanges are barbed and intricate. In fact, the whole movie is visually plain but dense with dialogue.

CLIP: The gentle atmosphere is very MacBethish. What has or is about to happen? What is he talking about? MacBeth. We know you. We’ve seen you like this before. Is it over or is it just beginning?

Eve worms her way into the theater as Margo’s understudy. But her disguise as a kind person gives way, revealing a brutal, scheming person underneath.

Meanwhile, Margo is going through a transformation of her own.

CLIP: Week after week to thousands of people you’re as young as you want. As young as they want, you mean. I’m not interested, but a thousand of people think I’m 6 or 600.

She feels her age and ponders life beyond the stage with her long-time boyfriend. Her volatility toward Eve is fueled by jealousy. But her career outlook changes because all the years of performing have estranged her from herself.

CLIP: So many people know me. I wish I did. I wish somebody would tell me about me. You’re Margo. Just Margo.

Both the audience and the actor fall for the vanity of fame because of its allure. And worst of all, the glory of fame is a cheap stand-in for love. In Sunset Boulevard, Norma wants to get back that wash of applause. All About Eve shows that Eve will sacrifice anything to get it. And Margo simply wants to live again.

CLIP: Funny business, a woman’s career. The things you drop on your way up the ladder so you can move faster. You forget you need them again when you get back to being a woman. It’s one career all females have in common whether we like it or not: being a woman.

Margo lost touch with herself and risked losing a future of security and love. All About Eve shows us that fame is like a vapor and that trying to seize it is like chasing a ghost. None of these characters can find permanence in fame, and it’s their paths towards or away from it that make these beautifully written movies such classics.

I’m Max Belz.

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