So , at the same time Hollywood had Cary Grant and Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire starring with actresses thirty to forty years younger than they were , Grace Kelly , Audrey Hepburn , Leslie Caron, this is presented as nasty , sordid and unnatural ? Shame!
shareWhy not? The movie isn't making a point about male-female relationships in general. It's showing us a picture of one particular relationship. And that one IS nasty, sordid and unnatural. I think you could find a good number of ugly movie mismatches where the man is the older partner, too. 'Citizen Kane' wasn't exactly a flattering portrayal of a May/December marriage.
Flat, drab passion meanders across the screen!
You mean to say you don't acknowledge a double standard in old man/young woman in Hollywood ? Really?
shareThis is not a Hollywood thing, this is reality that has biological and evolutionary causes.
shareI'm not interested in discussing "Hollywood". I'm discussing "Sunset Boulevard". It tells a story about a particular fictional couple. Maybe a different movie would better suit your tastes.
Flat, drab passion meanders across the screen!
This movie is fraught with symbolisms. Old Hollywood versus New Hollywood. If it was about sexist ageist angst then Joe wouldn't have had a job in Hollywood and Norma wouldn't have been a Hollywood ex-actress.
shareI didn't note a lot of symbolism . Just seemed a straight Hollywood Noir to me. Aside from the suggestion that the most heinous thing a woman can do is grow old.
shareNorma Desmond didn't "grow old". She went crazy and became a recluse obsessed with her own former fame. In a sense, she was her own stalker/obsessed fan. Her issues weren't to do with aging, but with insanity.
"It ain't dying I'm talking about, it's LIVING!"
Captain Augustus McCrae
Just seemed a straight Hollywood Noir to me. Aside from the suggestion that the most heinous thing a woman can do is grow old.
The lead Male character tells her "There's nothing wrong with being 50. Unless you're trying to act 25."
You must have missed that. Or you are just trolling.
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You are correct . Like so many old movies it reflects biases that are repellent to modern sensibilities.
shareI think, "biases that are repellent to" some "modern sensibilities" is more accurate.
And, looking at the adverse, it can be said that some modern biases" (biases that haven't become time-honored -- yet) are repellent to sensibilities not entirely pursuaded by their fashionability -- or praised, weekly, in the pages of the NY Times.
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many silent films stars found their careers faltered when sound came in, their personalities and voices did not necessarily suit the new medium. John Gilbert is an esample of a male star whose career faced away when sound came in. Some, like lillian Gish, went on to have stage careers, and later came back to the cinema in character parts. As indeed Gloria Swanson did herself.
shareThere is nothing nasty, sordid and unnatural about their relationship. Are you crazy?
shareIt is unfair isn't it? But unfortunately it is true the actresses have a shorter shelf life than actors in Hollywood, let's be honest here.
Global Warming, it's a personal decision innit? - Nigel Tufnel
"Honest"? Pretty much so. And, I think it's true in life as well. . . Then, I've observed, nature isn't exactly "fair" very often, either.
shareYep. It's not as though these are just social constructs devised by Men to punish Women. Blame Mother Nature.
The balance is found in acknowledging the fact that Women tend to outlive Men. Since this fact is hard on Men, I suppose the OP forgot to take this into account ... for some reason.
The nasty and sordid aspect about the relationship hadn't got so much to do with Holden being 20 years Swanson's junior, but rather that a) he was something of man-toy, a kept man financially reliant on the older woman and b) that the older woman in question was borderline deranged. As for growing old being the most heinous crime a woman in Hollywood could commit, that's part of the stuff Wilder's film was critical of.
"facts are stupid things" - Ronald Reagan
Hate to say it but OLD ACTORS and ACTRESSES who try to play 20 year old leading characters come off to me as PATHETIC. I've seen good actors and actresses accept their fates gracefully and become grandpa and grandma roles. 40 year olds and beyond playing sexual kittens and studs just strikes me as stupid.
shareBack in the day, so to speak, we weren't as concerned about re-visiting reality when we went to the movies. We were more interested in leaving that outside the theatre. You know, the "dream factory" thing. If she was in a tickelish situation with an older James Stewart, or a risky chase with a mature Cary Grant, it was "Cary Grant!" -- "lucky girl!!!". Those "stars" were "ageless" (with just a little help from the make-up dept, and a soft-focus lens).
shareCary Grant, in the film Walk don't Run (1966), thought it would be obscene to end up with Samantha Eggar at the end of the film. People back in the day, had common sense and didn't need their libidos fed ad nauseum like Bill Clinton WAY PAST middle age. They were at least decent enough to keep it in the closet or in the home if they were perverted.
shareGenerally true. And, of course, there are limits beyond which even mega-star status can look ridiculous. Grant recognized this. In WDR, Grant was 35 years Eggar's senior.
shareAt the time, once a leading female actress crossed a certain boundary, either their careers pretty much ended, or they were shunted off into mother/aunt roles. That's the way it was. (I'm talking about leading ladies; character actresses like Mary Wickes, Reta Shaw or Margaret Hamilton worked steadily until death) Lucky ones like Loretta Young and Barbara Stanwyck found second careers on television. Obviously, nowadays a 50-something actress like Norma would still be working steadily, ala Helen Mirren, Meryl Streep, Glenn Close and Susan Sarandon. And in her private life, she could be dating all the young studs she could handle.
May I bone your kipper, Mademoiselle?
See: 'Phil Spector / Lana Clarkson".
shareOf course Hollywood has messed up standards and double standards about aging, this is not news to anyone. And it's not like the film approves of any of this madness, it's all presented as grotesque.
Really, the only thing I object to on that front is the casting. Swanson looked so young for her age, and Holden looked so old for his, that all the talk of his youth seemed silly. Honestly, she looked hotter than he did.
" Jack, you have debauched my sloth! "
In the movie, Holden is meant to be 20 years younger. In real life he was 19 years younger.
shareWell, if you actually payed attention to the nature of the relationship and how it developed, you wouldn't be complaining about sexism. What we have here is a woman whose ego had grown monstrous, leading to filmmakers not wanting to work with her anymore. She loses her friends, because she has become so self absorbed, and when a handsome young man stumbles into her life, she manipulates him into staying at her mansion indefinitely. All these things are symptoms of a personality trait and mental illness know as "being an actual sociopath". It is a real thing. Perhaps if you weren't so bent at looking at sexism where it is not present, you would take the time to look it up. Now, the young writer, Gillis, naturally feels trapped into a relationship by his sympathy for the woman, who is now desperate, manipulative, and vain. So he tries to escape, but she has just grown too lonely to let him go, and she becomes increasingly mad.
A very good point (that you ignored) on another post compared this clearly unhealthy relationship to the relationship between Charles Foster Kane and a young opera singer. Kane has become reclusive, lonely, and has forgotten how to treat the other party in the relationship as she deserves to be treated, so she leaves him to his huge empty mansion devoid of friendship and good times. This scenario from that classic film, is very similar to the one in Sunset Boulevard that you drastically misinterpreted.
Now if you want to talk about a classic film that actually has sexist double standards, look no further than Grease, in which Olivia Newton John changes who she is to please her man, thus denying her true clean cut self to become a sexually active greaser chick.
Now, I humbly request that in the future, you do not complain to the public every time you fail to understand a truly great film.
on one level, yes i agree with you. of course older women are always pilloried but the world was like that then and still is to an extent now. my argument with someone on another board showed that plain and clear
So , at the same time Hollywood had Cary Grant and Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire starring with actresses thirty to forty years younger than they were , Grace Kelly , Audrey Hepburn , Leslie Caron, this is presented as nasty , sordid and unnatural ? Shame!
Not only have you judged a 66 year old film by today's societal norms, but you've completely misjudged the film's plot, the roles of the characters and the point of its existence.
There was no plotline whatsoever suggesting that Norma Desmond was seen as being unnatural or nasty because of her age. In fact, age was never really mentioned at all. There was an early scene in the film where she discussed silent movies, and it clearly mentioned that she was a star of the silent movie age and had been somewhat 'left behind' by the movies because of her inability to adapt to the new age cinema 'talkies' as I think she called them ("they talk & talk & talk"). She became disillusioned because she was no longer a star, and this was what caused the onset of her mental state. She drew into herself and clearly became a recluse, with no-one to worship her in the way she wanted other than her butler (and one time director), who was faking fan mail etc.
THIS is the true reason for her being portrayed as odd and unbecoming. She'd gone mad over years and years of fooling herself, and she clung onto Joe because he happened to be there, and be a 'Hollywood writer'. She was using him just as much as (if not more than) he was using her. She wanted to be back in the bigtime.
You're way off with your whole reading of the film and how the characters are portrayed, presumably because you're looking for anti-feminist messages where there aren't any.