 Welcome to Solioid Mirror, I'm your hostess Betty St. LeVoe. On this show we talk a bit about film history, film definitions, and then we go straight into the movies. Today is the City of Angels Part II, our second episode about LA. So our first movie today, because we're going to go straight into the movies, is The Glorious Sunset Boulevard, directed by Billy Wilder, and he was helped with the story by Charles Brackett and their Time Magazine writer friend and bridge partner D.M. Marchon. It stars Gloria Swanson, William Holden, Eric von Strowheim, Jack Webb, Nancy Schaffa, and a couple other people who are old-time names in Hollywood. So first off I'll start with the plot, and that's because the end is at the beginning. In those days it was a very revolutionary thing to put the ending of the movie before you saw the movie, and that's exactly what Billy Wilder did. So the narration, and from what I learned today, and I've seen some Billy Wilder movies, but from what I was reminded of today is that he does use narration in his movies, and so we hear William Holden in the voiceover, in a voiceover explaining why he's floating in a pool face down. And actually there's police there, three cars showed up filled with journalists and cops and two motorcycles. So it happened that he died at the estate of a very wealthy and eccentric old movie star named Norma Desmond. Now this story is by many considered the penultimate Hollywood story, Hollywood about Hollywood. And yes, it even ranks above the player and LA Confidential and a couple other film noir that people would consider the story of Hollywood. So as we are looking at Mr. Holden's character, he's a down-to-out writer, can't sell a script to sell a soul, and Norma has this huge mansion, he's running from the repo men, and he sticks his car in the garage, he goes into the mansion expecting it to be deserted, but she lives there with her butler played by Eric von Stroheim, who we later discovered was her first husband. So this is what they call film noir, black comedy, but when Billy Wilder was asked what type of movie he thought it was, he said it's simply a picture, and it is, but it's a very interesting picture. So the definition of film noir basically is this, noir means black and dark in French, and film noir almost always includes, I wrote these words down here, I think I'm going to do them off the top of my head. Gritty, mysterious, gritty, mysterious, something needs to be solved. Enigmatic, sometimes there's villains and they're heroes, sometimes there's a chance for redemption for those of pure heart, sometimes there is not and usually there is not. This movie is classic noir because, something I was reading today, as the film is being shot in the interior of Gloria Swanson's house there, it's all very gothic looking. The currents are exactly drawn but you don't really see sunlight coming in. There are a few exterior shots but there are just as many night shots as there are day shots. So as he enters this mansion, Eric von Stonheim, who plays Max Merling, says to him, wipe your feet, but it's actually the tone of Baldale, miscreant, and hold and pause, hold and pause as he ascends the staircase to meet Swanson for the first time. It's a case of mistaken identity. They think he's the undertaker to pick up or chimp who just died. His pause is priceless. Richard Corlis, there were a couple of critics who said that Holden played the role with the slack jawed prettiness and that he was a spineless, his character was a spineless writer type and indeed he is. So if this is a dark comedy or a black comedy, the laughs are actually at Holden's expense because he becomes this very lonely woman's kept man. The laughs are not at Norma's expense. You can't remake this movie today. Just like you can't remake Imitation of Life and a couple other of them. She's an aging film star of 50. Now we all know, look at Helen Mirren. The days of an actress being put to pasture and she had 40 is over and Joan Collins certainly proved that. So did a whole bunch of other ladies I could think of. But back then it was unheard of for a woman to keep working after 40. When Gloria made this movie, she had left Paramount, which is, this is a Paramount made movie, she had left Paramount to go to United Artists because she wanted to have creative control of her work and she left with acrimony. And when she left Hollywood in particularly, Hollywood was mad at her and she was mad at Hollywood. And we'll see later how that all worked out. So her character, manic, lonely, prone to rage, wanting love, and saying like most people eating up by loneliness becomes Joe's staccaracci. He's running from the repo men, he's got an apartment, but she has Max move his clothes into the garage, the garage starts leaking and then into the house. And very slowly over a span of time, we see how he becomes a kept man. Now back in 1950 this wasn't done, but again it was very interesting how, when they were just about to do it or whatever, the camera would pan away. So I thought that was very tasteful. Now he is definitely sort of a heel in his own way, but he's with Norma because she's writing a script and he's helping her with it. He needs a job. At the same time he's romancing his friend Jack Webb, the guy who played our police captain, Dragnet. He's helping Jack Webb's girlfriend Nancy Schaefer with her own script and Gloria finds out. So the guy's a two-faced heel and when you look at the beginning of the movie you can understand why he turned up dead in the water right at the beginning of the flicker. So Wilder had considered lots of people for this part. There are two stories. One that he wanted Gloria no matter what and two from what he remembered, he considered quite a few such as, and he considered actors who were silent screen actors because that is what Norma was. It was all faces, not words, and she feels that that's why she doesn't have a job. So he considered actresses such as Pola Negri who he couldn't really understand her on the phone because of her accent. Mae West, which I thought that would have been a terrible, horrible miscasting. Marlon Brando to play the Colton character which could have been interesting. Fred McMurray, which would have been not so interesting. Greta Garbo, she didn't even consider it. Mary Pickford was offended at the fact that he was asking her to play an older woman who was sleeping with a younger man. So was Norma Scheer who was the Queen of Hollywood in those days. And Montgomery Cliff was also approached to play the Holden role but he didn't do it because he was actually having an affair with an older woman at the time who was Libby Holman who, if you catch the movie written on the wind, the movie is sort of about her. So he didn't really want to do it. However, as we see the cast, what we see, the end result is perfect except that Betty Schaefer and Jack Webb all respect. I found them the most annoying characters in the entire movie. Simply because Jack Webb played the gung-ho, hearty, OG whiz, I'm 22 and I just know him as my man on Dragonet. And Betty Schaefer, I have to give her kudos because she's also in the picture with Gloria. So if she was overacting a little bit, she was young, I'm sure she learned a lot from Adam Swanson there. Okay, so Holden got paid $39,000 less than Monty was offered. Monty was offered $5,000 a week, I think, for something like 12 weeks worth of work. And Holden, at that point, was actually playing himself. He was unfortunately going through a break-up of a marriage and his career was sort of on the rocks. This helped him come back a little bit. And a few years later, he won an Academy Award for Billy Wilder's excellent Stolog 17. I haven't seen that one years, but you all check that out. Let's see. The other reason why Holden's career was helped by this movie was because he was also in Born Yesterday that year, which actually won Judy Holiday Best Actress Oscar. So as Judy is winning, and there were excellent movies up for the Oscar that year, as Judy's name was called for Best Oscar, Gloria Swanson could feel everyone look at her. They were watching her, not only her reaction, but they actually expected her to do a Norma Desmond tantrum for not winning the Oscar, which I thought was pretty funny. In the movie Cecil B. DeMille, who plays himself, calls Gloria a young fella, and that's what she was called on the lot. She was born in 1899, and I believe she was a Capricorn, a Sagittarius Capricorn, and she'd been acting since she was 15 years old. But by the time she was 22 years old, she was right that she was going to be a star, and that's exactly what she became. She became one of the highest-paid actresses in the world in America. Now, one of the main reasons why she left Hollywood is because she formed a production company with Joe P. Kennedy and Eric von Stroheim directed her in a movie called Queen Kelly. And as Holden and Swanson are watching some of her old movies, what's playing on the screen is a clip of Queen Kelly. Eric von Stroheim was one of the greatest film directors of the silent era. He's up there with, I want to say, Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau, and Joe von Stoenberg, but I think Joe did sound. Joe von Stoenberg worked with Marlena Dietrich. Mr. Stroheim's full name was Eric Oswald, Hans Karl, Maria von Stroheim, and his nickname was Von, and he was born September 22, 1885, and he died May 12, 1957, moved to America in 1909, and later, after his falling out with Hollywood, and there was a big falling out, he moved to France and died there and later won the Legion of Honor. Mr. Stroheim said that, Mr. von Stroheim said that, in France, you do one movie, you do it well, it's brilliant, and they honor you for the rest of your life. They don't forget after 30 years, he said in Hollywood, you're only as good as your last flicker, and that's why he really loved the French. The movie that he made with Swanson was called Greed, and it was, oh, oh, oh, pardon me, that's a different movie. The movie that he made with Swanson was called Queen Kelly, and it was not released until after 50 years had passed by and Swanson had walked off the set, but his magnificent Greed, which he made, was cut up by the studio and he had agreed to edit a bit, he edited it, and then another editor was called in and the editor in question had always had a great working relationship with Stroheim. What happened was it still got chopped up, he always blamed her, but one of the greatest tragedies in film history is that most of the film that had been processed, that was still being cut up, got thrown out by a janitor, which to this day just makes you shudder, and people don't really understand about that anymore because we have digital editing, but this was a tragedy. But the same thing happened, not so bad, the janitor didn't throw it up, but Magnificent Ambersons and Marlon Brando's One Eye Jax, the studio will go in if they think that a director has overshot or not played ball with them and they take matters into their own hands. And that's one of the reasons why he left Hollywood, one of the many. So on our last episode we were talking about the movie The Player and how Griffin Dunn was getting these poison pen letters by someone named Joe Gillis. That's actually Holden's name in this movie is Joe Gillis. Swanson would say that she played the part too well when the movie had a private screening. Louis B. Mayer jumped up and called Billy Wilder horrible, horrible names. There was a horrible, horrible fight between them. They said unmentable things to one another, both of them having arrived in this country. Neither of them I don't think were born here. According to their horrible, horrible names, but at that same showing at the end of it, Barbara Stanwick went over to Gloria Swanson and she was crying and she kissed the hemiphoid dress because Gloria had proved to everyone that even though you're retired and you're a woman, you can do it. And as Gloria was looking around for Mary Pickford, someone said to Gloria, Gloria, Mary's in the bathroom. She's just undone. She can't even talk to you. You did such a great job. So I love the stories about this movie, I like this movie. Seeing the movie recently, I wasn't as fond of it as I had been, but maybe because there's a lot of tragedy as we know now in our modern celebrity era when Hollywood's done with you, they are done with you. They lock you out and then they throw away the key. So I think that that's about it for this one. I hope I didn't skip anything. Yeah, I would recommend this for date night. The kids can watch it. I'd like to thank The Guardian over in London, England for helping me out writing this. You can check out the article written about this movie. March 8th, 2003 issue and the August 1st, 2016. One last note, that opening shot of the movie. At first, you're seeing Holden float, I think spread eagle, face down the water. So it's as if you're looking up at him and seeing the police in back. While they didn't like the effect, he would put the camera in something, lowered it into the water, and then just didn't come out right. So what he did was the opening shot was achieved by placing a mirror on the bottom of the pool and filming Holden's reflection from above with the police to store it in the background. And that's about it. So please check that out. You're going to like it. You're going to love it. You're going to love Ms. Swanson's performance quite a bit. And we'll talk a little bit more about her in some other episodes. All right. So now to our next movie, which is the brilliant modern film noir set in the past, L.A. Confidential, with Kim Bassenger, who won an Academy Award, Russell Crowe playing himself, Guy Pierce, Kevin Spacey, Simon Denny Baker before he blew up and became a big old TV star, and again a cast of thousands. So this movie, which I own this one, I'm going to say that it's violent. It's racist. And it's awesome. It's racist against Miss Kins and black people. And I think it might even be bigoted towards Americans because the two leads are Australians. And what was up with that, that they couldn't find a he-man to play the two leads. But this movie, it's pretty wrenching. It's set in Mickey Cohen era, L.A. He's been running heroin for a couple of years. There's all types of magazines and out talking about stars, private lives. And Danny DeVito plays one of them. He owns this magazine called Hush, Hush. And a lot of what happens in this movie is Hush, Hush. Kevin Spacey, Guy Pierce, and Russell Crowe also play detectives who are all working on three different cases. And it turns out that the three cases eventually converge into one. So they're all going to have to try and get along if they want to crack this case. Guy Pierce plays the straight cop. Kevin Spacey plays the dirty corrupt cop. And Russell Crowe, of course, plays the thuggish cop. But he has good heart even though he's a thug. So let's see. Now, from what I can find in most Dominoal movies, there's always a love triangle. So Ken Bassinger's character plays a love triangle between Russell Crowe, the thuggish cop, and Guy Pierce, the straight arrow. So this movie also smacks of exploitation filmmaking because it exploits prostitution, it exploits corrupt dirty cops, it exploits racism, it exploits even misogyny up to a point because Russell Crowe, given his history in the movie, his character there, Bud White, he's also a woman-beater. So this movie is also not only filmed while it's exploitation filmmaking, in my opinion. Now, before Tom Hardy's muscularity became popular over here in the States, we had Russell Crowe. But Mr. Hardy doesn't throw telephones at hotel, help, et cetera, but it always amazes me that actors can have such bad boy behaviors and they can still be in, like, lots of movies. This was the second time I noticed Mr. Crowe. The first time was in the cheesy but good, quick and the dead, which I have a sneaking fondness for. He played a bad guy who turned into a good guy. And Russell Crowe's character in this particular movie, he's also conflicted. He's got a good heart, but he's prone to rage and violence and you certainly see a lot of this in this flicker. So this is the other side of the city of Angels. Can you fly as these officers' boss to Gangster? Can you fly? Because if you can't, best be getting back to St. Louis, Vosche Vermont, or New Orleans, dude. All right? The city of Angels is nowhere to mess around if you're a gangster or on the make. All right? So now A Star is Born, which is on my last episode. That's the other side of Hollywood where the purity gets in the way of the corruption and eventually wins the day. All right? And the player, which we saw in the last episode, is another side of Hollywood because that's the side of Hollywood where the studio is involved. It's the power and the studio can only be nicked slightly by scandal because the studio is not going to have any scandal happen to them and theirs. All right? So LA Confidential is the hush-hush side. It's the very scary side of any city, but especially the city of Angels. All right? So with exploitation movies, there's always a hint or the evidence of gratuitous sex, gratuitous violence. This movie, which it set in the wayback machine, but it was made around the turn of the century, is so beautifully eye-catching. Curtis Hanson directed it. I forgot to get statistics on the budget because I usually concentrate on Bassenger's performance. It's very, I like it. It's whimsical. It's raw. It's touching. She plays a call girl, but she doesn't look like one. And part of the plot is that this guy, played by David Stratham, has this harem of women who are look-alikes for famous movie stars, and Kim is the Veronica Lake in his collection. So this entire movie, instead of showing the side of Hollywood that we would rather see, you know, the star's born side of you make it, you make it, this is the side where you have to remember that Los Angeles has the largest homeless population in the country, simply because the gals and guys have got great teeth, great hair, and they got that MG and they go to make it. Sometimes it's the lucky ones who are the cursed few who are lucky. And that's a quote I got from somebody else talking about my Cory Hame there. So this is the second part of our City of Angels here on Soloid Mirror. I'm your hostess, Betty St. LeVoe. I think that wraps it up for me. My last episode, I talked about Wim Freakin's wonderful To Live and Die in LA, and I forgot to mention his big daddy movie of them all, The Exorcist. That is what, that's actually one of his most famous, he's known for that, but I always think of French connection as being his particular baby. I'd like to thank Gendron Building for its continued support over the years. And I would also like to thank my first film professor, Sharon Ardella, Warfield, Paris, Ojasan and Clarec for teaching me to articulate and appreciate the silver screen. Until next time, darling, stay away from those bad movies. Ciao.