The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Billy Wilder · a film · 1950 · about 110 minutes · written with Charles Brackett and D. M. Marshman Jr.
Mode
Hollywood satire told as noir and built as gothic; a confession in voice-over by a dead man
Mythos
The tomb kept by a servant, and the queen who does not know she has died; the mortal kept in the goddess’s house; Pygmalion inverted
Phase
Six months in Los Angeles, told back from a body in a pool, closed by an arrest on a staircase
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, about 110 minutes, in English; one narrator in voice-over; stars of the silent era, a director and a columnist playing themselves
Register
From comedy of manners through gothic to homicide; a dry, quick narration over a gilded tomb
Scale
A writer, a star and her servant, one house, one trade
Governing Proposition
A screenwriter short of money drifts by accident into the house of a forgotten star of the silent pictures, is taken in and kept, and is found dead in her pool. The wager of the film is that an industry which makes gods of faces discards the faces and keeps the machinery, and that a story told by a dead man, with the silent era’s own survivors in its rooms, can show a medium burying itself in its own grammar.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film opens on the kerb, the name of the street lettered along the gutter, and then on police cars arriving at a mansion on Sunset Boulevard. A body floats face down in a swimming pool, and the camera looks up at it from beneath the water, past the dead man to the police and the photographers peering down through the surface. A voice begins to tell the story, and the voice belongs to the man in the pool. He takes it back six months and tells it more or less in order. Everything until the last minutes is his telling.
That voice is the film’s first fact and its authority. Joe Gillis, played by William Holden, is a screenwriter, and he narrates his own end the way he would pitch a picture: dry, quick, professional, amused at himself. The man telling the story is already what the woman at its centre will turn out to be, someone held in the past tense. The design is simple and fixed: a prologue in the present, one long flashback in his voice, and a return to the present for an arrest and a staircase.
Billy Wilder directed the film for Paramount Pictures, which released it in August 1950: one cut, in black and white, about 110 minutes. Charles Brackett produced it and wrote the screenplay with Wilder and D. M. Marshman Jr. John F. Seitz photographed it, Doane Harrison and Arthur Schmidt edited it, Hans Dreier and John Meehan built its rooms, Edith Head dressed it and Franz Waxman wrote the score. A prologue set in a morgue, in which the dead narrator talks with the other corpses, was shot and removed after a preview, and was never part of the released film. Of eleven Academy Award nominations, among them all four acting categories, the film won three: story and screenplay, black-and-white art direction, and score.
Movement II
Gillis is a writer without work and short of money, and the repossession men are after him. He comes into the house by accident. It is enormous, gilded and going to ruin, and it is kept by a servant, Max von Mayerling, played by Erich von Stroheim. Its mistress is Norma Desmond, a star of the silent pictures, played by Gloria Swanson. She tells him that it is the pictures that “got small”.
She takes him for the undertaker. Her chimpanzee is dead, laid out by candlelight in her gilded bedroom, and that night it is buried in a small white coffin. Norma buries a pet as a star buries everything, in a scene. She is writing her return to pictures, a Salome, the woman who asks for a man’s head, and when she learns what Gillis does she sets him to work on it. He sells her his talent first.
Then he moves in. She dresses him and keeps him, and he lets her. The house has an organ in an empty hall with the wind in its pipes, a screening room, a bed like a gondola, a pool she has had filled for him, and a room with no locks. It is a tomb kept by a servant, with a queen who does not know she has died, and the young man who has wandered in is the mortal in the goddess’s house. The second sale, of himself, comes easier than the first, and he narrates it with the same wit.
Movement III
In the evenings the films are run in the screening room. The one Norma watches is Swanson’s own: footage from Queen Kelly (1929), directed by von Stroheim with Swanson in the lead. The silent close-up fills the screen while the living face, older, watches in front of it. The projector’s beam is full of smoke, and Norma rises into it. “We had faces”, she says, and the line is the film’s case for her and against her at once.
Her friends come to play bridge: Buster Keaton, H. B. Warner and Anna Q. Nilsson, playing themselves, stars of the silent era at a card table in a dead star’s house. Gillis’s voice calls them the “waxworks”. The casting is the film’s deepest stroke. The silent dead are not represented; they are present, and the film makes their obsolescence its material, with Swanson in a part close to her own life.
On New Year’s Eve she hires an orchestra to play to the two of them, and they tango on a floor that, the narration says, Valentino laid. Gillis runs from it to a party given by Artie Green, played by Jack Webb, crowded with the young of the studios, where Betty Schaefer, played by Nancy Olson, is the clean alternative to the house. The party and the drugstore scenes run on the rhythm of an ordinary picture, pleasant and slack. He goes back to the house.
Movement IV
Norma believes the studio wants her back, and goes to Paramount, through its own gate, to see Cecil B. DeMille, who plays himself on the set of Samson and Delilah. On the stage an old electrician swings a lamp onto her, and the extras gather in its light. The studio has been calling about her car, not her. A major studio lent its name, its gate, its leading producer-director and its sound stage to this portrait of itself as a graveyard.
Meanwhile Gillis writes at night with Betty, an original script of their own, and they walk the backlot’s painted streets in the dark, falling in love in the studio’s own town. An honest script by night set against a kept life by day: the strand is required, and it is the softest material in the film, which half believes its sincerity and half mocks it. Even here everyone is selling to a camera.
Then Max tells Gillis who he is. He was Norma’s first husband, and the director who made her, and he is the writer of the fan letters that still come to the house. The revelation reorders everything that has gone before: the servant is the creator become the slave of his creation, keeping alive by devotion the delusion that he serves. Von Stroheim plays it still, and the history of the man playing him, who directed Swanson in the footage on the screen, stands behind every line.
Movement V
Gillis destroys the last thing he has, the honest script and Betty with it, and makes to leave the house. Norma shoots him, and he falls into the pool she had filled for him. The flashback has come round to its beginning. The film returns to the present: the body face down in the water, the police in the house, the photographers looking down.
The newsreel cameras arrive, and Norma plays to them as if to her own picture. Max goes below to direct her, calling the shot as he once did, and she comes down the staircase toward the lenses, playing the scene. Swanson plays it in silent gesture, eyes and hands at a scale the sound film had abandoned, controlled to the last step.
At the foot of the stair she speaks to the director who is no longer there: “Ready for my close-up”. Then she comes at the lens until the face fills it and dissolves. The newsreel cameras only pretend to the close-up; the film itself provides it. Its last image is the medium’s own unit, the face, given to a woman the medium has discarded, and the man who told her story is already dead in the water outside.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure. The dead narrator is required: he is the film’s first fact and the authority for its tone. The house is required, and every room of it works: the organ, the screening room, the bridge table, the pool Norma had filled for him, the room with no locks. Max’s revelation, husband, director and author of the fan letters, is held back until it reorders everything. The visit to Paramount is required: the studio wants her car, not her. The Betty strand is required in kind, an honest script written by night against a kept life by day, but its length gives: Artie Green’s New Year party and the drugstore scenes run on genre rhythm and could lose a third, and the repossession men announce a fact already established.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: an industry that makes gods of faces discards the faces and keeps the machinery, and the people it discards are kept alive in the image by those who cannot leave it. A second truth is Gillis’s: a man who sells his talent and then sells himself finds the second sale easier than the first, and narrates it with the wit he used to sell scripts. Max discloses a third: devotion that manufactures the delusion it serves. Much of it arrives through image: the silent close-up on the screen with the living face before it, the “waxworks” at the card table, a studio lamp swung onto her by an old electrician. Held below the top because the satire states its own case, and Betty, the alternative, is less a truth than a type.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The elevation is dreadful and grotesque, and it recurs. The body seen from beneath the water, the police and photographers looking down through the surface. A dead chimpanzee laid out by candlelight in a gilded bedroom and buried at night in a small white coffin. The organ in the empty hall with the wind in its pipes. The tango on New Year’s Eve, an orchestra playing to two. The projector’s beam full of smoke, and Norma rising into it. On DeMille’s stage, the light finding her and the extras gathering. The descent of the staircase, Max directing, the face coming at the lens until it dissolves. Held at its figure because the register is ironic through most of the running time, and the voice-over cools what rises.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Myth built, and built from cinema’s own dead. The house is a tomb kept by a servant, and its queen does not know she has died: the bride in the decaying mansion, Miss Havisham with a projector. A young man enters by accident, is taken in, dressed and kept, and dies in the water she prepared, the mortal in the goddess’s house. Max is the creator become the slave of his creation, Pygmalion inverted. Norma’s chosen role is Salome, who asks for a man’s head, and the film ends with her demanding the camera. The load-bearing stroke is the casting: Swanson, von Stroheim, Keaton, Warner and Nilsson are the silent era playing itself, and the film within the film is Swanson’s own. Held below the top because the wider patterns are evoked as genre more than built into the plot.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The inheritance is double: the noir confession in voice-over, which Wilder had made his own six years before, and the Hollywood picture about Hollywood, A Star Is Born (1937) above all. The turns are real. The narrator is a corpse. A major studio lends its gate, its name, its leading producer-director and its sound stage to a portrait of itself as a graveyard. The stars of the silent era play their own obsolescence, and Swanson takes a part close to her own life, a casting that was a wager. Held below the bar by precedent: the voice-over noir was the director’s proven path, the self-portrait a genre with a known shape, and the film’s grammar classical studio practice rather than a departure from it. The turns are made on a path already walked, and the form itself does not move.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Substitute a living narrator, and the film loses what it knows. The man telling the story is already what Norma is, a has-been held in the past tense, and his voice, dry, quick and professional, is a screenwriter’s, narrating his own end as a pitch. The form knows what the story says. The grammar is the old Hollywood’s, used to show the old Hollywood dead: deep studio interiors, the iris of a silent film, and the close-up as the last image, a close-up the film itself gives while the newsreel cameras only pretend to. Ending on her face, coming toward the lens, completes the argument in the medium’s own unit. Held a step from the top: the frame is laid round a conventionally told middle, a well-made melodrama, and the Betty scenes could sit in another picture.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence over promise, and seventy-six years supply it. The film has been read as industry satire, as noir, as gothic, as a study of age and gender in the star system, as camp, and as a document of the silent era’s survivors; the Queen Kelly footage, von Stroheim’s history with Swanson and the cameos keep yielding to film historians. How much Max knows and serves, and whether Gillis’s contempt is the film’s own, stay open on return. The return is narrower than the fame: the satire is legible on a first viewing and its irony mostly settled, and much of the later writing is on context and casting rather than on meanings the film withholds. A well that rewards history more than it deepens in meaning.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 1940s and 1950s. Intrinsic force: the film turned the studio’s self-portrait from celebration or cautionary romance into gothic and autopsy, carried the noir confession into the voice of a dead man, and made the industry’s own past a subject of horror. That is a real reorganisation of what Hollywood could say about itself, though the grammar it used was classical. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Hollywood picture about Hollywood after it, The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) among them; the ageing-star gothic of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and its cycle; Wilder’s own Fedora (1978); a stage musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber (1993); lines in common speech. The force and the reach meet the bar together, and do not pass it.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across seventy-six years. Form: the film as released survives whole, in its one cut; the morgue prologue removed before release was never part of it, and restorations of the released cut repair it. Presence: continuous and of the widest kind, in repertory, on television, in every home format and in teaching; Norma Desmond and her close-up are common reference among people who have not seen the film, and the stage musical has carried the story to new audiences. Fabric: the Hollywood of 1950 is the subject, so its surfaces age as history rather than as fashion, and the silent era it mourns was already history when it was made. A span of seventy-six years with the widest presence earns the figure, and a film’s span earns no more.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Command of the medium, with invention left to The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition. The making bears weight. John F. Seitz lights the house as a tomb: dust in the projector’s beam, the body shot from below the water. Hans Dreier and John Meehan build its gilt, the organ and a bed like a gondola. Franz Waxman sets a Salome motif against dance-band Hollywood, and the cutting keeps voice-over and scene in exact time. Swanson plays silent gesture as the character itself, eyes and hands at a scale the sound film had abandoned, controlled to the last step; von Stroheim is still; Holden’s narration has a screenwriter’s economy. The lines carry character in a phrase, “We had faces”. The costs: Olson and Webb are pleasant and flat, and the Betty scenes are conventionally staged.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the monkey’s funeral, and the bright night of Betty and Gillis on the backlot streets. One law governs both: the image outlives the life, and everyone in the film is selling to a camera. Norma buries a pet as a star buries everything, in a scene; Betty and Gillis work by night in a town of painted fronts, writing a picture and falling in love in the studio’s own street. The bridge game, the screening, the DeMille set, the newsreel cameras and the corpse in the pool obey the same law. The range runs from comedy of manners through gothic to homicide, and the tone holds. The strain is the Betty strand, whose sincerity the film half believes and half mocks, and a flippant voice-over that at moments undercuts what the images are doing.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Held in one structure: consciousness, Gillis’s from inside and Norma’s from without; the industry as labour, the writer as hired hand, the repossession men, the electrician, the producer’s office; money and the sale of a man; age and gender in a trade that uses women’s faces; the history of a medium from silence to sound, embodied by its survivors. They are integrated: the kept man’s debt, the studio’s indifference and the star’s delusion are one economy. What holds the axis lowest is the narrowness of the world: one town, one trade, one house. The family is absent but for Max’s marriage; the state appears only as police; the sacred as Salome and a pet’s coffin; the natural order as a swimming pool. A wide trade held whole, inside a small world.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 8.9 and The Imperishable at 8.8, then The Archetypal Deep, The Living Form and The Inner Law at 8.7. A making in which light, set, score and a performance at silent scale carry the house as a tomb; a film whole in its one cut and in common reference for seventy-six years; a myth built from cinema’s own dead by casting them as themselves; a dead narrator whose voice is the form’s knowledge; and one law, that the image outlives the life, from a monkey’s funeral to a night on the backlot.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.7: consciousness, labour, money, age and gender and the history of a medium are held as one economy, inside one town, one trade and one house, with the family, the state and the sacred barely present. Above it, The Swerve and The Bottomless Well at 8.4: real turns on the director’s proven path in a classical grammar, and a return that yields history more than meaning.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.7, The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.8, The Archetypal Deep at 8.7 and The Unconcealment at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, and Pressure on Tradition meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.4 falls a tenth short. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.4, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.7. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.5 from a sum of 102.4, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Sunset Boulevard as released by Paramount Pictures in August 1950, the one released cut, in black and white, of about 110 minutes, from the lettering on the kerb to the close-up at the foot of the staircase: directed by Billy Wilder, produced by Charles Brackett, written by Brackett, Wilder and D. M. Marshman Jr., photographed by John F. Seitz, edited by Doane Harrison and Arthur Schmidt, with art direction by Hans Dreier and John Meehan, costumes by Edith Head and music by Franz Waxman; with William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim, Nancy Olson, Fred Clark and Jack Webb, and Cecil B. DeMille, Hedda Hopper, Buster Keaton, H. B. Warner and Anna Q. Nilsson as themselves. The morgue prologue, shot and removed before release, is not the object and is not judged; restorations of the released cut are weighed as repair. The film entered the National Film Registry in its first year, 1989. No print, script or recording was consulted. Four fragments of dialogue are quoted, each certain; the rest is described. Figures and details that could not be verified, among them the budget, the box-office returns, the shot count, the scene timings, the history and place of the previews, the date and kind of any restoration, and the industry’s private response to the film, are not given.