"Sunset Boulevard" in Blu-Ray, "The Song Is You" Book Review

Gloria Swanson And William Holden In 'Sunset Boulevard' (1950)

On November 9th, 2012, Paramount will be releasing a film on Blu-ray that showcases the studio in a variety of ways that no other film really did. While Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950) is widely recognized to be one of the most cynical looks at Hollywood ever committed to celluloid, it also managed to document the studio and film personalities in a way that no one had ever done before and no one has really done since.

Sunset Boulevard tells the story of Joe Gillis (William Holden), a down-and-out screenwriter in Hollywood who, through a series of mishaps, lands in the domicile of a famous silent film starlet, Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), who has since faded into obscurity. Monetary temptations being too strong for the young Gillis, he is convinced to assist Desmond in rewriting the screenplay that will help her return to the silver screen and to the fans that she “deserted” all those years ago… to disastrous results for all parties involved. Wilder’s study of Hollywood in the ‘50s, acting and the industry all come together to show a powerful and complex story of how technology and personality intermix and sometimes end up like oil and water.

Gloria Swanson and director Billy Wilder between scenes of "Sunset Blvd." (1950)

The extras that are on the disc are as follows: Commentary by Ed Sikov, author of On Sunset Blvd: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder, Sunset Boulevard: The Beginning, Sunset Boulevard: A Look Back, The Noir Side of Sunset Boulevard, Sunset Boulevard Becomes a Classic,Two Sides of Ms. Swanson, Stories of Sunset Boulevard,Mad About the Boy: A Portrait of William Holden, Recording Sunset Boulevard, The City of Sunset Boulevard, Franz Waxman and the Music of Sunset Boulevard, Morgue Prologue Script Pages, Deleted Scene—“The Paramount-Don’t-Want-Me Blues” (HD) Hollywood Location Map, Behind the Gates: The Lot, Edith Head: The Paramount Years, Paramount in the ‘50s Galleries: Production, The Movie, Publicity, Theatrical Trailer (HD). Out of all of these features, the stand out pieces are the Edith Head documentary, the Sunset Boulevard Becomes a Classic, the Galleries, and the Morgue Prologue Script pages. Source: www.craveonline.com

-Theresa Schwegel: You wrote a male lead in "The Song Is You" and he isn't so likeable. I mean, most women would probably like him, but not for long. Would you ever sit down with a guy like that over a few gimlets? What do you find compelling about Gil Hopkins?

-Megan Abbott: Thinking about Gil Hopkins, I had two pictures in my head: William Holden in "Sunset Boulevard" and Tony Curtis in "Sweet Smell of Success". I kept photos of both of them by the computer. These charming, smooth-talking pretty boys hustling every angle and hating themselves for it. Men doing bad things who are too smart not to have self-contempt but not smart enough to figure out a way to rise above it. I just find it fascinating and I wanted to write a character like that. And you can bet I would sit down for gimlets with him, but I'd definitely stop at one. Source: www.mysteryreaders.org

"And he went to premieres with the glimmering girls of the moment, lunch at the Derby, to the track with John Huston and his rough-living crowd. When someone needed to pick up the big-shot buccaneer at the drunk tank and slip some green to the blue, he sent Mike or Freddy or reliable old Bix. They kicked needles down sewer grates, slipped suicide notes into pockets, gave screen tests to hustlers quid pro quo. Hop had it taken care of. He had it fixed. Mr. Blue Sky. All from his chrome and mahogany office, cool and magisterial and pumped full of his own surging blood." -"The Song Is You" (2007) by Megan Abbott

Edgar-winner Megan Abbott became a sort of soul mate in the neo-noir literature. Her tortuous and vibrant novels equal in ambience to James Ellroy's gritty and eerie "L.A. Confidential" and "The Black Dahlia" stories. Emulating the hardboiled lingo to a T, Abbott recounts in her second mystery novel the strange circumstances surrounding the former "Florentine Gardens" dancer, model, actress and B-girl Jean Spangler, who disappeared from Los Angeles in 1949 after having completed a bit part in the film "Young Man with a Horn" with Kirk Douglas. In the alternate scenario created by Abbott, Gil "Hop" Hopkins (the publicist who helps to obscure the details of the investigation, favoring the movie studios' pretense) has seen Jean and her best friend Iolene the last night in the Red Lily club in the company of creepy song-and-dance duo Marv Sutton and Gene Merrel, who have a terrible reputation around dames.

Contrasting to the more classicist approach of the 'Czar of Noir' Eddie Muller (author of "The Distance", one of my favorite crime novels, where his indefatigable San Francisco's sportswriter Billy Nichols tries to protect the Heavyweight boxer Hack Escalante), Abbott's style, although nailing the atmosphere and a feeling of true chronicle, is more on the emotional (not sentimental) side. She has written two more crime novels set in the past: "Queenpin" (the central character, gambling queen Gloria Denton is loosely inspired by Bugsy Siegel's lover Virginia Hill) and "Bury Me Deep" (set in 1930's, inspired by the true story of Winnie Ruth Judd, known as The Trunk Murderess). Both Muller and Abbott's have a potent poetic flair in their narratives, which frames the plot and historical addendums.

Frannie Adair (whose restrained attitude reminded me of Lora King in "Die A Little"), an Examiner's reporter who is interested in the Jean Spangler case, maintains a tense relationship with Hop based on professional rivalry that culminates in a romantic attraction, despite of her character seeming almost undersexed compared to the other women in Hop's life - as Midge, his ex-wife who had a platonic crush on Jean. Hopkings is a very accomplished finagler, turned into a successful PR in the lucrative Hollywood machine of 1950's. Whereas the detectives and dupes in the vintage noir films projected a stern aura of morality and machismo de rigueur, in "The Song Is You" and "Die A Little" (Abbott's previous novel), we find a sharp trastocation of the genre conventions, mainly throwing away the apparently solid male façades and showing us their filthy edges. Abbott's detailed representation of complex femme-fatales and their self-destructive pulsions, doesn't betray a subjacent analysis of the whole feminine idiosyncrasia and multiple weaknesses associated to the sex-symbols and starlets in that particular era. More than a confrontation between sexes, Abbott proves both fall prey of a feverish machinery prepared to dislocate their dreams and bury deep their souls.

While "Die A Little" constitutes a more orthodox effort to recreate the golden suburbia in the middle of the 20th century, "The Song Is You" is a more wide-ranging experience, outlining the glamour of old Hollywood and revealing the subterrestrial world of the drifters, hopefuls, wannabes and losers: the industry's underclass that threatens to get the lid off the Dream Factory's lieges. Combining echoes of Chandler's Little Sister, Abbott entwines real-life personalities such as the bombshell Barbara Payton (and her failed romances with Franchot Tone and Tom Neal), and aspiring actress Elizabeth Short (turned into the sad celebrity 'The Black Dahlia' due to her macabre murder): "Jean grinned broadly at her, a grin that split her face in two, eerie like a ventriloquist’s dummy, dark on a stage. She grinned broadly and in that grin she told Iolene, All the stories in the world and I wouldn’t pass this up — I’ve seen bad things enough to shake the word “bad” loose from its roots. I can go to the far end of nothing with the best of them. I can pull the pin and roll."

Hop embarks on a dark journey in the demimonde of Tinseltown, reluctantly fighting off his last vestiges of dignity when the demons being to pile up precipitately inside his dormant conscience. There are melancholic winks to Raymond Chandler, especially in the last chapters "Reno, 1946" and "Merry Lake" (which contains the most disturbing twist in the novel).

In the manner of epilogue, in "Four Years Later" Hopkins has established himself as one of the big shots in the film industry: "He spoke to the contract stars and the beauties who floated over from the other studios for a picture or two. They all came to him. Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, too, even Humphrey Bogart. And the women, Jeanne Crain, Doris Day, Jennifer Jones, Jane Wyman, Anne Baxter. They all came. And finer, less flinty fare in the up-and-comers: Janice Rule, Dorothy Malone, Jan Sterling, Carroll Baker. Every day. And, of course, the columnists — the rumor monkeys he worked like a carnival organ grinder. Walter still kicking around, Hedda, Louella, Sheilah, and all their lesser models — all dancing for him."

Chandler's femme fatale glowered at her destiny, she was more romantically evil and her sexuality more abstract; his hero Philip Marlowe was naïvely incorruptible and distant toward women. Abbott's femme fatales (if we can call them so) are imperfect, suffer deep fears and painful resentments. And there are not smooth knights or tough guys who can heal their despair, just abusive bosses, sometimes subspecies of a man, or grifters who stroll through desolate spots, only to find their own scams in the end looking them back in the mirror.

"There was something lost. He could look in the mirror a thousand times and he would never see it again. He’d snuffed it out. Had he known he’d never get it back… Had he known it would be gone forever… He opened the drawer to his bedside table and dug under the handkerchiefs, phone book, cigarettes, matchbooks. He pulled it out. It was thin as a cobweb now, this postcard. It had become delicate with time. Postcards, after all, aren’t meant to last. They’re less than a letter. They’re a fleeting thing. A whisper in the ear reminding you, “Merry Lake’s Waiting for You.”

Article first published as Book Review: The Song is You by Megan Abbott on Blogcritics.