FILM REVIEW :: Sunset Boulevard (1950, Billy Wilder)

I loved this movie. But not for the tango.
Another example of a great filmmaker using tango to set a scene for the bizarre, the ridiculous, the off-key. Wilder would use and abuse tango again in this way in his later film "Some Like it Hot" in a strange tango danced between 2 men, one of them Jack Lemmon in full-on drag.



But back to Sunset Boulevard. The year is 1950, and Joe, a struggling Hollywood screenwriter evades the collectors by ducking his car into an open garage. He soon discovers himself on the estate of the famed (and aging) silent film actress Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson). Out of both desperation and complacency, he quickly finds himself the estate's newest resident, working on what would be Norma Desmond's comeback script, as acting himself as her "husband".

Norma is completely trapped in a time gone by...a time of silent films, of actors with "faces"...of her own fame and self-adoration, of tangos danced on a tile floor in the arms of Rudolph Valentino (note: Valentino featured prominent tango scenes in several of his silent films). The film reaches a climactic point during Norma's New Year's Eve party...an orquestra plays waltzes and tangos, while the Butler oversees the buffet...for all of the 2 guests who are invited..Norma and Joe. She prods and pulls her unenthusiastic partner onto the dance floor into an awkward tango...she, completely delusional, he, completely detached (and a little disgusted). Although it is Norma's intention that the tango dance release Joe's passion for her, after the dance he rejects her and she ends up fleeing to her room. Instead of following after her, Joe leaves for another party of his own peers, and another girl. When he finally returns to the estate, he discovers that Norma, in her state of hysteria, has attempted suicide.

Tango is the wacky ingredient, the backdrop for the unfolding melodrama of unrequited love, of robotic obedience and willful rejection. Tango is the ridiculousness of a 50 year old silent film star in the arms of a 30 year old dialogue writer...the absurdity of a live orchestra on New Year's Eve for only 2 people...it is also, in this scenario and taken within the context of its own time, an indicator of a bygone era (that is to say, old fashioned in 1950's terms). The people at the young hollywood party are not dancing tango.