Come Back, Little Sheba (Daniel Mann, 1952)

Shirley Booth and Burt Lancaster in Come Back, Little Sheba

Cast: Shirley Booth, Burt Lancaster, Terry Moore, Richard Jaeckel, Philip Ober, Edwin Max, Lisa Golm, Walter Kelley. Screenplay: Ketti Frings, based on a play by William Inge. Cinematography: James Wong Howe. Art direction: Henry Bumstead, Hal Pereira. Film editing: Warren Low. Music: Franz Waxman.

Shirley Booth won an Oscar for her portrayal of Lola Delaney, a middle-aged frump married to an alcoholic chiropractor (Burt Lancaster) she calls "Daddy" or "Doc." We first see Lola coming downstairs in a ratty chenille robe to answer the doorbell; it's Marie Buckholder (Terry Moore), a college student answering an ad for a room Lola has for rent. Marie takes a look at the room and tells her she'll think it over. When Doc finds out that Lola has decided to take in a roomer, he's angry and forbids it. But when Marie returns to say she wants to rent the room, only Doc is home -- Lola has gone out to buy some orange juice for his breakfast -- and when he gets a look at the nubile Marie, he agrees to rent it, along with another downstairs room that Lola calls her "sewing room," though there's no evidence that Lola ever uses it for that. And so begins the film version of the first of William Inge's plays about sexual frustration. The movie would have us believe that Marie rouses a repressed desire in Doc and also makes him want to protect her, as if she were the child he and Lola lost, but as with most of the works by the closeted playwright, it has a strong gay subtext. When Marie, an art student, brings home a classmate, a young athlete named Turk (Richard Jaeckel), to pose for a poster she's creating, Doc is shocked to find the well-built Turk, in a track suit that shows off his muscles, in his living room. He immediately begins professing his concern for Marie's honor, her supposed virginity, but we can sense that he's more than a little aroused by Turk. We learn, too, that Doc was an only child, coddled by his mother and always shy around women, and that it was only because Lola was more than a little sexually forward that he got her pregnant and had to marry her. The real disappointment in the movie is the radical miscasting of Lancaster as Doc. He was 15 years younger than Booth, and no amount of gray at his temples can cover up his athletic vitality and make us believe that the two are supposed to be the same age. Still, despite the screenplay's disingenuousness about sexuality and the stagebound character of its action and dialogue, Booth's performance is worth savoring and there are moments of genuine feeling in the film.

Peyton Place (Mark Robson, 1957)

Lana Turner and Diane Varsi in Peyton Place

Cast: Lana Turner, Lee Philips, Diane Varsi, Hope Lange, Arthur Kennedy, Lloyd Nolan, Russ Tamblyn, Terry Moore, David Nelson, Barry Coe, Betty Field, Mildred Dunnock, Leon Ames, Lorne Greene. Screenplay: John Michael Hayes, based on a novel by Grace Metalious. Cinematography: William C. Mellor. Art direction: Jack Martin Smith, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: David Bretherton. Music: Franz Waxman.

Take the sex away from Grace Metalious's lurid novel Peyton Place and what you have left is a portrait of small-town narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy, very much in the tradition of fiction by much better writers, from Mark Twain to Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and William Faulkner. Squeezed by the strictures of the Production Code, the film version of the novel becomes a kind of reworking of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. There was narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy in Wilder's Grover's Corners, but only in the background. It bubbles to the surface in the adaptation of Metalious's novel, which replaces Wilder's heroine, the romantic Emily Webb, who loves her family and her town, with the embittered Allison MacKenzie (Diane Varsi), who hates not only the gossip-ridden town but also her mother, Constance (Lana Turner), for having withheld the information that Allison is the product of Constance's liaison with a married man. The film version of Peyton Place turns what in the novel was sexual molestation of a girl by her father into a rape by her stepfather, side-stepping the incest issue a bit, and converts an abortion into a miscarriage. The randy teenagers of the novel do nothing more shocking in the film than make out a bit and go skinny-dipping. The film hints a little that the shy mama's boy Norman Page (Russ Tamblyn) may be gay -- he refers to himself as a "sissy" once -- but relieves him of that stigma by having him join the paratroopers when war breaks out and come home bold and no longer shy. (It would never occur to Hollywood or its audiences of the day that a gay man could be bold and masculine.) In short, Peyton Place makes today's viewer do a lot of decoding. Which, aside from the fact that at 157 minutes it's overlong and a lot of the dialogue is heavy-handedly expository (and sometimes just banal), doesn't fatally undermine it as entertainment. There are some very good performances: Varsi, Turner, and Tamblyn received Oscar nominations, as did Arthur Kennedy as the slavering rapist stepfather, and Hope Lange as his victim-stepdaughter. Metalious, of course, hated it all the way to the bank.

Mr. Skeffington (Vincent Sherman, 1944)

Bette Davis and Claude Rains in Mr. Skeffington

Cast: Bette Davis, Claude Rains, Walter Abel, George Coulouris, Richard Waring, Marjorie Riordan, Robert Shayne, John Alexander, Jerome Cowan, Johnny Mitchell, Dorothy Peterson, Peter Whitney, Bill Kennedy. Screenplay: Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, based on a novel by Elizabeth von Arnim. Cinematography: Ernest Haller. Art direction: Robert M. Haas. Film editing: Ralph Dawson. Music: Franz Waxman.

Although the title role of Mr. Skeffington belongs to Claude Rains, the movie is really centered on Mrs. Skeffington, née Fanny Trellis, played by Bette Davis, a fact reflected in the Oscar nominations to Davis for best actress and to Rains for supporting actor. It's a film that gives Davis the opportunity to run the age gamut, from youthful beauty to haggard old lady. Unfortunately, although the screenplay is credited to the usually reliable Julius and Philip Epstein, who also served as producers, the director is the undistinguished Vincent Sherman, and the resulting film is tediously conventional. It lacks some of the verve of Hollywood movies of the era that was often supplied by a gallery of character players, leaving Davis and Rains to do what they can to carry the story: Spoiled, flighty woman marries a rich man she doesn't love, both of them suffer but are reconciled at the end when she's old and he's blind. It has the distinction of being one of the few films of the period to deal directly with antisemitism, but it doesn't do so with much real conviction. Still, Davis is always fun to watch, even if the nearly two and a half hour run time tends to challenge even that fun.

Old Acquaintance (Vincent Sherman, 1943)

Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins in Old Acquaintance

Cast: Bette Davis, Miriam Hopkins, John Loder, Gig Young, Dolores Moran, Phillip Reed, Roscoe Karnes, Anne Revere, Esther Dale. Screenplay: John Van Druten, Lenore J. Coffee, based on a play by John Van Druten. Cinematography: Sol Polito. Art direction: John Hughes. Film editing: Terry O. Morse. Music: Franz Waxman.

One of those actress pairings that you can't help being drawn to, no matter the quality of the movie: Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins. Fortunately, the movie, Old Acquaintance, is pretty good. (So was their earlier teaming in 1939, in William Goulding's The Old Maid, during which they are said to have had off-screen battles.) It's a story of two childhood friends who both grow up to be successful novelists, though Davis's Kit Marlowe is a critical darling while Hopkins's Millie Drake is a commercial success. They also grow up orbiting the same man, Preston Drake (John Loder), though Millie is the one who marries him and has a daughter with him. Eventually, Millie and Preston split, and the daughter, Dede, grows up to be played by Dolores Moran, and wouldn't you know it, to take Kit's much younger lover, Rudd Kendall (Gig Young), away from her. The central fact of the relationship between Kit and Millie, however, is that they represent opposite temperaments: Kit is solid and cynical, while Millie is high-strung and manic. All of this makes for some entertaining scenes, which is all that's needed in a Bette Davis movie, or a Miriam Hopkins one, for that matter.

Dark Passage (Delmer Daves, 1947)

Houseley Stevenson and Tom D'Andrea in Dark Passage

Vincent Parry: Humphrey Bogart
Irene Jansen: Lauren Bacall
Madge Rapf: Agnes Moorehead
Bob: Bruce Bennett
Sam: Tom D'Andrea
Dr. Walter Coley: Houseley Stevenson
Baker: Clifton Young
George Fellsinger: Rory Mallinson

Director: Delmer Daves
Screenplay: Delmer Daves
Based on a novel by David Goodis
Cinematography: Sidney Hickox
Art direction: Charles H. Clarke
Film editing: David Weisbart
Music: Franz Waxman

Time doesn't just heal wounds, it also makes bad movies into interesting ones. Dark Passage is, on the face of it, a bad movie, a silly thriller whose plot depends on a series of absurd coincidences. But it has survived and achieved almost cult status because of several things: the eternal chemistry of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, and its wonderful views of San Francisco in the late 1940s among them. And, I think, because writer-director Delmer Daves knew enough to take its absurdities with a straight face, keeping his tongue only slightly in his cheek as he unspools the story of convicted wife-murderer Vincent Parry, who manages to escape from San Quentin in an open barrel precariously perched on the back of a truck, to survive a barrel roll from the truck on Highway 1, to be picked up first by a guy we later learn is an ex-con who had done time in San Quentin and then by Irene Jansen, who is convinced that Parry is innocent. She takes him to her handsome apartment -- an Art Deco building at 1360 Montgomery St. that still attracts movie-loving tourists -- and gives him shelter, even though she's also friends with Madge Rapf, who testified against Parry at the trial. Leaving the safety of Irene's apartment, he hails a cabbie named Sam, who recognizes him but believes he's innocent, and who takes him to a back-alley plastic surgeon who -- for $200! -- gives him a new face. And so on. Much of the first part of the film is done with a subjective camera, giving us Parry's view of things, including the film's best -- that is, funniest -- scene: the doctor explaining the procedure as Sam kibitzes over his shoulder. His face bandaged, Parry returns to Irene, who nurses him until the bandages come off and we see Bogart's face for the first time -- though even with bandages on, he's identifiably Bogart. And so on as Parry gathers evidence that proves the real murderer was Madge, who inconveniently takes a header through a plate-glass window, robbing him of his proof. Pauline Kael was representative of the earlier response to the movie, calling it "miserably plotted" and "an almost total drag," but if you have an easily willing suspension of disbelief, a taste for old-style star chemistry, and an interest in seeing the Golden Gate Bridge without bumper-to-bumper traffic, Dark Passage can be a lot of fun.

Air Force (Howard Hawks, 1943)

John Garfield, George Tobias, and Harry Carey in Air Force

Capt. Quincannon: John Ridgely
Lt. Williams: Gig Young
Lt. McMartin: Arthur Kennedy
Lt. Hauser: Charles Drake
Sgt. White: Harry Carey
Cpl. Weinberg: George Tobias
Cpl. Peterson: Ward Wood
Pvt. Chester: Ray Montgomery
Sgt. Winocki: John Garfield
Lt. "Tex" Rader: James Brown
Maj. Mallory: Stanley Ridges
Col. Blake: Moroni Olsen
Susan McMartin: Faye Emerson

Director: Howard Hawks
Screenplay: Dudley Nichols
Cinematography: James Wong Howe
Art direction: John Hughes
Film editing: George Amy
Music: Franz Waxman

"Fried Jap coming down!" crows gunner Weinberg as a Japanese fighter pilot and his plane attacking the Mary-Ann are consumed in flames. It's a much-quoted and much-parodied line that puts Howard Hawks's Air Force squarely where it belongs: in the wounded jingoism of the period immediately post Pearl Harbor. We wince at the line today, but Air Force has endured not so much because it's a period piece as because it's a tremendously effective piece of filmmaking. Hawks, who was a licensed pilot and had served in the Army Air Corps during World War I, was the exactly right person to make the film, which producer Hal B. Wallis put into production shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and which he wanted to release on the first anniversary of the attack in 1942. Hawks was too savvy and persistent a craftsman to allow anything like an arbitrary deadline to hinder him, and his failure to adhere to Wallis's schedule led to a brief replacement as director by Vincent Sherman. Wallis was exasperated in particular by Hawks's constant departure from the producer-approved screenplay, particularly the dialogue. Nevertheless, Hawks persisted, and called in William Faulkner to rewrite Concannon's death scene, which the director found too saccharine. The result is one of the most affecting moments of the film. The rest is pretty much razzle-dazzle heroism and entertaining male-bonding: There's no Hawksian woman in the movie to take the guys down a peg, although Faye Emerson's bit as McMartin's sister and Williams's girlfriend has a good deal of the Hawksian tough cookie about her. Hawks wanted the film to be a wartime version of his great movie about pilots, Only Angels Have Wings (1939), but the propagandist pressures to support the war effort, and probably a good deal of meddling from Wallis and Warner Bros., kept him from achieving that goal. Still, the action is exciting and the performances are good, especially John Garfield as the reluctantly heroic Winocki and Harry Carey as the oldtimer mechanic -- though Carey, in his mid-60s, was probably more of an oldtimer than the role strictly calls for.

Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)

Judith Anderson and Joan Fontaine in Rebecca

Mrs. de Winter: Joan Fontaine
Maxim de Winter: Laurence Olivier
Mrs. Danvers: Judith Anderson
Jack Favell: George Sanders
Frank Crawley: Reginald Denny
Major Giles Lacy: Nigel Bruce
Colonel Julyan: C. Aubrey Smith
Beatrice Lacy: Gladys Cooper
Mrs. Van Hopper: Florence Bates
Coroner: Melville Cooper
Dr. Baker: Leo G. Carroll

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Robert E. Sherwood, Joan Harrison, Philip MacDonald, Michael Hogan
Based on a novel by Daphne Du Maurier
Cinematography: George Barnes
Art direction: Lyle R. Wheeler, William Cameron Menzies
Music: Franz Waxman

Rebecca is a very good movie. Would it have been a better one if Alfred Hitchcock, directing his first American film, had been left alone by the producer, David O. Selznick, an incurable micromanager? That's the question that lingers, especially since Hitchcock later expressed some dissatisfaction with the film. It does lack the director's sense of humor, manifested for example in the scene in which the horrid Mrs. Van Hopper snuffs a cigarette in a jar of cold cream, a gag Hitchcock liked so much that he used it again 15 years later in To Catch a Thief, in which the substitute ashtray is a fried egg. The differences between Hitchcock and Selznick largely lay in the realm of editing, in which Selznick loved to dabble, insisting that scenes be shot from various camera angles to give him latitude in the editing room. Hitchcock was a famous storyboarder, working out scenes and planning camera setups well in advance of the actual shooting -- "editing in the camera," as it's usually called. The story would probably also have been very different in the Hitchcock version: According to one source, the original version suggested by Hitchcock began on shipboard, with various people being seasick. Selznick, however, liked to stick closely to the novels on which he based his films: The opening title, for example, refers to the movie as a "picturization" of Daphne Du Maurier's bestseller. (This was doubtless a comfort to Du Maurier, who hated Hitchcock's version of her novel Jamaica Inn (1939) -- but then so did Hitchcock, and both of them were right to do so.) The glory of Rebecca lies mostly in its performances. Although Laurence Olivier never makes Maxim de Winter a fully credible character -- I think he felt he was slumming, doing the film only to be near Vivien Leigh, and disgusted when Selznick didn't cast her as the second Mrs. de Winter -- he was always a watchable actor, even when he wasn't doing a great job of it. Joan Fontaine is almost perfect in her role, making credible the crucial character switch, when she stops being shy and stands up to Mrs. Danvers. And Hitchcock must have loved working with the gaggle of British character actors who had flocked to Hollywood and populate all the supporting roles.

Suspicion (Alfred Hitchcock, 1941)

Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine in Suspicion

Lina McLaidlaw Aysgarth: Joan Fontaine
Johnnie Aysgarth: Cary Grant
General McLaidlaw: Cedric Hardwicke
Mrs. McLaidlaw: May Whitty
Beaky Thwaite: Nigel Bruce
Mrs. Newsham: Isabel Jeans
Ethel: Heather Angel
Captain Melbeck: Leo G. Carroll

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Samson Raphaelson, Joan Harrison, Alma Reville
Based on a novel by Anthony Berkeley as Francis Iles
Cinematography: Harry Stradling Sr.
Music: Franz Waxman

"Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you," as Joseph Heller put it in Catch-22. Considering how many plots of Alfred Hitchcock's films are variations on that theme, he might well have had the phrase posted on his office wall. Suspicion is one of the purest explorations of that premise: A woman thinks her handsome rotter of a husband is out to murder her, and the evidence keeps piling up up that she's right. Of course, she isn't, but it takes an hour and 39 minutes to reach that rather anticlimactic conclusion. Suspicion was Hitchcock's fourth American film, and it shows that he was still getting used to working in a rather different studio system than the one he had in England. After the micromanaging of David O. Selznick on his first, Rebecca (1940), he had a comparatively easier time with producer Walter Wanger on Foreign Correspondent (1940) except for the difficulty of making a film about impending war in Europe while the United States was still officially neutral -- so the bad guys could never be explicitly identified as Nazis, for example. But his third film, Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941), his first set in the United States, was a dud, in large part because Hitchcock had yet to master American idiom: The prissy character played by Gene Raymond, for example, was supposed to have been the best fullback at the University of Alabama. I doubt that Hitchcock knew what a fullback was, let alone one from Alabama. So for Suspicion he retreated to familiar territory, England at a time when there wasn't a war going on, and some actors he had worked with before: Joan Fontaine, Nigel Bruce, and Leo G. Carroll from Rebecca, as well as May Whitty, who had starred in The Lady Vanishes (1938). The chief newcomer was Cary Grant, who would become, along with James Stewart, one of Hitchcock's most reliable leading men. But Grant's presence in the film presented its own problems: He was known as a charming actor in romantic comedy. Would an audience accept Grant as a potential murderer? One story, reportedly verified by Hitchcock himself, holds that the studio, RKO, didn't want to mar Grant's image and insisted on a change from the novel's original ending, in which Johnnie Aysgarth really is guilty. Biographers, however, have disputed that story, claiming that Hitchcock really wanted to focus on Lina's paranoia and not on Johnnie's villainy. In any case, the film's ending feels wrong, mostly because it resolves nothing: Is Johnnie's fecklessness really curable? The chief problem is that Lina herself is an unfocused character, improbably wavering between shyness and passion, between common sense and paranoia, between tough determination and a tendency to faint. Fontaine did what she could with the part, and won an Oscar for her pains, but the film really belongs to Grant. Hitchcock was the one director who could really bring out Grant's dark side.* He did it more brilliantly in Notorious (1946), but in Suspicion Hitchcock effectively exploits Grant's ability to turn on a subtle, cold-eyed menace.

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*A possible exception to this statement is George Cukor, who first explored the "other" Cary Grant as the Cockney con-man in Sylvia Scarlett (1935).

Humoresque (Jean Negulesco, 1946)

John Garfield and Joan Crawford in Humoresque

Helen Wright: Joan Crawford
Paul Boray: John Garfield
Sid Jeffers: Oscar Levant
Rudy Boray: J. Carrol Naish
Esther Boray: Ruth Nelson
Gina: Joan Chandler
Phil Boray: Tom D'Andrea
Florence Boray: Peggy Knudsen
Monte Loeffler: Craig Stevens
Victor Wright: Paul Cavanagh
Frederick Bauer: Richard Gaines
Paul as a child: Robert Blake

Director: Jean Negulesco
Screenplay: Clifford Odets, Zachary Gold
Based on a story by Fannie Hurst
Cinematography: Ernest Haller
Art direction: Hugh Reticker
Film editing: Rudi Fehr
Music: Franz Waxman

Jean Negulesco's Humoresque gets its title from the Fannie Hurst short story it's based on, but it also evokes the music played behind the opening title: the seventh of Antonín Dvořák's Humoresques, a group of short piano pieces that were later transcribed for orchestra. The music is best known today for the several facetious lyrics that have been attached to it, including "Passengers will please refrain from flushing toilets while the train is standing in the station" and "Mabel, Mabel, strong and able, get your elbows off the table."* Today, the movie also inspires similar irreverence, as an example of the melodramatic excesses of Joan Crawford's later career. How many drag queens have donned replicas of the Adrian gowns Crawford wears in the film, with shoulder pads so wide and sharp you fear that she could injure a bystander with a sudden turn? But there are far worse movies than Humoresque, and far less impressive performances than Crawford's in it. She doesn't appear until well into the film, after we've established the ruthless desire of Paul Boray to become a famous concert violinist. All he needs, it seems, is a rich patron, so when he meets Helen Wright, who has the money and nothing else to do with it but take lovers and drink, his fate is sealed. It's not like he doesn't have people to warn him off: There's his fellow musician, pianist Sid Jeffers, who can't supply much more than cynical wisecracks to keep Paul from doing the wrong thing. And there's his mother, who bought him his first violin but now wants him to settle down with fellow starving musician Gina and raise a family. But once Paul falls into Helen's clutches and becomes a hugely successful concert artist, all Mama and Gina can do is sit in the audience and glare up at Helen in her box -- though Gina sometimes bursts into tears and flees the auditorium. None of this would work if Garfield and Crawford didn't play their roles as well as they do. Garfield brings all the intensity and conviction to Paul that he does to his ambitious boxer in Body and Soul (Robert Rossen, 1947). Although the violin playing is actually done by Isaac Stern, with some nice camera trickery that puts Garfield's face and Stern's fingers in the same frame, Garfield keeps up the illusion well, to the extent of busily working the fingers on his left hand, practicing the fingering even when he's not playing. He has some improbable lines to speak -- the screenplay by Clifford Odets and Zachary Gold is freighted with them -- but he makes them work. As for Crawford, ambition was her nature and ruthlessness her forte in life as well as art, but she never just speaks her lines -- she inhabits them. There's no surprise in her performance, but that's not what we want from her. Negulesco's direction can be a little shapeless -- there's a gratuitous mid-film montage depicting a busy, hyped-up New York City -- but he handles the concluding sequence, set to a pastiche of themes from Tristan und Isolde, very well. Franz Waxman received an Oscar nomination for scoring, and there are excerpts from composers like Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Bizet, Mendelssohn, and Bach throughout: The film is a reminder that there was once a time when the audience for a Hollywood film would sit through extended passages of classical music.

*Or in my case, the discovery along with generations of other English lit grad students that the pouncing trochees of Tennyson's "Locksley Hall" -- e.g., "In the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love" -- could be sung to Humoresque No. 7.

Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1935)

Funny, campy, occasionally scary, and featuring over-the-top performances by Ernest Thesiger, Dwight Frye, and Una O'Connor, Bride of Frankenstein may also be the saddest of all horror movies. Much has been made of a perceived subtext of the film, based in part on the knowledge that its director, James Whale, and Thesiger were openly gay, and it's possible to see the plight of the monster (Boris Karloff) as analogous to that of the gays of their time, subject to ridicule and repression from a hostile society. In this reading, Whale and Thesiger adopt camp attitudes as a way of thumbing their noses at a hostile, uncomprehending society. But that's an unnecessarily reductive interpretation. The monster is the ultimate outsider, an anomalous and inarticulate being, whatever his sexuality. He briefly finds companionship in the blind hermit (O.P. Heggie) who begins to teach him to speak -- including the word "friend" -- but their relationship is doomed by the intrusion of the world of ordinary humans, a world he can never be part of. In the end, when the mate (Elsa Lanchester) who has been created for him rejects him, his only recourse is self-destruction. "We belong dead!" the monster proclaims. To see Bride of Frankenstein as some sort of parable about gays in society would then be an endorsement of suicide as the only option. Subtexts often reside only in the mind of the beholder, and Whale was too much of an artist to turn his film into any kind of message, however latent in the fantastic tale he is telling. Better instead to relish Karloff's ability to give a subtle performance that shows through pounds of makeup. Or Lanchester's remarkable control and timing in bringing the bride to life, including the squawks and hisses that she claimed to have developed by watching swans in the park. Or John J. Mescall's classic black-and-white cinematography, Charles D. Hall's set designs, and Franz Waxman's score. Yes, Colin Clive and Valerie Hobson are a most improbable couple as the Frankensteins. Clive was far gone into alcoholism and looks it, but nobody could have delivered the line "She's alive! Alive!" more memorably.

Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder, 1950)

Sunset Blvd., with the abbreviation, is the "official" title because it's the only way we see it in the credits of the film: as a shot of the street name stenciled on a curb. So from the beginning we are all in the gutter, and later we are looking at the stars -- or at least one fading star, Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson). Accepting the role of Norma was a truly courageous act by Swanson: She must have known that it was the part of a lifetime, but that posterity would remember her as the campy has-been silent star, and not as the actress who had a long and distinguished career, playing both comedy and drama with equal skill, or as the spunky title character of Sadie Thompson (Raoul Walsh, 1928), which earned her her first Oscar nomination. The role of Norma Desmond might have won her an Oscar if it hadn't been for another star whose career was beginning to fade: Bette Davis, who was nominated for All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz). The conventional wisdom has it that Swanson and Davis split the votes, allowing Judy Holliday to win for Born Yesterday (George Cukor). This was also a landmark film for William Holden, who had been an unremarkable leading man until his performance as Joe Gillis established his type: the somewhat cynical, morally compromised protagonist. It would earn him an Oscar three years later for another Wilder film, Stalag 17 (1953), and would be his stock in trade through the rest of his career, in films like Picnic (Joshua Logan, 1955), The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean, 1957), The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969), and Network (Sidney Lumet, 1976). Holden almost didn't get to play Gillis; Montgomery Clift was offered the role but backed out. One story has it that Clift thought the role, of a man out to get the money of a woman he doesn't love, was too much like one he had just played, in The Heiress (William Wyler, 1949), while others have said that he backed out because the story of a man's affair with an older woman would remind people of his own earlier affair with the singer Libby Holman, 16 years his senior. There is in fact an unfortunate whiff of disapproval in Wilder's treatment of the age difference between Norma Desmond and Joe Gillis -- Norma is said to be 50, which was Swanson's age when the film was made, while Holden, who was 32, was made up to look even younger. Wilder, it must be observed, seemed to have no problems when the age difference was reversed, as in his 1954 film Sabrina, in which a 54-year-old Humphrey Bogart romances a 25-year-old Audrey Hepburn, or the 1957 Love in the Afternoon, with 28-year-old Hepburn and 56-year-old Gary Cooper. None of this, however, seriously detracts from the fact that Sunset Blvd. remains one of the great movies, with its its superb black-and-white cinematography by John F. Seitz. It won Oscars for the mordant screenplay by Wilder, Charles Brackett, and D.M. Marshman Jr., the art direction and set decoration of Hans Dreier, John Meehan, Sam Comer, and Ray Moyer, and the score by Franz Waxman. It's also one of the few films to receive nominations in all four acting categories: In addition to Swanson and Holden, Nancy Olson and Erich von Stroheim received supporting player nominations, but none of them won.