Sunset Boulevard (1950): Special Collector's Edition
1.33:1
Dolby Digital 2.0
Paramount, $24.99

Preview audiences are sometimes right. That was the case in 1950, when Paramount sneaked Sunset Boulevard in the swanky Chicago suburb of Evanston, and the audience uniformly rejected the film's opening sequence. In it, the recently deceased Joe Gillis (William Holden) is wheeled into a morgue full of bodies, the lights go down, and then the corpses come to life and chat with one another about how they died. Today such a scene might play on Six Feet Under, but in suburban Illinois in 1950, it was a disaster. Laughter erupted and walkouts ensued, and a crestfallen Billy Wilder went back to the drawing board.

Wilder and Sunset Boulevard co-writers Charles Brackett and D.M. Marshman Jr. subsequently crafted an opening sequence that could be a textbook example of how to begin a movie - thanks to the ingenuity of John F. Seitz, ASC, it features one of the most remarkable shots in American film - and with that, one of the bleakest motion pictures ever produced by a major studio was born. Brimming with ironies both great and small, Sunset Boulevard is a sardonic tale about Tinseltown's least celebrated and most desperate inhabitants: the has-beens and the wannabes. In the former category is silent-film star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), whose career was sidelined by the coming of sound; in the latter category is B-movie screenwriter Joe Gillis (Holden), who is considerably younger than Norma but no less jaded. When fate literally brings Gillis to Desmond's door, he finally gets the job he's been scraping for: doctoring her incoherent script for Salome, which she sees as the perfect vehicle for her "return."

Sunset Boulevard was honored with 11 Academy Award nominations - including one in every acting category and nods for cinematography, art direction, story/screenplay, director and picture - and it won three. (The Academy favored another tale of grasping ambition, All About Eve, with the Best Picture Oscar, and Seitz lost the black-and-white cinematography statuette to Robert Krasker, who won for The Third Man.) Sunset Boulevard's numerous accolades made it one of the prizes in Paramount's collection, but when the studio inaugurated a preservation program in the mid-1980s, the staff was dismayed to discover that all that remained of the film was a damaged dupe negative. Paramount was able to digitally restore the film only recently (see AC March '03), and the result is this DVD.

The blessings and shortcomings of using digital technology to restore older motion-picture images are clear on this disc. On one hand, it feels like a great gift to watch Sunset Boulevard without spotting any noticeable imperfections, but on the other, it's strange indeed to see the film's all-important shadows robbed of life and nuance. Gillis describes Norma Desmond's mansion, where most of the film's action transpires, as "crumbling apart in slow motion." It's a monument to the forgotten, and on film the shadows in which Desmond dwells appear to have a life of their own; in the digital version they are clean, still and cold.

Paramount has assembled some noteworthy supplements on this disc: footage (minus sound) and script pages for the film's original opening sequence; a nifty "Hollywood Location Map," which illustrates how well the film's milieu reflected Hollywood at that time; a tribute to Franz Waxman, the movie's Oscar-winning composer; and interviews with Paramount producer A.C. Lyles, actress Nancy Olson (who plays the film's ingenue), film critic Andrew Sarris, and author Ed Sikov, who penned On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder. Less noteworthy is Sikov's negligible audio commentary, in which he tends to repeat key lines for dramatic emphasis and make points such as, "This is black comedy."

- Rachael Bosley