This column features a weekly pick, usually from one of the independent cinemas, of a film that — because of age, color or length — might be in the viewer’s blind spot when he or she goes through the week’s cinema listings.
While currently screening landmark films from 1960s French cinema, including Jules et Jim and Pierrot le Fou, with treats for fans of Francois Truffaut starting next week, the Bio Ponrepo cinema (Bartolomějská 11, Prague 1, Bio-ponrepo.cz) is allowing audiences to experience a magical trip down memory lane with Billy Wilder’s classic Sunset Blvd., from 1950.
Though less popular than the evergreen Marilyn Monroe–vehicle Some Like it Hot, the film’s insightful and incisive look at post-war Hollywood affords the viewer an opportunity to look past the gloss and the makeup, and get a real sense of the place where dreams sometimes come true, but not without a hearty dose of nightmares mixed in.
It would be two more years before Singin’ in the Rain would take on the movie-making business in a more vibrant light, but Sunset Blvd. hits the spot for anyone who wants to get a sometimes magical, sometimes realistic, look at the place where dreams are born, when heartache can always be found close by.
In the very first scene, the narrator tells us that the body we are looking at, floating in he swimming pool of a lush mansion in the Hollywood Hills, is his, before we cut to many months earlier when this guy – a screenwriter – is still hard at work trying to sell his screenplay to the executives. The rest of the film sees him come in contact with a former silent movie star, Norma Desmond, and recognize this friendship as ultimately destructive.
The film is a lucid treatment of the time and place, permitting access to figures such as Cecil B. Demille and dealing with important issues such as ageing in Hollywood and the workings of the industry behind the scenes. Shot as a film noir, the film is stylish and class and a necessary must-see.
Sunset Blvd. is screened in English with Czech subtitles at Bio Ponrepo Tuesday, Feb. 7, at 14:45.
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