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Even though i loved Gloria Swanson in the movie Sunset Blvd, i would like to ask which silent film actress would you have liked to see play that role if they made a second one say in the late 1970s when they were old and would be really convincing. My choices would be Pola Negri and Mary Miles Minter. Pola seemed like a diva to the end and after the lost of her career i would have liked to see Minter play a role like that.

GARBO!

Well, naturally, I would have loved to have seen Theda Bara as Norma Desmond, but having seen photographs of her in her later years, I wonder if she would have had the stamina for the shoot. Add to that that it would have been her first talkie and her first film in over 20 years, and I 'd bet she'd never even have signed a contract! Which, of course, is why I think Wilder and Brackett didn't approach her (if they even remembered her at all; the legend is that they'd even forgotten Gloria Swanson was still around, though I find that hard to believe).

It's hard to imagine who would have turned in a better performance, though I do wonder what Lillian Gish might have made of the off-kilter Miss Desmond.

I could be wrong, but I seem to remember that Mary Pickford was asked to do it.
That would have made the film above and beyond creepy. It would have been too much but I'd love to have seen it.

From what I've read, Wilder and Brackett asked Mae West (good God!), Pickford and Negri before somebody said "what about Gloria Swanson?"

From what I've heard they'd overlooked Swanson because she looked too good. Swanson was very UN-Desmond in her own life, very active and anything but reclusive. In later years she went with the whole nostalgia thing because it paid the bills.

They talked to Mae West also but she wanted to write the script....

Swanson was just perfect as Norma Desmond. She basically CREATED that character.

Pola Negri would have taken the thing into a different direction, being foreign and too exotic. I can think of Norma Desmond as American only.

Garbo was foreign too and her cool and silently suffering temperament wouldn't fit to Norma's fits and extraversion. The acting she became famous for was subtle, enigmatic and understating rather than the grandiose Desmond-style over-acting. Same goes for Marlene Dietrich.

Mary Miles Minter's fame hadn't survived the silent age unlike Gloria's, so there would have been less of an aura around her that is so important for the part.

Pickford & Gish were too cute in appearance.

Mae West was basically a man in women's clothes and had too much of a funny face. Whenever she was pretentious and pompous she always was - unlike Norma - ironic too, and I don't think her acting range would have been sufficient for a serious part like this. To think of her as Norma feels a bit like Harold Lloyd playing the butler.

Theda Bara and Mae Murray werent good enough actresses to pull it off.

Clara Bow's screen persona was too far removed from the De-Mille-ish camp of Norma Desmond.

If the film had been remade in the Seventies, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford could have pulled it off, but they were too closely associated with 30s and 40s talking pictures, and besides they had done the shtick before in WHATEVER HAPPENED...

I agree with Einar, are we allowed to say Swanson again, or is it cheating?

Swanson was total perfection in one of the great screen performances....

Oooooh!!! CRAWFORD, PLEASE.

They should have used Anna Q. Nillson and had Swanson at the card table!

If the picture had been remade in the 60's they'd have pumped up the glitz and had at least one party scene with a room full of silent star cameos.

The Swanson/Von Stroheim/De Mille combo was just perfect for the film, and their real-life connections and intertwined histories - however far from the truth the film actually was - adds a frisson you couldn't have reproduced, not in the 70's, certainly not now...

My only quibble is that SB was made too soon--if it was filmed around 1965 or 1970 it would've really been a more evocative distance from the silent era. Swanson was barely 50 years old in the movie (and it was no different than if a 2010 setting was harking back to circa 1990. Hardly a glaring jump into the past). However, in a 1965 version we wouldn't have had DeMille, Stroheim and a host of others.

I can see a modern remake though with Doris Day, recalling the heyday of the 1950s!

Well I think the 20-year gap in SB is just perfect. By the 1960s the gap would have made Norma ancient, plus by the 1960s we had a 20s craze (on TV the Roaring Twenties, songs like Winchester Cathedral) that would have made Norma a ridiculous figure. Norma has a comic side but she is basically a tragic figure.

The technological change that rendered Norma redundant wouldn't have worked in the 60s because the silent stars were just that much more forgotten.

In 1950 Swanson was totally believable as a forgotten silent star but also as a woman in love. By the 60s it would not have worked. Any remake, including the musical, has to take place in 1950 to work.

Quantitive time is relative here. The gap between 1930 and 1950 certainly was far greater in terms of cultural change than the one between 1990 and 2010.

Einar the Lonely wrote:Swanson was just perfect as Norma Desmond. She basically CREATED that character.

Pola Negri would have taken the thing into a different direction, being foreign and too exotic. I can think of Norma Desmond as American only.

Garbo was foreign too and her cool and silently suffering temperament wouldn't fit to Norma's fits and extraversion. The acting she became famous for was subtle, enigmatic and understating rather than the grandiose Desmond-style over-acting. Same goes for Marlene Dietrich.

Mary Miles Minter's fame hadn't survived the silent age unlike Gloria's, so there would have been less of an aura around her that is so important for the part.

Pickford & Gish were too cute in appearance.

Mae West was basically a man in women's clothes and had too much of a funny face. Whenever she was pretentious and pompous she always was - unlike Norma - ironic too, and I don't think her acting range would have been sufficient for a serious part like this. To think of her as Norma feels a bit like Harold Lloyd playing the butler.

Theda Bara and Mae Murray werent good enough actresses to pull it off.

Clara Bow's screen persona was too far removed from the De-Mille-ish camp of Norma Desmond.

If the film had been remade in the Seventies, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford could have pulled it off, but they were too closely associated with 30s and 40s talking pictures, and besides they had done the shtick before in WHATEVER HAPPENED...

All this. Best post of the thread. Well damn said.

Good points, all. It's fun though to make these kind of comparisons, and to be grateful that Billy Wilder captured the Hollywood of 1950, when the vanished silent film era was perhaps more of a mysterious memory than it is now, given all the research and rediscovery. It's hard to imagine that for many an aging silent star back then, how many ever got to see their work again?

Two other silent actresses come to mind who might have given Swanson a run for her money as Norma: Dorothy Mackaill and Betty Compson.

Mackaill made her last film in 1937 but returned in 1953 for a TV appearance. Compson retired from films in 1948.

While neither was the level of star as Pickford, Gish, Negri, Bow, West, Crawford, Davis, Dietrich, Garbo they both had the acting chops, especially Compson.

That said, I still think Swanson was absolutely perfect.

I don't think anyone has mentioned Norma Talmadge. Seems to me that she would be a great choice for many reasons, although I think that Gloria was still the best pick.

I was going to pose an alternate question; 'If Sunset Boulevard were re-made and re-imagined today what aspect of cinema would be featured? Silent is too far gone. Even the 50's would be 20-30 years too late. Sunset B was made in 1950, silent era died only twenty years earlier. So that leaves us 1975-1980 to work with on this re-telling.
Now you see the reason I shouldn't have posted this question as nothing happened in those years to base a nostalgic look on the past.
Maybe Blacksploitation?

silent-partner wrote:I was going to pose an alternate question; 'If Sunset Boulevard were re-made and re-imagined today what aspect of cinema would be featured? Silent is too far gone. Even the 50's would be 20-30 years too late. Sunset B was made in 1950, silent era died only twenty years earlier. So that leaves us 1975-1980 to work with on this re-telling.
Now you see the reason I shouldn't have posted this question as nothing happened in those years to base a nostalgic look on the past.
Maybe Blacksploitation?

"We didn't need 3D. We had implants then."

Blaxploitation is still considered cool today... and Pam Grier did come back in JACKIE BROWN. So do glamrock stars occasionally.

I guess this question shows that the silent film setting was crucial for the story. It was not only the technical advancement, it was also the cultural change and WWII that made these 20 years prior to SUNSET BLVD. seem like an abyss of time. I mean 3D aside, technically cinema hasnt much progressed since the late 20s (color + sound, thats it).

Another aspect that is important: the story wouldn't work if Norma Desmond was a man, say some agened Valentino. Life is far crueller to female beauty, and to female stardom.

I could imagine a very cruel story based upon the fate of Whitney Houston, which dates her earliest success even further back into the 80s, and 25 years later, now a wreck of drug abuse etc, she still clings Baby-Jane-style to these days when she was a beautiful young beloved pop star .. well you get the picture. And the 80s being faithfully recreated in flashbacks as they did with 60s in MAD MEN. She could be shown playing cards (or Pacman ^^) with Boy George, Cindy Lauper, Rick Astley, Limahl in his 50s singing "Never Ending Story" for her birthday party, still showing that horrible haircut etc.

One male exception I can think of would be an alternative history Elvis. He hasnt died in 1977, merely retired Howard-Hughes-style, faded into obscurity and got stuck in his fat-Las-Vegas-period. He became even fatter and reclusive, like Marlon Brando. By, say early Nineties he has been forgotten, and the Elvis-cult as we know today never came into existence. And this is when the story starts....

Maybe the key to a re-imgaination is that everything would have to be exaggerated, alternative-history-style... in real life all these have-been popstars still manage to hang around somehow...

If Norma was a man, the story would work as a gay drama queen piece... but that wold probably raise far too many angles to deal with.... and we'd be right back to having Mae West as Norma.

Come think of it, even silent movies are considered to be cooler today than they were in 1950...

I guess this question shows that the silent film setting was crucial for the story. It was not only the technical advancement, it was also the cultural change and WWII that made these 20 years prior to SUNSET BLVD. seem like an abyss of time. I mean 3D aside, technically cinema hasnt much progressed since the late 20s (color + sound, thats it).

Yeah, It was really a huge cultural shift that made those stars, and their fabulous wealth if they still had it after the Depression, and their Victorian-era personas in the era of the bobby-soxer, seem so far removed from the postwar era, even though in years it wasn't all that much-- Swanson was quite a bit younger in Sunset Boulevard than still-current stars like Meryl Streep and Al Pacino are now.

The only cultural shift that even comes close to comparing is the late 60s, when a whole class of Hollywood stars (the Tab Hunter-Sandra Dee types) suddenly seemed too white and square for the era of Pacino and DeNiro and had to go into television or retirement. Even so, plenty of pre-hippie-era stars managed to update their personas, more than really did in the transition to sound, I'd say. The silent Ben-Hur was done by 1933, but the sound one kept plugging away into old age.

I really think the silent film angle has to stay and the story just doesn't work unless it's set around 1950.

Still awaiting the hugely underrated musical version to be made into a film. Even here, Norma has been pushed back to 60-something (read over 60) with stars like Barbra Streisand, Glenn Close, and Liza Minnelli supposedly circling the star role. We shall see. The songs "With One Look" and "As if We Never Said Good-bye" are worth the price of admission.

I saw Glenn Close as Norma in LA and she was electrifying. I've never seen so much arm hair standing on end!

drednm wrote:If Norma was a man, the story would work as a gay drama queen piece... but that wold probably raise far too many angles to deal with.... and we'd be right back to having Mae West as Norma.

That's a fucking funny post is what that is.

Einar the Lonely wrote: One male exception I can think of would be an alternative history Elvis. He hasnt died in 1977, merely retired Howard-Hughes-style, faded into obscurity and got stuck in his fat-Las-Vegas-period. He became even fatter and reclusive, like Marlon Brando. By, say early Nineties he has been forgotten, and the Elvis-cult as we know today never came into existence. And this is when the story starts....

It's not a good movie, but have you seen "Bubba-Ho-Tep"? Elvis faked his death and has been working as an Elvis impersonator. Bruce Campbell is a riot in the part.

rollot24 wrote:

Einar the Lonely wrote: One male exception I can think of would be an alternative history Elvis. He hasnt died in 1977, merely retired Howard-Hughes-style, faded into obscurity and got stuck in his fat-Las-Vegas-period. He became even fatter and reclusive, like Marlon Brando. By, say early Nineties he has been forgotten, and the Elvis-cult as we know today never came into existence. And this is when the story starts....

It's not a good movie, but have you seen "Bubba-Ho-Tep"? Elvis faked his death and has been working as an Elvis impersonator. Bruce Campbell is a riot in the part.

Yeah, its fun!