“I am big, it’s the pictures that got small!”

If you know one thing about this movie, it’s that line, which is played on like every single “Classic Hollywood” reel on Oscar nights and anywhere else. So I’ve always assumed that this was sort of a movie like Singin’ in the Rain, only less comedic and musical, where the main character is finding it difficult to get new roles and having to come to terms with her diminishing role in a new Hollywood.

But in fact, no, this is later in the E! True Hollywood Story arc, and Norma Desmond (played by a 53-year-old Gloria Swanson, who hadn’t made a feature film in something like a decade and had to be lured out of retirement for this role) has actually been out of work for quite some time, and is living in a run-down mansion that is effectively a shrine she’s built to her faded glory. The plot kicks in when a down-on-his-luck screenwriter pops in for coincidental reasons, and she ends up turning him into a kept man, to his eventual disgust.

The movie borders on the melodramatic at times — and crosses right on over that border at other times — making Desmond’s character seem absurd and cartoonishly villainous or pathetic. But then the movie undercuts that with sympathetic moments, like when she goes to the Paramount Studios lot, on the mistaken belief that they want her to star in a new movie. It’s a ridiculous notion that she can only hold because she’s living in delusion… and yet, when she gets on that lot, long-time security guards and cameramen recognize her instantly and treat her with the kind of fawning adoration she once merited; and when she meets up with Cecil B. DeMille (played by DeMille himself), even though he kind of embarrassedly shuffles her out of there as quickly as possible with noncommittal words, he really does have a real respect for who she is and what she’s accomplished and the work they’d done together in the past.

There’s a certain poignancy to another scene, where she’s playing bridge with her old friends. The younger screenwriter refers to them as “the waxworks,” because of how old they all are; unmentioned in the movie is that one of them is Buster Keaton — who is of course a legend, but who, in the year when this movie was released, was making a television show for local Los Angeles TV (which later tried and failed to go national). There’s also a bunch of industry-insider stuff that went over my head: The guy who plays her butler, who in the movie was Norma Desmond’s director in the silent film days, is played by… the guy who was Gloria Swanson’s director in the silent film days, and who was himself once viewed as one of the great ones, right up there with DeMille, but whose career and reputation had fallen off by the time of this film. It’s almost painfully on the nose.

So that whole faded glory thing is obviously the main theme running through the movie, but the main character is actually the screenwriter, and in a way this is really his story, about failure and giving up and compromising your ideals for a bit of comfort; about the gap between the lives people want to live and the lives they settle for living.

It’s a little corny at times, but mostly it’s bleak as hell but gently tender. I didn’t expect this one to be as good as it ended up being.