The more I watch this, the more unseemly it gets. On my first viewing it was just a very, very good movie. But with each revisit, its inherent ickiness becomes more and more overt. Gloria Swanson is absolutely electric in an unhinged, over-the-top performance that shouldn’t work at all but it works in every single scene, without fail. Her desperate ambitions to return to glory are the heart of this thing, but it’s now clear to me that the script is mostly a reflection on the self-hatred of William Holden’s down-on-his-luck screenwriter. 

The general seediness of Desmond’s decaying estate, while never particularly wholesome when I first watched it, now is just such an obvious death trap, it’s unmistakable that Holden’s Joe Gillis is just looking for trouble. From the moment he wanders onto the premises, he’s drawn to the misery, the desperation, the codependency like a moth to a flame. The signals are plain to see and a sane person would immediately walk away, but it all just activates his self-loathing so precisely, he’s helpless before it. And the revelation that Max was Desmond’s first husband has a sudden, putrid stink to it that’s disturbing to its core, and yet even that isn’t enough to shake Holden. His one redemptive relationship with Nancy Olson’s aspiring screenwriter is tragic at its core too; he can’t see himself as anything but poison even when someone is falling in love with him. And the climactic moment, when he’s shot, staggering towards the pool, Holden makes a futile gesture to grab hold of his typewriter, a sad acknowledgement of how his soul has become irretrievable. 

Surprisingly, this wasn’t my pick for the evening. It was my 15-year old daughter who had been eager to watch this.