“I didn’t know you were planning a comeback,” the youngish screenwriter says. And the long-ago movie star spits back, “I hate that word. It’s a return, a return to the millions of people who have never forgiven me for deserting the screen.” As silent-film relic Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder’s 1950 Hollywood horror movie, Swanson captured all the egotism and insecurity of a queen forgotten by her subjects. Swanson was only 50 at the time, younger than Kim Cattrall is now, but people got older earlier back then. She had effectively been out of movies since the early ’30s and was a huge star only in the silent era: different medium, vanished language. The script is a Bartlett’s of memorable quotations about old-time star quality (“I am big — it’s the pictures that got small”; “We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces!”; “All right, Mr. De Mille, I’m ready for my close up”). Swanson speaks with a tart rhetorical flourish that finds the showbiz truth in all these lines. Especially this one: “The stars are ageless, aren’t they?”
In the ’40s, back when he was Young Blue Eyes, the actor-singer had enjoyed movie success with MGM, especially costarring with Gene Kelly in films such as Anchors Aweigh, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, and On the Town. But by the early ’50s his screen career was hurting; in 1951′s Double Dynamite he was billed third, after Jane Russell and Groucho Marx. He fought to get the secondary, non-singing role of Maggio, the edgy soldier in 1953′s From Here to Eternity, because he knew it could rewire his Hollywood cred as a dramatic star. Did The Godfather get it right? Was a horse head involved in the casting discussions? We’re sworn to omerta. Whatever happened, though, Eli Wallach was out and Sinatra was in. He won a Supporting Actor Oscar and, after that, it was Hollywood that had to do the begging.
As we prepare for the Game of Thrones finale, we recognize Joffrey and nine other baddies who showed us that terrible, horrible things can come in small packages
