The 1950 masterpiece Clint Eastwood called the greatest movie ever made: “Two different styles”
What is the greatest movie ever made? It’s a simple question with an impossible answer, because everyone has their own opinion. Don’t tell that to Clint Eastwood, though, since he knows what it is.
Of course, that’s just, like, his opinion, man, but the major difference between some lad on the street naming their pick for the finest feature ever made and Clint Eastwood naming his pick for the finest feature ever made is that he is, in fact, Clint Eastwood, one of Hollywood’s foremost living legends.
The greatest actor-turned-director of them all, an icon on both sides of the camera, and a figure who’ll remain carved into the industry’s history for generations to come, he’s been around the block enough to come to a pretty definitive conclusion about which film deserves to be remembered as celluloid’s magnum opus.
Then again, and in the interest of fairness, the four-time Academy Award winner was left almost pissing his pants at Tropic Thunder, and a lot of folks don’t really care for Ben Stiller’s blockbuster industry satire. He also mocked Stanley Kubrick for touting The Shining as one of the scariest movies of all time, even though you wouldn’t have to look too hard to find someone willing to agree.
Still, he’s Clint fucking Eastwood, and he can say what he likes, and if he wants to call Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard “my favourite film” and celebrate it for its artistic merits, then he can. “Two different styles,” he offered, explaining why he loves the 1950 masterpiece so much. “The style of the silent movie actress, and then with William Holden’s character, someone more contemporary. The two styles working so well together.”
Even if you wanted to try to argue with Dirty Harry himself, which you’d be entitled to do because cinema is a subjective medium, at the very least, it’s widely accepted for any number of good and completely valid reasons that if Sunset Boulevard isn’t the best of them all, it’s definitely right up there as one of the shining examples of the ‘Golden Age’ and an influential, inimitable example of film noir at its best.
As a filmmaker, he’s also got a favourite shot from the flick, which also happens to be one of its most iconic. “The only real close-up you remember is at the end, with Norma Desmond saying, ‘I’m ready for my close-up, Mr DeMille,'” the star elaborated. “She comes right into it. If you’d shot the entire film in close-ups, that ending shot wouldn’t have been effective at all.”
Eastwood’s favourites from his own back catalogue span westerns, war films, and biopics, but Wilder’s monochromatic marvel remains, in his eyes, the one that every other auteur has been trying and failing to beat for over 75 years. The three-time Oscar-winning and 11-time nominated classic has endured as one of its era’s shining cinematic lights, and a century from now, it’ll be held in exactly the same esteem.
If he caught it the first time around, which he probably did, seeing as he’d have been 20 years old during its initial theatrical run, then Eastwood’s love of Sunset Boulevard long predates his career and has stayed strong for three-quarters of a century.
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