Twenty-five years before the hard-bitten Hollywood tale Sunset Boulevard, Swanson played a small-town waitress with a dream to act
Gloria Swanson’s most enduring role is the imperious, bitterly eclipsed screen queen Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. But to fully appreciate Desmond’s faded glory in Billy Wilder’s 1950 noir classic, you need to see Swanson’s silent films. Stage Struck – directed 25 years earlier by Allan Dwan – both revels in and pastiches the visual opulence of the silent era, with a plot that reflects on the adulation of glamorous actresses. It also features a brief chance to see Swanson as a glittering Salome, the role coveted by Desmond for her misbegotten comeback.
The Salome sequence comes in Stage Struck’s tongue-in-cheek prologue, filmed in an entrancing early version of Technicolor, offering assorted scenes from the life of “the greatest actress of all time”. On stage, we see Swanson bombarded with bouquets by ecstatic audiences; on the street she is mobbed by an adoring public desperate for a brush with stardom. At a lavish banquet, she suddenly steps into the role of Salome and ascends the stairs of a temple, returning with a platter bearing the head of John the Baptist.
