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The hero as operator
WILLIAM HOLDEN
William H olden, Gloria Swanson, in Sunset Boulevard, the film which rescued his career.
In 1949, William Holden told an interviewer that he liked to make three kinds of movies — Westerns, "because they keep me outside, give me lots of exercise"; comedies, "because they're the ones that bring money into the box office"; and serious dramas, because "I hope maybe some day a critic will spot me and say 'Aha, that's the boy!' "
Discovered in a student dramatics group at South Pasadena Junior College, he became a star in 1939 as the fighter-fiddler in Golden Boy, made a few pictures that established him as a promising Boy Next Door, then went into the Army. After the war, he played a succession of similar parts and found that he was just another standard hero, indistinguishable from William Lundigan or Dennis O'Keefe or any of a dozen other profiles whose names are already half forgotten. But a year after his somewhat wistful statement, critics, producers and public were saying "Aha," because Billy Wilder had cast him as the gigolo to Gloria Swanson's aging movie queen in Sunset Boulevard. Four years later he won an Oscar for his
tough, funny con man in Wilder's Stalag 17. Ever since, he has been ranked as a superstar, one of those who disdain to accept "just money."
Like Peck, his off-screen demeanor is that of a bright young corporation president, whose product is himself. But there is an edge of anger, or perhaps just wildness (he does his own stunts) about him. One shrewd friend has said, "He's the typical American boy who wanted to become a slob — and never did." Adds Wilder, "Only actors who are ashamed to act are worth their salt. . . . Anybody who tears himself to shreds being hammy, I suspect. That's why I'm fond of Holden. He dies every time he has to act. . . . He's beyond acting. He is there. It is as simple as that. You never doubt or question what he is." Holden, thus became the heir, in the fifties, to the mantle of the great American leading men. Salty yet urbane, he was especially effective in a time which likes a soupqon of cynicism in the heroic mix.
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