Blake Edwards

CHAPTER 11 Sunset (1988)

Written and Directed by Blake Edwards

Sunset appeared at a time of intense creativity in Edwards’s career but also a time in which his work received little critical acclaim or box-office success. Although a rich and complex film, it is difficult to categorize since it moves in so many different generic directions. Its elasticity embodies the declaration by the movie director in S.O.B. (1981): “Every time I think I know where ‘it’s at,’ it’s always somewhere else.” When we visited the set of Sunset, Lindsey Jones, the film’s publicist, told us that he was frustrated because he didn’t know what genre to call the film in its promotion and asked us what we thought. We didn’t know either. IMDb describes the film’s genre as “Crime, Mystery, Thriller, Western.” And, it does include that genre mix and more, such as films about Hollywood and filmmaking.

The Western component of Sunset recalls the beginnings of Edwards’s film career since his first two films as writer and producer in the late 1940s were Westerns. Furthermore, in 1971 he had returned to the genre with Wild Rovers. But Sunset is clearly not a Western in the classical sense since it is set in 1929 Los Angeles, long after the era of the Wild West had passed. It is also a film about Hollywood and the industrial dynamics and politics of filmmaking. This links it with such major Edwards’s mid-career comedies as The Party and S.O.B. All three films include a character threatening another with what for ...