William Holden would have turned one hundred on April 17 2018, and we thought a few words were in order to mark his centennial. Holden, a product of the studio system, is one of the few actors who made enduring contributions to both the Old Hollywood and the New. And in a handful of those earlier performances he bravely played compromised, imperfect characters – the kind of risky roles that at the time, image-conscious stars would turn down – but that would come to characterize the seventies film.
After ten-plus years of paying his dues in an active but unspectacular career, Holden broke through with his performance on Billy Wilder’s masterpiece, Sunset Boulevard. Playing a kept man, as Roger Ebert observed, “Holden projects subtle weakness and self-loathing into the role.” Holden followed Sunset with the very fine but less ambitious film noir Union Station and a few other productions before soaring again with another compromised character in Wilder’s Stalag 17, winning an academy award for his portrayal of a cynical, unheroic prisoner of war. Otto Preminger, who also appeared in Stalag, then directed him in The Moon is Blue, ushering in an era during which Holden was one of the most recognizable and sought after leading men in Hollywood.
By the late 1950s, however, a run of indifferent films and the effects of a formidable drinking habit dimmed his once-luminous start power, a slow fade that continued through the 1960s. But against any expectation, Holden would re-emerge as an essential New Hollywood figure, in mature roles that defended old values under siege—a venerated spokesman of the best of the good old days in an era more generally committed to exposing and rejecting those myths. In Sam Peckinpah’s landmark revisionist western,The Wild Bunch, Holden is certainly not a “good guy”—we love the way Peckinpah synchronizes the freeze-frame of his director’s credit with outlaw Holden’s line, “if they move . . . kill ‘em!” But his character is also the enforcer of a declining moral code, which he articulates in the film’s key speech: “We’re going to stick together, just like it used to be. When you side with a man, you stay with him, and if you can’t do that you’re like some animal . . . you’re finished.”
Holden would bring the best of the old guard to two more notable New Hollywood films, Breezy and Network. The former, a relatively obscure film (the third movie directed by Clint Eastwood, written by Jo Heims), is a thoughtful intergenerational romance that emphasizes the hypocrisy of the older generation, as Holden’s character is trapped by the rigid social norms of his cohort and class. Network, one of the great films of the seventies, features Holden’s finest performance. An overstuffed film of many themes, one of them is, again, the old values and the new, and the movie is on Holden’s side, as when he lectures to Diana (Faye Dunaway): “I feel guilty and conscious-stricken and all those things that you think sentimental but which my generation called simple human decency.”
Network would prove to be Holden’s last great role, though he would team up one last time with Billy Wilder for Fedora and make his final appearance in Blake Edward’s S.O.B., after which decades of hard living finally took their inevitable toll. More than thirty-five years later, he remains an invariably welcome presence on the screen: always reliable, often exceptional.
Sunset Boulevard
Sunset Boulevard (with Erich von Stroheim)
The Wild Bunch
Breezy
Network (with Faye Dunaway)