Sunset Boulevard

A classic for the must to be seen list.

Gloria Swanson is magnificent.

One of the great films of Hollywood's golden age.

This movie is really special. Not only does it show us a lot about the world of Hollywood during its golden age, but it also reveals a lot about the actors' egos, vanities and their titanic struggles to preserve their careers and stay in the limelight. Brilliantly directed by Billy Wilder, it is considered by many to be one of the great movie classics, combining entertainment, artistic value and cultural relevance. In 1951, it won three Oscars (Best Screenplay, Best Art Direction in a Black and White Film, Best Comic Film Soundtrack) and could perfectly have won one more, for Best Actress. But awards like these are never completely fair, especially in years so fertile for good films.

Starting with the iconic scene of the dead man in the pool, the film intrigues us, and curiosity grips us, as the film shows how it all happened, introducing us to an average screenwriter who struggles to write a successful script that can leverage his career. He owes money, is in serious trouble and takes advantage of the opportunity to earn some easy money at the expense of a retired silent film actress, who decides to hire him to revise and type a script, written by herself and designed to mark her return. The script is mediocre, and he knows that the film will never happen, but he is coerced into silence, becoming the privileged eyewitness of the former star's gradual loss of lucidity. Of course, things get complicated as he loses his individual freedom and becomes more dependent on the whims and desires of his mistress.

Despite the fiction, the film is based a lot on several loose true facts: one of them, the most obvious, is the fall of several actors in the course of the transition from silent to talking films. There were great actors who looked magnificent on screen and had great physical and facial expression, but who didn't survive this transition due to things as prosaic as a poor English fluency or a strange acce...

"Gillis" (William Holden) is a down-at-heel script writer who is struggling to keep his head above water. Not having had any successes for a while, his car is about to be repossessed and his erstwhile boss "Sheldrake" (Fred Clark) has nothing for him. On the run from the pursuing repo men, he turns his car into the drive of a decaying old mansion. Hiding his car in the garage, he is mistaken by the house's owner for an undertaker - she has a small matter that needs attending too! Realising her error she demands he leave, but not before he mentions what he does for a living. She has a script. Hundreds of pages of script - and she offers him a job, champagne and caviar if he will edit and refine it so "Norma Desmond" (Gloria Swanson), a retired former silent movie star, can present it to her favourite director Cecil B DeMille and restart her glorious career. Initially just seeing dollar signs, he agrees and what now ensues is a masterfully crafted story of love, dependency, ambition and delusion in which Swanson absolutely shines. It's clear to us from the outset that her grasp on reality is somewhat limited, and but for her dedicated factotum "Max" (Erich von Stroheim) she might well have fallen victim to her own depression many years ago. Holden is also on solid form here, his initial selfishness starts to morph into something more, he begins to care for this woman whose head is increasingly in the clouds, and upon whom she is becoming more reliant. The dialogue is delivered via a mix of Holden's quite honest narrative and the conversations between the characters delivering some of the best lines in cinema - "I'm still big - it's the world that's got smaller!". The mental decline and instability of "Desmond" is expertly displayed here by a star who new a thing or two herself about the silent film scene, and who brings her facial expressions, her mannerisms and her generally star-studded demeanour to bear really effectively as the audience gradually realise that noth...

Ace! 'Sunset Boulevard' is a splendid flick from 1950.

I will note that I found the middle to be ever so slightly less interesting than the beginning and ending, though even so overall I most definitely enjoyed watching it. Love the dialogue, the score is excellent too. William Holden and Gloria Swanson are tremendous together onscreen, in what is a supremely well told story.

IMHO...This is a straight up Horror film. A demented, faded star of the Silent era takes in a down on his luck writer... and basically keeps him as a boy toy/hostage. She has a creepy attraction to the much younger man. Her house and butler are straight out of Hammer Film.

That being said... I love this film. The casting is great. William Holden gives one of his best performances ever. Gloria Swanson plays deranged wonderfully. And Von Stroheim is a brilliant bit of casting. You get the feeling he would do anything for his employer... including murder.

The writing is crisp...Billy Wilder's direction is amongst some of his best.

For those who resist B&W films... put aside your prejudice and watch this film. It is excellent.

Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard is a masterpiece of black comedy and savage Hollywood critique, a film so dark and so funny that it becomes something singular. Everything about it is wonderful: the performances, the direction, the audacity of its premise, the cruelty of its vision. It's a film about delusion and exploitation, about an industry that devours its own, and it tells that story with a viciousness that never stops being entertaining. Seventy-five years later, it remains one of the greatest films ever made about the movies, and one of the finest examples of how merciless art can be when it's done right.

Joe Gillis (William Holden) is a struggling screenwriter, broke and desperate, fleeing repo men when he stumbles into the decaying Sunset Boulevard mansion of Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), a former silent film star who has retreated into total delusion. She believes she's still a star, that the world is waiting for her return, that the studio will call any day. Joe becomes her kept man, hired to polish a deranged screenplay for her nonexistent comeback. Her devoted butler, Max (Erich von Stroheim), enables every fantasy. The film's structure is audacious: Joe narrates the end of the film even after his dead body is removed from the scene, a voice from beyond the grave that somehow makes perfect sense in a film this extreme.

Gloria Swanson's performance is radical. She expresses everything through her face and eyes, exactly as a silent film star would, because that's what she was. Wilder cast her knowing the meta-commentary would be inescapable: Swanson, largely washed up by 1950, playing a woman destroyed by Hollywood's indifference to aging stars. The role could have been camp, could have been pitiful, but Swanson plays it with total commitment and a kind of fierce intelligence. She knows Norma is ridiculous, but she never condescends to her. Norma's gestures are theatrical, overwrought, absurd; she moves through the world as if cameras are always...