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What a fantastic classic. It was perfectly crafted and made even small melodramatic scenes intriguing. There were really bland parts of the story to be sure, but with a razor sharp script and great delivery by the actors it gave an edge to what could have been a very dull plot. The script gives an amazing depth to the characters themselves. They personify deep themes about acceptance. Whether this be in the form of an aging actress, or a writer struggling to break into show business, or a woman looking for love, or even a butler who is just wanting to be a support each character subtly illuminates that person inside of us all trying to find a sense of purpose.

The directing is a different subject entirely when talking about this film. Every scene is absolutely gorgeous in its own right. The angles and the lighting Wilder is able to utilize succeeds in being beautifully shot, and yet not detracting from what it is filming.

I could give this a higher score if it were only for more flushing out of the main character. I felt that every single character in the film contained depth and you were able to look into their psyche. Unfortunately that did not happen with the most important character in the film. I didn’t have nearly as much connection to the person I was following through the story as I did with everyone else.

This film is completely deserving of its classic status and is an important watch for anyone who enjoys a psychoanalytical, and gorgeous film noire.

This gripping and chilling film noir is visually stunning and superbly made, scripted and acted – particulary from the star of the movie, Gloria Swanson who puts in a terrific performance that will enthral and terrify you.

Swanson plays Norma Desmond, a faded Hollywood star who has failed to make the transition from silent movies to talkies. A chance encounter with desperate for work script writer Joe Gillis (William Holden) offers the pair a relationship of mutual benefit when Desmond hires Gillis to write the script for her big comeback movie. Openly challenging the darkest side of Hollywood, the resulting path of the plot is a fascinating one which was in many ways reflected in real life. Cecil B. DeMille and Hedda Hopper play themselves and Eric Von Stronheim, who plays the butler, directed Swanson in real life. I would recommend you read the Wikipedia article on this movie after you have seen it to really enhance the viewing of this stunning masterpiece by the same director and cinematographer who brought us the seminal Double Indemnity.

1950 | 110m | BW | USA | Showbiz Drama, Satire | TSPDT #31

A hack screenwriter writes a screenplay for a former silent-film star who has faded into Hollywood obscurity.

   DIRECTOR    
    Billy Wilder

   SCREENPLAY    
Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett, D.M. Marshman, Jr

   OSCAR    
Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett, D.M. Marshman, Jr (screenplay)
Hans Dreier, John Meehan, Sam Comer, Ray Moyer (art direction)
Franz Waxman (music)

   OSCAR NOMINATION   
Charles Brackett (producer)
Billy Wilder (director)
William Holden (actor)
Gloria Swanson (actress)
Erich von Stoheim (actor is supporting role)
Nancy Olson (actress in supporting role)
John F. Seitz (photography)
Doane Harrison, Arthur P. Schmidt (editing)

  CAST   
William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Erich Von Stroheim, Nancy Olson, Fred Clark, Lloyd Gough, Franklin Farnum, Larry Blake, Charles Dayton, Cecil B. DeMille

   IMPRESSIONS   
Full of truly ostentatious visual, rather unusual for Wilder, and compositions that evoked the air of Phantom of the Opera, and Kane’s Xanadu.

I love the huge close up of the white gloved hands as they play Beethoven on the wheezy pipe organ as the trapped gigolo flutters in the background.  Wilder’s acidic, yet nostalgic, traipse through the film industry’s haunted house could certainly be re-watched endlessly.

You can’t help but feel sorry for Norma (Gloria Swanson), the megalomanic silent movie queen, whose attempts to stay youthful into her fifties paradoxically make her seem a thousand years old.  Norma lives in a decaying mansion on Sunset Boulevard, holding a midnight funeral for her pet monkey, scrawling an unproducable script, and dreaming of an impossible comeback (“I hate that word!  This will be a return!”).

Even Wilder gives strange affection to the has-been Norma, and the never-was Joe, with a somewhat sadistic use of such ravaged and frozen silent era faces as Buster Keaton, H. B. Warner and Anna Q Nilsson.  I love Norma’s line: “I’m big, it’s the pictures that got small!”

The dialogue is beautiful and often poetic, especially Joe’s narration of the story.  There are some great one liners too, and I almost feel that this film in some ways will be just an enjoyable to read.

NO. 1 Sure we believe you, only now we want you to believe us. That car better be back here by noon tomorrow, or there’s going to be fireworks. GILLIS You say the cutest things.

As a side note to remember, for myself: I like the narration at the beginning “you’ve come to the right party” – another alternative would be an off screen monologue as the narrator tells another character – although this wasn’t the case in this film.

   SHOTS   

GILLIS
Come to think of it, the whole place seemed
to have been stricken with a kind of
creeping paralysis, out of beat with the
rest of the world, crumbling apart in slow
motion …

NORMA
Thank you, Jonesy.  And teach
your friend some manners.  Tell
him without me he wouldn’t have
any job, because without me there
wouldn’t be any Paramount Studio.

DEMILLE
Of course you didn’t.  You didn’t
know Norma Desmond as a plucky
little girl of seventeen, with
more courage and wit and heart
than ever came together in one
youngster.


1ST ASSISTANT
I hear she was a terror to
work with.


DEMILLE
She got to be.  A dozen press
agents working overtime can
do terrible things to the human
spirit.
                (to the set)
Hold everything.

GILLIS

That’s the trouble with you
readers. You know all the plots.

GILLIS
May I say you smell real special.


BETTY
It must be my new shampoo.


GILLIS
That’s no shampoo. It’smore like
a pile of freehly laundred hand-
kerchiefs, like a brand new auto-
mobile. How old are you anyway?


BETTY
Twenty-two.


GILLIS
That’s it — there’s nothing like
being twenty-two. Now may I suggest
that if we’re ever to finish this
story you keep at least two feet
away from me … Now back to the
typewriter.

For some noir historians, Billy Wilder’s acerbic “Sunset Boulevard” marks the end of the true heyday of the classic film noir (that brief heyday, or golden age, having opened with Wilder’s own “Double Indemnity;” during the years of 1944-1950, more classic noirs were produced than at any other time during the series). This film stands at the crossroads of another important cinematic shift as well. In many ways, “Sunset Boulevard” represents the sunset of Classical Hollywood Cinema in general. It’s a swan song for the powerful and prolific studio system, and one of the bridges leading into Hollywood’s post-classical period.

“Sunset Boulevard” is one of the more cynical Hollywood satires ever made. This fact isn’t strange at all, as Billy Wilder was one of the more perceptively cynical writer/directors Hollywood has ever known. With film noir being such a uniquely cynical form, the match was heavenly. “Sunset Boulevard” is much more than a sterling example of classic film noir, however. It transcends the limits of style and becomes a masterpiece of the art form through its piercing worldview, expressive social critique, and vivid characterizations.

The legendary composer Franz Waxman wrote the beautiful score for the film (he also wrote the scores for “Dark Passage” ¹⁹⁴⁷, “The Unsuspected” ¹⁹⁴⁷, and “Night and the City” ¹⁹⁵⁰; all outstanding classic noirs). That score is borderline postmodern, as Waxman weaves a complex pastiche out of previous Hollywood musical styles and genres. In one remarkable scene, femme fatale and fading screen icon Norma Desmond (played to delirious effect by Gloria Swanson) impersonates Charlie Chaplin for the enjoyment of her boy toy, ‘B’ movie writer Joseph C. Gillis (played by William Holden). When Norma appears in suit, bowler, short mustache, and with a cane, mimicking the mannerisms of the silver screen’s greatest comedian, the music that accompanies her is picture perfect, evoking the silent and golden age of Hollywood cinema through its jaunty piano riffs. The effect, combined with Norma’s deftness as an impersonator and performer, is flat-out seamless. It’s one of the freest and most striking moments in the entire film.

The film has many other unique, and sometimes bizarre, noirish moments as well. The voice-over narration in this film is delivered by a dead man, making the non-linear flashback structure of the film all the more fatalistic. One of the more dynamic shots in the film features a corpse floating face down in a pool, with press and police photographers, their bulbs flashing, busily snapping away in the background. The shot is taken from the impossible point-of-view of the bottom of the pool, looking upwards at the corpse. The eerie nature of this shot, with pulsating lights and wavy images of nondescript forms swirling into an expressionistic configuration, aesthetically imprisons us in a watery grave along with the dead body.

Note the billowing noir curtains in the first flashback scene. They hover over Gillis, predicting and conveying his unstable and disastrous fate. That fate quickly puts the finger on Gillis, causing him to have a blowout on the street right in front of Desmond’s mansion, thus initiating his descent into a noirish nightmare. The sarcastic hard-boiled dialogue that peppers so many other noirs is all-encompassing here, particularly with relation to Gillis. Rarely has a noir protagonist stood party to his own downfall in such a dispassionate and ironically self-aware manner (complete with stinging commentary) as Gillis does here.

Wilder aligns “Sunset Boulevard” with the style of gothic horror films (which were one of the many visual antecedents of classic film noir). There is a large and ghostly mansion, an uncanny butler, and Norma Desmond herself, who is associated with the iconography of classic movie monsters (like vampires). She often wears dark clothes, hides her face behind dark glasses, and in one memorable shot sits coiled up like a spring, her spidery fingers clutching her awkwardly bent leg as she smokes cigarettes with the aid of a strange contraption attached to her index finger. Desmond is a very unique femme fatale. But like others, she is often connected with, and derives potency from, light. In an early scene where she and Joe watch one of her first screen works, she suddenly leaps up in the path of illumination from the film projector screaming, “I’ll be up there again, so help me!” For a brief moment she is, as she joins her celluloid image, bathed in cinema’s silvery radiance. Later in the film, when she visits Cecil B. DeMille on the set of his latest project, a technician readjusts a key light to fall directly upon her. When it does, and Norma is once again bathed in a purifying light, she is mobbed by fans and well-wishers (almost as if they didn’t recognize her without her standard arcs). At the film’s conclusion, when Norma has taken her final descent into dementia, she learns that newsreel cameramen have arrived to document her plight. To her, they have come to document what is to be her greatest (and final) performance. She descends the stairs to meet them, but only after the artificial lights have once again shone brilliantly on her, energizing her for her final journey.

This closing scene in “Sunset Boulevard” is one of classic noir’s greatest. It’s surreal poetic justice. Again, in some perverse way, all the main characters get what they want. Norma gets to act in a scene again, the cameras rolling for her one last time. Max (played by silent era auteur Erich von Stroheim) gets to direct one last time, as he proudly calls for lights, camera, and action while stifling back tears of sorrow and joy. Joe gets his pool, but, as he sardonically remarks, with a price.

As Norma descends the stairs in her mansion into the arms of the waiting policemen below, time seems to grind to a halt. None of the photographers or reporters rimming her path along the staircase moves a muscle, as if they have become waxworks and she has been granted immortality. Earlier in the film, Gillis spoke of Norma’s two-note trump party with her old movie cronies (like Buster Keaton and Anna Q. Nilsson) as a gathering of her waxworks. That identification has been reversed by the conclusion of the film, as it suddenly becomes apparent that screen legends are in fact immortals. We, the wonderful people in the dark, are the ones who will ultimately fade into nothingness. This is the transformative power of the cinema, and the final absolution of its practitioners; like Norma Desmond, who walks directly into the light, the camera lens, and our consciousness, in the film’s last shot. She defies the boundaries of the film frame, transcending the very limits of the medium. She’s timeless, as is this film itself, and the multi-faceted dark style that spawned it.

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hate to admit it,but to be honest,of all the classic movies that i’ve been watched till this day (DR CALIGARI,ALL ABOUT EVE,CITIZEN KANE,REAR WINDOW,etc),this is the weakest.seen it today over almost 60 years of its initial release,is just very irrelevant.the acting is overmelodramatic and the story is predictable.i waited until the last scene to find something groundbreaking,that makes this movie stand in number 50 in top 250 movies of IMDB,but i couldn’t find any,.i know i’m in the minority for this,but hey,its just my opinion,

This movie is absolutely phenomenal. I honestly can’t think of a single thing that I would change, or a tidbit that didn’t work for me. I honestly can’t remember the last time I watched a movie that swept me away like this. Once the medium shot of Sunset Blvd came on the screen, and slowly pulled away with Holden’s narration over it I fell completely in love with it. Honestly. I have nothing but praise for this film.

At its heart it’s a film noir, but light on the cheese you might expect from all the other film that fell off the mighty Hollywood noir assembly line. The acting here is fantastic, and the closing shot of Gloria Swanson as she descends the staircase and utters her famous words is utterly horrifying, yet at the same time it left me in awe. I can’t think of anything else to say, so see it.

I watched this last night with friends over some Chinese take-out; I was a little hesitant to view it in such a casual setting, given its ranking, but it turned out to be the perfect environment for “Sunset Blvd.” This isn’t a philosophical tome or an experimental masterwork; it’s a circular noir, sometimes funny, sometimes overwrought, but always engaging. It’s about a struggling screenwriter Joe Gillis (played by William Holden) who reluctantly becomes the boy-toy of the one-time star of the silent era, Norma Desmond. On a higher level, it’s probably the first jab at Hollywood’s glossy facade.

Nancy Olson and William Holden in Sunset Blvd.

My favorite moments of the film involved the subplot between Joe and another aspiring screenwriter Betty Schaefer (played by the beautiful and underrated Nancy Olson). Near the end of the film, Joe begins sneaking away from Norma’s mansion/prison to co-write a screenplay with Betty; the two are hopelessly perfect for each other, and their dialogue is some of the most witty and wonderful in all of the golden age of cinema. I found myself wanting more and more of this story and less and less of the primary plot. These scenes are bittersweet; the film begins with a flash-forward to Joe’s death, so we know that this romance will never fully blossom. Credit to writer/director Billy Wilder for finding a way to subvert our expectations about their affair’s demise.

I don’t know that I would place this film so high in my own top 100 list, but I recommend it to anyone looking for a great flick to watch with friends.

Truly a masterpiece of the Classical Hollywood period. An excellent film about Hollywood and fame from legendary director, Billy Wilder. An engaging storyline with strong performances from Gloria Swanson as a former silent film star; desperate for a comeback and William Holden as a down-on-his-luck screenwriter and also from Eric von Stroheim as Norma’s stoic and loyal German butler.

Gloria Swanson and William Holden both create very interesting, complex and sympathetic characters. Their on-screen relationship is electric. Billy Wilder also casts Buster Keaton, Eric von Stroheim and Cecil B. DeMille and references D.W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin in the film. It was great to see a tribute to the people of the silent era that helped pave the way for Wilder and his contemporaries in Hollywood.