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Sunset Boulevard

It’s hard to think of a director with the talent and versatility of Billy Wilder. Sunset Boulevard is one of his several masterpieces. The story about the forgotten star of silent pictures is at the same time sad and frighteningly real.

William Holden is Joe Gillis, a broken screenwriter who ends up in a decaying mansion when trying to escape from debt collectors. There he finds Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), a silent movie star, forgotten since the sound achievement and planning a comeback, writing a silent movie for herself.

Deciding to use the old and lonely woman to make some money, Gillis offers himself to edit her script, a terrible piece that he calls a “hodgepodge of melodramatic plots,” but soon he will find that he is the one to be used. Little by little, Gillis becomes a prisoner in her fantasy world, seduced by her gifts and attention.

The parallels between the screen and the real world fill the story. First of all, Gloria Swanson was really a silent movie star and was retired by the time Wilder cast her to the movie.

Her butler, Max von Mayerling, a former movie director who discovered her and later took the task of feeding her fantasies when her career was over, is actually a real movie director, Erich von Stroheim, the director of Greed, among others, and he really discovered Gloria Swanson; in fact when Norma Desmond watches one of her silent movies with Gillis, the scene is from a Stroheim picture, Queen Kelly (1928).

Sunset Boulevard portrays the other side of Hollywood, the dark side, that exists under all the lights and glamour. All characters are secondary professionals or forgotten people. In another scene, Desmond’s friends, who Gillis calls “the waxworks,” visit her to play a game of bridge and they are all former silent performers, Buster Keaton, Anna Q. Nilsson and H.B. Warner, even Cecil B. DeMille appears playing himself. Fantasy and reality mix all the time.

Wilder, as always, delivers some unforgettable lines. When Gillis first meets Desmond he says, “You’re Norma Desmond, you used to be in pictures, you used to be big.” She replies, “I am big, it’s the pictures that got small.” Swanson’s performance is all the time exaggerated, at the edge of madness and pantomime, perfect for a former silent movie star.

Sunset Boulevard is not only a great movie from one of the greatest directors of Hollywood’s golden age, but also a cinema’s history class, to be seen, studied and kept forever.

Written by: Edward Olivier

Reviewers Rating: 9.5
Reader's Rating: 10.00
Reader's Votes: 1

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