Directing: Billy Wilder
Screenwriting: Charles Brackett; Billy Wilder; D. M. Marshman, Jr.
Starring: William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim, Nancy Olson, Jack Webb
Review:
“All About Eve might be Hollywood’s greatest look at Broadway, but Sunset Blvd. remains Tinseltown’s best gaze into its own fun-house reflection.” TV This “witty black comedy” FS is “one of Wilder’s finest, and certainly the blackest of all Hollywood’s scab-scratching accounts of itself.” T95
The movie “opens with a shocking flashback narrated in voice-over by a dead corpse – a victim floating face-down in a Sunset Boulevard mansion’s swimming pool.” FS “In the first version, the opening and closing scenes were at the L.A. County Morgue. Preview audiences found the scenes hilarious, much to the chagrin of Wilder, who was not going for that reaction.” MSN From that moment “through Norma’s deranged final close-up, the stunning Sunset is the standard against which all movies about movies must be viewed.” TV “The performances are suitably sordid, the direction precise, the camerawork appropriately noir, and the memorably sour script” T95 is “all deliriously dark and nightmarish.” T95
“Gloria Swanson is smashing” TV as Norma Desmond, “a reclusive, former silent screen actress” A98 “who refuses to accept the end of her stardom” FS (“I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.”) “and heading for outright insanity.” T95 Von Stroheim is “superb as Swanson’s devotedly watchful butler Max.” T95 “William Holden makes for a terrific pre-Richard Gere gigolo” TV as Joe Gillis, an “aspiring, debt-ridden screenwriter” FS who “sees a lucrative break for himself when she wants to make a return to the screen.” A07 While writing a script for her impending comeback, “he takes advantage, encouraging her false hopes” FS so he can move in her mansion and hide out for creditors. However, “his exploitative dependence upon the film star with romantic attention toward young script-reader Betty Schaefer (Olson), [ends up] creating a lethal situation.” FS
“The perverse, cynical film references Swanson’s actual career, with excerpts from one of her unfinished films (Queen Kelly, directed by von Stroheim) and cameos by other forgotten silent film stars,” FS “[Buster] Keaton, H.B. Warner and Anna Q. Nilsson appearing in a brief card-game scene).” T95
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