Sunset Boulevard

Filipe Manuel Neto 11/16/2022 9:36:26PM 8.4

**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 accent. Others, however, simply did not know how to understand and adapt to the novelty. The collapse of their careers and personal lives led to alcoholism, drugs, mental disorders. The film is able to condense almost all of this into a single character: Norma Desmond, the epitome of the fallen star. The cast has several well-known names, three of which – William Holden, Erich Von Stroheim and, obviously, Gloria Swanson – offer us the interpretation of their lives and their work of greater value and recognition. Of course, we cannot ignore that Swanson was a great star of silent cinema and that she shone in films like “Trespasser” or “Indiscreet”, and that Holden would continue to be a highly sought actor after this, having won his Oscar for Best Actor in a film that starred two years later. But there is no doubt that this film immortalized the three of them. Technically, the film is impeccable, and the merit lies a lot in the brilliance of the dialogues, in the excellence of the conception and development of the characters, in the extraordinary way in which Wilder managed to get the best out of Swanson and lead the actress to a magnificent performance, which has so much to brilliant and difficult as well as provocative (especially from the point of view of many Hollywood shooting stars, who saw themselves in character and felt offended by it). With an excellent pace, the film does not waste time or let the atmosphere of tension and drama fall into a standstill. The mansion, owned by the Getty family, acquires character by itself as it becomes the most obvious symbol of the disturbed personality and only of its resident. The black and white cinematography is magnificent, and accentuates, in its details and shooting angles, the dramatic feel of the film. The soundtrack isn't memorable, but it's effective and functional.

badelf 5/15/2026 3:16:39PM 8.4

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 watching, and Swanson makes that both hilarious and heartbreaking. The way she uses her eyes and face in "real life" is a performance within a performance, a woman who can no longer distinguish between being and acting. Norma's final descent into total delusion is both inevitable and mesmerizing. We see it coming from the first frame, but Swanson's execution is so brilliant that the ending still lands with devastating force. When she believes the newsreel cameras have arrived for her comeback and delivers her most famous line — "All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up" — it's tragic, grotesque, and somehow triumphant. She's completely mad, and she's finally getting what she wanted: the cameras are rolling, and she's the star again. In a lesser film, the narration device would feel gimmicky, but Sunset Boulevard is so darkly comic, so heightened in its gothic intensity, that the impossible perspective works. The film has already asked us to accept a world where Hollywood's cruelty is so complete it becomes operatic, where a silent film queen lives in a mausoleum of her former glory. The voice-over is just one more layer of stylization in a film that understands style is inseparable from meaning. Wilder's direction is merciless. He films Norma's mansion like a tomb, all shadows and decay, the grandeur rotting from the inside. The script, co-written with Charles Brackett and D.M. Marshman Jr., is venomous and precise, every line a little knife. The film skewers Hollywood's obsession with youth, its disposability of talent, its hollow worship of fame. But it's also funny, wickedly so, because the tragedy is so predictable and the savagery so unrelenting. We know Joe is doomed the moment he walks into that house, and watching him try to escape while sinking deeper is both pathetic and perversely entertaining. Sunset Boulevard is a film that understands Hollywood better than Hollywood understands itself. It sees through the glamour to the rot underneath, and it presents that rot with a kind of glee. It's a Gothic horror story, a noir, a black comedy, a tragedy, and somehow all of these at once. Swanson's performance alone would make it essential, but everything here is working at the highest level: Holden's cynical narration, von Stroheim's mournful dignity, Wilder's unsparing intelligence. This is filmmaking as autopsy, cutting open an industry to show what's really inside. And it's glorious.

r96sk 5/19/2023 3:17:10AM 8.4

Ace! <em>'Sunset Boulevard'</em> 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.