Barnes & Noble

Billy Wilder's terrifying valentine to Hollywood, Sunset Boulevard (1950), features one of the most indelible of all screen performances: Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond. Norma, the aging silent-movie star who ensnares down-at-the-heels screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden), is the vamp become vampire (look at those clawlike hands!), a woman who trades on charms that have long since ossified and curdled. In many ways a horror film -- with the broken-down mansion, the wind playing through the organ pipes, the dead monkey, even Norma herself -- Sunset Boulevard is also an essay about Hollywood and its discontents. If Norma is warped (and she is), the warping Hollywood culture of ego, vanity, and delusion is at least partially to blame. Another casualty is Max von Mayerling, Norma's servant (previously her director and husband), played to self-lacerating perfection by Erich von Stroheim. Though the movie critiques the excesses of Hollywood's silent era, it also reinvigorates the myth of that time. Stars did have faces then -- and magical names. Compared to the workaday Hollywood of the film's present tense, the glamour conjured by Norma's mere mention of Valentino is potent indeed. Rachel Saltz

All Movie Guide

Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard ranks among the most scathing satires of Hollywood and the cruel fickleness of movie fandom. The story begins at the end as the body of Joe Gillis (William Holden) is fished out of a Hollywood swimming pool. From The Great Beyond, Joe details the circumstances of his untimely demise (originally, the film contained a lengthy prologue wherein the late Mr. Gillis told his tale to his fellow corpses in the city morgue, but this elicited such laughter during the preview that Wilder changed it). Hotly pursued by repo men, impoverished, indebted "boy wonder" screenwriter Gillis ducks into the garage of an apparently abandoned Sunset Boulevard mansion. Wandering into the spooky place, Joe encounters its owner, imperious silent star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson). Upon learning Joe's profession, Norma inveigles him into helping her with a comeback script that she's been working on for years. Joe realizes that the script is hopeless, but the money is good and he has nowhere else to go. Soon the cynical and opportunistic Joe becomes Norma's kept man. While they continue collaborating, Norma's loyal and protective chauffeur Max Von Mayerling (played by legendary filmmaker Erich von Stroheim) contemptuously watches from a distance. More melodramatic than funny, the screenplay by Wilder and Charles Brackett began life as a comedy about a has-been silent movie actress and the ambitious screenwriter who leeches off her. (Wilder originally offered the film to Mae West, Mary Pickford and Pola Negri. Montgomery Clift was the first choice for the part of opportunistic screenwriter Joe Gillis, but he refused, citing as "disgusting" the notion of a 25-year-old man being kept by a 50-year-old woman.) Andrew Lloyd Webber's long-running musical version has served as a tour-de-force for contemporary actresses ranging from Glenn Close to Betty Buckley to Diahann Carroll. Hal Erickson

Product Details

• UPC: 097361389844
• Source: PARAMOUNT
• Region Code: 1
• Presentation: Pan & Scan
• Editions: Remastered, Subtitled, Slip Sleeve, Dubbed
• Time: 1:50:00
• Sales Rank: 3,321

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