Sunset Boulevard
Year: 1950
Director: Billy Wilder
Writer: Lewis R. Foster
Cast: William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim
Genre: Drama/Comedy
Rating: Unrated
Runtime: 110 mins
THE narrator starts this movie just right – he’s already dead, face down in a swimming pool, eyes open with surprise. Joe Gillis (William Holden), a failed screenwriter, tells us how it all began six months earlier, when he was trying to hide his car from the repo man and turned into the wrong garage on Sunset Boulevard.
Aging butler Max (director Eric von Stroheim) lets him into the cavernous, decaying mansion, where he is mistaken for a pet mortician, called to attend to the deceased pet monkey of Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), aging film goddess. He recognises her as a star of silent film, reveals himself as a script writer, not a mortician, and promptly becomes the new pet monkey.
Norma engages him to work on her awful script for Salome. She’s deluded herself into thinking she’s about to make a huge comeback as the veiled Biblical temptress. She pays Joe’s bills, installs him in an apartment over the garage, buys him expensive clothes, and throws a macabre New Year’s Eve party where he is the only guest. Joe has one chance for redemption – a wholesome young scriptwriter, Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson), who likes one of his unfinished scripts. He sneaks off to work on the script with her, they fall in love, he tries to get away form Norma…but as we recall from the swimming pool scene, he’s doomed from the start.
