Sunset Blvd

Maltings cinema
Sunday 23 18.30

USA, 1950, 115 min
Black & white, 35mm
English
PG

dir: Billy Wilder
scr: Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder,
D. M. Marshman Jr
prod: Charles Brackett
dop: John F. Seitz
editor: Arthur Schmidt
sound: Harry Lindgren, John Cope
music: Franz Waxman
cast: William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim, Nancy Olson, Fred Clark

production company: Paramount Pictures
UK rights: Paramount
print source: BFI

Filmography as director:
1981 Buddy Buddy
1978 Fedora
1974 The Front Page
1972 Avanti!
1970 The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
1966 The Fortune Cookie (Meet Whiplash Willie)
1964 Kiss Me, Stupid
1963 Irma la Douce
1961 One, Two, Three
1960 The Apartment
1959 Some Like It Hot
1957 Witness for the Prosecution
1957 Love in the Afternoon
1957 The Spirit of St. Louis
1955 The Seven Year Itch
1954 Sabrina (Sabrina Fair)
1953 Stalag 17
1951 Ace in the Hole
1950 Sunset Blvd
1948 A Foreign Affair
1948 The Emperor Waltz
1945 The Lost Weekend
1945 Death Mills
1944 Double Indemnity
1943 Five Graves to Cairo
1942 The Major and the Minor
1934 Mauvaise graine

On the run from creditors, jobbing screenwriter Joe Gills accidentally pulls into the driveway of a seemingly deserted mansion. Grand, decrepit and ominously claustrophobic, the house shelters Norma Desmond, a silent-film star whose grandeur has been obliterated by the advent of the talkies. She lives as an embittered recluse, a Miss Havisham waiting for her fame to return – her delusions of a triumphant comeback to the screen fanned by her devoted butler Max, who is also her ex-husband and ex-director and who painstakingly forges all her fan mail. Joe accepts a lucrative offer to help Norma edit a screenplay and soon becomes her kept lover, clearing his financial debts only to face moral bankruptcy.

As a film about filmmaking, Sunset Blvd remains far removed from the glittering glamour Norma still reveres. It is, instead, littered with the disconsolate victims of a ruthless machine, shining a stark light on the misfortune for which Hollywood reserves its greatest contempt: failure. In what must still count as one of the most cruelly inspired examples of casting ever, the characters of Norma and Max are played by real-life ex-couple Gloria Swanson (a silent-film star who had failed to retain her status after the transition to sound) and Erich von Stroheim (a formidable actor-director ditched by MGM at the end of the 1920s). The only visitors to their decaying mausoleum are their bridge-playing friends, whom Joe refers to as the ‘waxworks’. These, too, are played by once-revered relics of the silent era, amongst whom sits a poignantly solemn Buster Keaton.

In the decade that followed Sunset Blvd, director Billy Wilder brought us The Seven-Year Itch, Some Like it Hot and The Apartment, some of the most loved comedies of all time. This is a decidedly more acerbic affair, but it displays the same verve, incisive dialogue and justifiable claim to classic status.