Movie Review: Sunset Blvd. (1950)

Sunset Blvd. (1950) co-written and directed by Billy Wilder

Joe Gillis (William Holden) is a down-and-out screenwriter who is about to have his car repossessed. He wanders over Hollywood looking for someone to loan him a couple hundred dollars. His agent could but won't and nicely threatens to drop him as a client. His producer friend at Paramount could but won't and a script reader (Nancy Olson) comes in with some negative feedback on one of Gillis's earlier submissions. He gets a flat tire on Sunset Boulevard and pulls into one of the old movie star palaces. It looks rundown but has a big garage for hiding his jalopy. As he walks around, Joe is called into the house by a guy (Erich von Stroheim) who looks like he's the butler. Joe is taken up to the master bedroom where a distraught woman (Gloria Swanson) is ready to have her beloved put in a coffin and buried. That beloved is a dead chimpanzee. He's about ready to escape this looney bin when he recognizes the woman--Norma Desmond, the famous silent film star who hasn't worked since talkies came in. She's very full of herself but when she finds out he's a scriptwriter, she pitches him the script she has been working on for twenty years, "Salome." Who will play the young Biblical temptress? Norma of course. Joe is desperate enough to stay and work on the script, slowly turning into a kept man. Can he keep his own self as he enters Norma's cocooned life?

The prospects are bleak, especially considering the film starts with Joe Gillis floating dead in the palace's pool. Gillis provides a film-noir voiceover (presumably from the afterlife?) promising to tell the true story of what happened to him, not the phony sensationalism of all the press that's hot on the heels of the coroner's men. Norma starts out as a crazy, seemingly unstable and unsympathetic character, though as Joe learns more about her, the viewers find her pathos. Joe becomes a little less sympathetic as he falls into the trap and finds himself without the strength to get out when he darn well could. Joe runs into the script reader again. She's found a nugget of a really good story in one of his scripts and wants to develop it with him. He's interested but trapped; it's hard to get away from Norma's suffocating lifestyle and the reader is dating one of Joe's best friends. 

The acting is superb. Swanson was a happily-retired silent era star who makes the character both understandable and genuinely horrible when she needs to. Holden is great as the film-noir sap who can't escape his fate. Von Stroheim's loyal servant makes a lot of surprising revelations but still is believable. The script has a lot of dark humor and an unsentimental look at how people behave, especially people in Hollywood.

Highly recommended--this is top-tier film noir.

It's also the subject of A Good Story is Hard to Find podcast #282, with more fabulous commentary on the movie. Thanks for inspiring my re-watch of this classic.