Cinema
Sunset Boulevard
Billy Wilder · 1950
Synopsis
Joe Gillis, a penniless screenwriter, flees the bailiffs who have come to repossess his car and hides it in the garage of a dilapidated villa on Sunset Boulevard, which he thinks is deserted. Norma Desmond, a forgotten star of the silent era, who lives there with her butler Max, at first takes him for the undertaker's man expected for her dead chimpanzee. She has written a screenplay about Salome for her comeback and hires him to rework it, at five hundred dollars a week. She installs him in her house, in a room above the garage.
Context
Gloria Swanson had been a star of the silent era; Max is played by Erich von Stroheim, who had directed her in 1928 in a film left unfinished, and the extracts that Norma screens are taken from it. The film originally opened with a scene in the morgue, where corpses talked; as the audience at a test screening laughed, Wilder replaced it. Louis B. Mayer is said to have told him that he had disgraced the industry that had made and fed him. The film received three Oscars from eleven nominations, including the one for the screenplay.
Who it is for
A film of an hour and fifty minutes, in black and white. Several of the performers were silent-film stars and act before their own past.
Prizes and reception
Sixteenth in the AFI's ranking of the hundred best American films in 2007; the Library of Congress selected it for preservation as early as 1989.
Sources for this page 15
The pages consulted to check this page.