Sunset Boulevard

Other authorsBilly Wilder, Gloria Swanson, Charles Brackett, Franz Waxman, Erich Von Stroheim, Jr. D. M. Marshman

DVD, 1994

LCC

PN1997.A23

Status

Available at Center Only

Call number

PN1997.A23

Publication

Hollywood, CA : Paramount Pictures, c1994.

Description

Pursued by creditors, Joe swerves into a driveway of a seemingly abandoned Sunset Boulevard mansion. He finds Norma, an ex-screen queen dreaming of a dramatic comeback and her husband/servant living there. She takes a fancy to Joe and, learning that he is a scriptwriter, persuades him to help her with her comeback screenplay. Being broke he accepts. He falls in love with young script reader, but Norma breaks up their romance. Thinking she is mad, he tries to leave, but Norma kills him. scene which she believes is the highlight of her comeback movie.

Media reviews

Esquire

Although Mr. Wilder is considered a very cynical fellow in Hollywood, he seems to me not cynical enough; he uses bitter chocolate for his icing, but underneath is the stale old cake. Love Conquers All, ultimately... A genuinely cynical director like Lubitsch would have had Holden stay on with

Swanson because he has come to prefer loveless luxury to impoverished love. A real sentimentalist, on the other hand, would have him marry the girl and begin a new, clean life. Mr. Wilder’s ending tries to have it both ways, something as impossible in art as in life, though a feat achieved hourly in Hollywood, whose relation to either is distant.

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Sight and Sound

Much of the detail is marvellously effective and clever; Miss Swanson watching her young face in an old movie and standing up into the murderous glare of the projector to cry: “They don’t make faces like that any more!” (they certainly don’t and it is our loss).... The lost people are

given splendor, recklessness, an aura of awe; the contemporaries by comparison, are small, smart, safe-playing, incapable of any kind of grandeur, good or bad; and those who think they can improve or redeem the movies are largely just a bunch of what Producer Fred Clark aptly calls Message Kids, and compares with the New York critics. This is certainly a harsh picture of Hollywood; too harsh, considering some of the people who work there. By still quieter inference, of course, Hollywood is still essentially all right because it can produce such a picture as Sunset Boulevard; and with that, the considerable distance it goes, one is bound to agree.

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New Yorker

A young scriptwriter (William Holden), speeding away from the finance-company men who have come to repossess his car (it is Los Angeles, where a man can get along without his honor, but not without his car), turns into a driveway on Sunset Boulevard and finds himself at the decaying mansion of the

once great silent star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson)... Glint-eyed Swanson clutches at her comeback role almost as if it were Salome, yet the acting honors belong to Holden. When he makes love to the crazy, demanding old woman, his face shows a mixture of pity and guilt and nausea. This brittle satiric tribute to Hollywood’s leopard-skin past—it’s narrated by a corpse—is almost too clever, yet it’s at its best in this cleverness, and is slightly banal in the sequences dealing with a normal girl (Nancy Olson) and modern Hollywood.

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User reviews

LibraryThing member comfypants

An aged star of silent films moves a younger man into her isolated mansion.

I expected a lot more, given its reputation. Everything's good, but Stroheim's character is the only aspect that really lives up to the movie's legendary status.

Concept: C
Story: B
Characters: A
Dialog: A
Pacing:

B
Cinematography: A
Special effects/design: B
Acting: B
Music: B

Enjoyment: B

GPA: 3.2/4

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LibraryThing member jgcorrea

The casting of Gloria Swanson and Erich von Stroheim who both had careers in silent movies, invests the events depicted with a great deal of realism as do the cameos in which Cecil B DeMille, Hedda Hopper, Buster Keaton and others are featured. Shots of Paramount studios and Schwab's Drugstore and

the inclusion of an excerpt from "Queen Kelly" (1929) in which Swanson starred and von Stroheim directed also blur the lines between fiction and reality and add greater authenticity to the whole production.

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