Sunset Blvd.

Plot synopsis:
The film opens with the camera tracking down Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, California as police cars begin racing down it. The lifeless body of a young man, Joe Gillis (Holden) floats in the swimming pool of a palatial mansion. As the police begin converging on the house Joe's voice narrates, in flashback style, the events leading up to his own murder.Six months earlier, Joe was down on his luck, unable to find work as a screenwriter, having only made a few undistinguished films in his short career. Broke and on the verge of having his car repossessed, with no other options except a low-paying newspaper job in Ohio, Joe tries to persuade Paramount Pictures producer Sheldrake (Clark) to buy his most recent script, but fails after script reader Betty Schaefer (Olson) gives Sheldrake a harsh critique of the script in her summation. Joe then tries unsuccessfully to borrow money from his friends. Fleeing from repossession men in his car, one of Joe's tires blows out in front of a large and seemingly deserted mansion on Sunset. Hiding the car in the garage, he sets out to explore the decaying house, when a woman inside calls to him. Mistaken for the undertaker to a recently deceased pet chimpanzee, he is ushered in by the mysterious butler, Max Von Mayerling (Von Stroheim). Meeting the woman who owns the house, he recognizes her as long-forgotten silent-film star Norma Desmond (Swanson). When she learns that he is a writer, she invites him in and asks for his opinion on an immense script she has written for a film about Salome that she hopes will revive her faded acting career. Although Joe finds the script awful, he flatters Norma into hiring him as an editor.Joe is put up in her guest room. The next morning he objects when he sees that Max has moved his belongings to the mansion on Norma's orders, and that she has paid his overdue rent. Though he hates being dependent on her, he accepts the situation and begins living at the mansion, first in a room over the garage, then in the mansion itself. As he works on Norma's script, he comes to see how unaware she is of how her fame has died. She refuses to hear any criticism of her work, and makes him watch her old films in the evenings. Although she still receives fan mail, Joe later learns that Max feeds into Norma's fantasy by sending the letters himself. He explains that Norma's state of mind is fragile, and she has attempted suicide in the past.Over the next few weeks, Norma lavishes attention on Joe and buys him expensive clothing, including a tuxedo for a private New Year's Eve party attended only by the two of them. Horrified to learn that she has fallen in love with him, he tries to let her down gently, but she slaps him and retreats to her room. Joe, thinking his time with her is over, escapes to a party at his friend, assistant director Artie Green's (Webb) house, where he meets Betty Schaefer again. While still unimpressed with most of his work, she believes a scene in one of his scripts has potential. Joe half-agrees to work on it with her, and calls the house on Sunset to tell Max he is leaving. However, when Max informs him that Norma has attempted suicide with Joe's razor blade, Joe leaves the party and returns to the mansion, where he apologizes to Norma and makes love to her.After a while, Norma considers her script complete, and sends it to Cecil B. DeMille at Paramount and waits for his answer. Not long afterwards, calls from Paramount asking for Norma begin to arrive. They come from an executive named Gordon Cole, and Norma petulantly refuses to speak to anyone other than DeMille himself. Eventually, she has Max drive her and Joe to the studio in her 1929 Isotta Fraschini Tipo 8A, a rare vintage luxury car. While DeMille entertains Norma, many of the older guards, technicians and extras on the set recognize her and welcome her back. Joe and Max, meanwhile, learn that Cole had called because the studio wants to rent her car and has no interest in her script (DeMille tells an assistant in private that the script is awful). Max insists that they hide these facts from her. He later confesses to Joe that he was once a respected film director who discovered Norma as a girl, and was also her first husband, and that he now remains as her servant because he cannot bear to leave her.While Norma undergoes a rigorous series of beauty treatments to prepare for her comeback, Joe has secretly begun to work with Betty on a screenplay. Though she is now engaged to Artie, she falls in love with him. Although he likes her, Joe is dismayed at the triangle in which he is now caught. When Norma discovers the script with Betty's name on it, she phones Betty and insinuates what sort of man Joe really is. Joe, hearing her, invites Betty to the mansion to see for herself. When she arrives, he coldly terminates their relationship by letting her believe that he is a gigolo and prefers to live off Norma. After Betty leaves the mansion in tears, Joe begins packing, having decided to return to Ohio. He bluntly informs Norma of the truththat there will be no comeback, her fan letters come from Max, and she is forgotten. He ignores Norma's threats to shoot herself, and in a fit of passion she shoots him as he leaves, leaving him dead in the pool.The scene returns to the opening. Still narrating, Joe expresses fear over how Norma will be unable to cope with the disgrace, and the discovery of how forgotten she truly is. By the time the police arrive, however, she has completely broken with reality and slipped into a delusional state of mind, thinking the news cameras are set up for a film shoot. To help the police coax her down the stairs, Max plays along with her hallucination that she is on the set of her new film. He verbally sets up the scene for her, and yells "Action!"; Norma dramatically descends her grand staircase. Joe, in voiceover, remarks that life has decided to spare her the pain of that discovery, and that "The dream she had clung to so desperately had enfolded her." Norma makes a short speech at how happy she is to be back making a film, and delivers the film's most famous line: "All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up."

Tags: dark, boring, comedy, murder, atmospheric, flashback, satire, melodrama, tragedy

Review:
Hack screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) accidentally falls in with faded screen legend Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson).
"Norma Desmond" and "Joe Gillis" are at opposite ends of this warped Hollywood mindset, with Gillis, played by that most cynical of actors, William Holden trying to pay the rent and Norma (Gloria Swanson) living a lie as a silent queen whose star burned "10,000 midnights ago".
SUNSET BLVD is the father of all socially oriented pictures regarding the movies and is by far the best.The images of this beautiful black and white powerhouse are fascinating and unforgettable: the dead writer floating in a pool, eyes wide open, looking right at us at the beginning; the eerie pipe organ that plays by the breeze in the middle of one of the most deep and dustiest sets ever; the funeral ceremony of the dead monkey in Norma's courtyard ("That must have been one important chimp.
I wonder if they knew what they were creating while making this gem.Scenes are shot right on the lot of Paramount Studios (even the front gate), and Norma's mansion is an unforgettable piece of history and gloom with a floor that "Valentino once danced on." There is so much to discuss, but little to enlighten you on how great SUNSET BLVD is without you seeing it.
Now, in my late 20's and early 30's I found it to have a different impact on me  I was saddened by Desmond's mental illness, and when she makes her final descent down her staircase and utters her famous line as the camera pans the faces of the people around her, so full of pity, and the care her butler/ex-husband takes to make sure she's happy for maybe the last time in her life made more of an impact on me than any other time in the 20-odd times I've seen this film.
It is so beautifully shot (in that stark black/white that only nitrate negative could achieve), has a witty, clever and extremely well-written script, features some of the best acting in film's history, acrobatically balances the main plot/subplots with expert precision, contains some of the best characters on celluloid, has many true-to-life parallels (Swanson's career/real life cameos/DeMille's involvement/etc) and is peppered with such great dialogue/narration that today's film writers should take note.
It can give you the idea of the dream land's transformation into a nightmare.The film is about a troubled script writer 'Joe Gillis and a forgotten silent film star Norma Desmond's weird relationship and the madness that surrounds them and the people around them.
He meets the owner and former silent-movie star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), who lives alone wit her butler and driver Max von Mayerling (Erich von Stroheim).
When Joe falls in love for the young aspirant writer Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson), Norma becomes jealous and completely insane and her madness leads to a tragic end."Sunset Boulevard" is a bitter and tragic masterpiece of the genius Billy Wilder that exposes how Hollywood uses people and forgets them when they get old and are considered decadent by the industry.
Gloria Swanson, William Holden and Erich von Stroheim star in this Billy Wilder cinematic masterpiece about an aging essentially forgotten silent film star who has delusions about returning to pictures.
It so happens that as I was watching Sunset Boulevard, I was chewing gum, and Gloria Swanson's clipped, derisive tone felt more like it was directed not at William Holden's washed up Joe Gillis in 1950, but at me, sitting on my couch in 2008.
In BOULEVARD, Gloria Swanson's Norma Desmond is to some extent already dead by the time the film starts, locked away in a haunted house, coming out only for the funeral of her pet monkey.
Her life, like her career, is based on illusions of life.The prevailing interpretation of SUNSET BOULEVARD assumes that Norma is one of Hollywood's victims; that the town and the industry turned its back on her when she was no longer a star, her career sabotaged by the coming of sound in motion pictures.
The people in it are unsympathetic, as the leading male character is a hack screenwriter turned gigolo; and the woman he lives with is a mad former silent movie star who pins all her hopes on this third-rate writer's ability to write her 'comeback' picture.
As Norma Desmond, Gloria Swanson is magnificent, larger than life, and every inch the former silent movie queen she plays in the picture.
Sunset Boulevard does not in the end tell us more about Hollywood than the Selznick-Wellman A Star Is Born, but it does its job better, with pungent dialogue, brilliant acting and a sense of style rare in movies of the time and unheard of today..
All we know is that Joe was at the run-down mansion of deluded former silent-film star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson).
Wilder takes a truly original concept, bending Film Noir, satire, comedy, and pathos in the telling of Joe Gillis (William Holden), a down-on-his-luck screenwriter (the repo men are threatening to take his car, for Pete's sake!), who winds up all but imprisoned in the lonely, secluded mansion of Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), a washed-up silent-film starlet harboring delusions of a comeback.
Magnificent performances from William Holden as out-of-work gigolo-screenwriter who inextricably attaches himself to a faded possessive screen star ; Swanson is brilliant as the tragically deluded actress and realizes a real tour-de-force and of course superb Erich Von Stroheim as Norma Desmond's devotedly watchable butler .
One of those movies stars, Norma Desmond, lives in the past as she never adapted to the new reality, which is evident in the way she stays out of the scene dwelling in her antiquated castle on Sunset Boulevard.Enter Joe Gillis, the man who never made it into the industry.
Norma falls for the young Gillis in ways she never expected, but as a desperate woman she wants to possess what she can't otherwise buy, even a man going through financial bad times the way Joe Gillis is.Billy Wilder got magnificent performances out of the three principals.
William Holden had one of the best opportunities of his film career with Joe Gillis, a character he wasn't even scheduled to play, but which Montgomery Cliff handed to him in a silver platter when he refused to appear in the picture!
He winds up in the house of Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), an aging silent film star who is working on her comeback screenplay.
Gloria Swanson as the insane Norma Desmond, a mad silent movie star languishing in her old mansion surrounded by reminders of her glory days, and William Holden as a bitingly cynical screenwriter playing gigolo to Swanson while carrying on an affair with nice reader Nancy Olson is great.
Well, Sunset Boulevard (aka Sunset Blvd.) was just such a film for me.William Holden – who also narrates the film – plays Joe Gillis, a small-time screen writer, down on both money and luck; as we find out right at the beginning of the film, Gillis won't be alive by the end of it.
The fact that viewers are informed by Joe's voice-over right at the start of the film, that he will not survive to the end, fills the ensuing scenes with a bitter sense of doom, and the contrast between Joe the narrator, who knows his fate, and Joe the character who we see on camera, who is unaware of what will befall him, is very effective (A similar idea was used years later in American Beauty, also with excellent results, although Sunset Boulevard was, for me, a much better film.)Gloria Swanson was excellent as Norma Desmond, and at times was difficult to watch.
He imbues his character with passion, tenderness, ruthlessness, and resignation – oh, and he's darkly funny too.Eric von Stroheim is perfectly cast as Norma's taciturn and mysterious butler – this role could easily have been a caricature in different hands, but he plays the part brilliantly.The main cast is rounded out by Nancy Olsen as Betty Schaefer, a young writer who wants Joe's help on a script; she is perfectly cast as a feisty but tender young woman who is dragged into Joe's nightmare world.In short, my opinion for what it's worth, is that there is absolutely nothing wrong with this film.
With the spotlight on Norma Desmond, one of the greatest movie characters of all time, played majestically by Gloria Swanson, "Sunset Blvd." oozes Hollywood Gothic, in a story that is as bleak as it is timeless.Although the script's protagonist is Joe Gillis (William Holden), unsuccessful screenwriter and opportunist, the heart and soul of the film resides in the character of older woman Norma Desmond, a reclusive movie star of years gone by, living in the past, vain, egocentric, yearning for a return to the camera.What makes Norma so memorable is her singular strangeness ...
It's Norma Desmond that I want to see and listen to.These quibbles aside, "Sunset Blvd." is one of the great classic films of all time, a noir drama, wonderfully dreary and grim, yet funny, too.
Aside from a couple of relatively slow stretches, it is crafted with great skill, and it's a film-noir worth watching and re-watching.Holden's restrained, gently cynical performance is an ideal way to look at the unusual world where Swanson's character, an aging former silent movie star, lives.
It all works so well because it comes across as true-to-life not just as a portrayal of Hollywood but as a generalized picture of living in a bygone era.When you have interesting characters, an unusual situation, a good cast, and a director like Billy Wilder to tell you the story, you have rather high expectations.
Arguably his finest script Sunset also gets career highs from pantheon cinematographer Joseph Seitz and composer Franz Waxman whose score not content to just provide background intricately attaches itself to the action, accenting one powerful scene after the next.Aspiring screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) is trying to stay one step ahead of the finance company out to repossess his car when takes shelter in an old movie star's run down mansion.
When he connects with another writer as collaborator and romantic interest he decides to make a final break from the unstable Desmond.Holden's sardonic narration and Gloria Swanson's delusional Norma deliver Wilder and Leigh Bracket's biting script with emphasis in every word as morbid humor mixes with tragedy within the suffocating stage of the oppressive mansion along with the dour butler (perfectly played by Erich Von Stroheim) and the few visitors, actual former silent stars playing themselves, referred to by Gillis as "the waxworks."Also playing themselves are a sensitive but forceful Cecil B.
The acting is fantastic, and Gloria Swanson seems to have been born for this part-perhaps her creation of Norma was inspired by her own experience, being a silent film star herself.The intelligent plot and character development brings both Desmond and Gillis to self-destruct, and bury each other further in delusions, while staying entirely convincing throughout.
The players are all playing themselves in many well documented ways: Willam Holden, a career dip into mediocrity (failed writer), Erich on Stroheim (discarded director serving his past) and, of course, Gloria Swanson (faded silent movie star) whose reality diminishes down the famed, framed and fated staircase spiral into the bright lights of madness.Director Billy Wilder understood what he was doing in cinematically putting this all together in every aspect the film offers and yet it is the overly dramatic "Norma Desmond" that haunts afterwards.
Without a doubt - This picture is, indeed, an oddity in itself, being a story-of-the-grotesque that is told by, none other than, a corpse.Yes. Perhaps the most revealing movie that Hollywood ever made about its own decline - "Sunset Boulevard" was, very much, all about the movie industry's rise to great power, its fabricated imagery, as well as its total worship of youth and its own dark past.And, of course - Irony of ironies - Only director Billy Wilder could imagine Tinseltown as a place where the dead go on speaking - Talking about their lives as if nothing had changed..
Joe Gillis is floating face down in a pool and tells his story.That story tells how he met Norma Desmond, a big star from the silent era who now is forgotten by the people.She's planning a major comeback with a script of Salome.She wants Joe to help her with the movie.The movie's no good, everybody can see that, but Joe still stays around to help her.Soon he realizes that it was a big mistake.Sunset Blvd.
(1950) is a masterpiece from the master called Billy Wilder.The actors are really unique.William Holden is superb as Joe Gillis and Gloria Swanson, an actual silent film star, is absolutely brilliant as Norma.Erich von Stroheim does a wonderful job as Max von Mayerling and so does the beautiful Nancy Olson as Betty Schaefer.In cameos you can see people like Cecil B.DeMille and Buster Keaton.The movie is something really special from the beginning till the end.You can't see movies like this these days.Now we don't have directors like Billy Wilder to make them.In his movies everything usually worked.Especially the dialog was something you don't have so often in modern movies.What happened to the great writers?
What I think really holds this picture together is the well-down over-the-top portrayal of silent film star Norma Desmond by Gloria Swanson.
Joe Gillis(William Holden)is a Hollywood writer who gets himself caught up revising a script for the comeback of a silent film star named Norma Desmond(Gloria Swanson), who is obsessed with her past and suicidal.Forget the chemistry in Casablanca, this movie has the best on screen chemistry of all time!
And the screenplay by Billy Wilder provides plenty of other cynical and observant wise cracks that give his character of Joe Gillis such depth, conviction and truth.And, of course, GLORIA SWANSON, as Norma Desmond, in what has to be regarded as her film swansong (she did very little thereafter), is every inch the faded silent screen star who lives inside her rich imagination, inflating her ego with self-important phrases like: "It's the pictures that got small." With her cat-like eyes and claw-like hand gestures, she gets every nuance out of a role that is theatrical and larger than life, right up to the fantastic ending.
mansion and exposes the sordid truth of his relationship with Swanson.As the man servant who is Swanson's loyal protector and was once Swanson's first husband and director of her early films, ERICH VON STROHEIM easily matches Holden and Swanson with a fine characterization of the patiently devoted butler.Swanson plays the demented star like a more glamorous version of Miss Havisham in GREAT EXPECTATIONS, the woman who lived among the cobwebs because of a bitter disappointment when a lover jilted her on her wedding day.
There was the man floating dead in the pool, but telling me this story, the mysterious funeral for the dead monkey, the old people sitting around playing bridge, von Stroheim flitting in and out, menacing to a boy my age, and bug-eyed Norma descending the stairs.It is a movie obsessed with death, but aren't most of our great films?
This story of a down on his luck Hollywood screenwriter and his peril fraught associations with a fading silent film star plotting her return to the big screen has all the things a noir fan loves; dark mysterious places, a near constant sense of looming danger, rapid and smart dialog and great narration by William Holden.
Gloria Swanson plays Norma Desmond who is a lonely insecure once famous silent film star living in isolation with her servant in a lavish, but neglected Hollywood mansion from the 1920's.
William Holden plays the role of Joe Gillis, a down on his luck B film Hollywood writer who accidentally discovers her mansion.
Erich Von Stroheim plays the loyal house servant Max Von Mayerling to Norma Desmond.A combination film noir, satire with dark, cynical humor, "Sunset Boulevard" excels.
Gloria Swanson in the best role of her career plays Norma Desmond, the silent screen star who is in the process of writing a script for a film to be directed by Cecil B DeMille, or at least she believes so.
Norma entails the help of a younger man named Joe Gillis (played by William Holden), who in a bit of desparation of his own, decides to alter her script for her in return for money and a place to live.The haunting mansion that Desmond lives in with only her butler Max (Erich von Stronheim) shows only pictures of her, has a screen onto which her films are shown to her weekly and plays host to other former silent film stars (notably Buster Keaton in a surprise cameo), is a reminder of how time passed Norma by.
The lighting, the camera angles, the sets, the screenplay all add to the noir atmosphere but it is all topped by wonderful Direction which is really flawless.Also, realistic acting performances by both William Holden and Gloria Swanson are 10/10.You can't really chose which one has done his/her part better.I never put spoilers in my reviews so I would highly recommend to watch this movie.Even if you are a Noir fan,you will love it.If you want to start watching this genre,start with the best,the crown jewel of film noir and that's undoubtedly 'Sunset Blvd' ..
Gloria Swanson, the star of the film, plays a woman who is a star still in her old mind, Norma Desmond.
One can maybe guess what might happen as this goes on, but like with Wilder's other great films, the unexpected moments and keen revelations/coincidences are the best parts; Erich von Stroheim as Max, Norma's 'butler', is surprisingly good.I've seen Sunset Blvd.
Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) is a faded movie star in a relationship with reporter Joe Gillis (William Holden).
Joe Gillis (William Holden) is a faded screen writer whom is at rock bottom when he fortuitously falls upon faded silent film star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) after his car gets a blow-out outside her house after he is being chased by a couple of dudes from the finance company.