Slideshow
SUNSET BLVD.
U.S., 1950
Directed by Billy Wilder
Starring William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim
Screenplay by Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett, and D.M. Marshman Jr.
Approx. 110 min. DCP.
Luck has run out for William Holden’s hack screenwriter Joe Gillis. But even from the depths of a Beverly Hills swimming pool, Gillis recounts his tormented affair as kept man to Gloria Swanson’s has-been silent star Norma Desmond.
Reviews
"That rare blend of pungent writing, expert acting, masterly direction and unobtrusively artistic photography which quickly casts a spell over an audience and holds it enthralled to a shattering climax."
– The New York Times
"A delicious comedy with a psycho edge... This is an unmissable commentary on Hollywood's rejection of its silent past: a kind of Sobbin' in the Rain."
– The Guardian
"Billy Wilder’s 1950 classic, disinterred at Film Forum, not only pioneered the portrait of the camphorously demented American shut-in (and therein opened one of the drains leading to PYSCHO), but brilliantly joined it to the hip of Hollywood. Here was an Industry vision of the Industry’s fake-life boneyard, wherein the meta-world of movies — already so notorious for corrupting the hopes and sensibilities of moviegoers — also condemns its godlings to an empty afterlife."
– The Village Voice
"SUNSET BOULEVARD remains one of the best, truest, funniest, saddest and scariest of all movies about Hollywood."
– Chicago Tribune