Sunset Boulevard

Sunset Boulevard (1950) is the cruellest film Hollywood has made about itself, and its narrator is dead. Joe Gillis is an out of work screenwriter. Running from debt he pulls by chance into a large mansion. Norma Desmond lives there: once a great star of silent pictures, now forgotten, convinced she is returning and wanting a script written. Joe stays. Staying finishes him. The opening was originally something else entirely. Wilder first shot a morgue scene: Joe's body is wheeled in and the other corpses tell him how they died. Wilder considered it among the best things he had ever filmed. At the first test screening the audience laughed. They laughed at the second, and at the third. He threw the scene out and replaced it with the body floating in the pool. The dead narrator stayed; the talking corpses went. The casting brings real life into it. Gloria Swanson, who plays Norma, was a genuine star of the silent era whose career really had ended. The old film screened in the mansion is Queen Kelly, in which Swanson starred and which Erich von Stroheim directed, and von Stroheim plays Norma's butler here. Buster Keaton appears as himself. The last line is one of the best known closings in cinema. It runs 110 minutes, in black and white. Good for: classic cinema, noir, and Hollywood on itself. Less good for: the pacing belongs to its period and the film is bleak from beginning to end.