Sunset Boulevard

Sunset Boulevard is a 1950 American film directed by Billy Wilder, produced by Paramount and starring Gloria Swanson and William Holden. It is narrated after his death by Joe Gillis, a screenwriter who turns into the driveway of the silent-film actress Norma Desmond while evading men sent to repossess his car. He is hired to revise the script intended for her return to the screen, becomes her lover, and is shot by her; his body is found in her swimming pool. Swanson, herself a leading actress of the silent period, plays Norma. Erich von Stroheim, a director of the same period, plays her butler Max, written as her former director and first husband, who writes the fan letters she believes she still receives. Cecil B. DeMille and the columnist Hedda Hopper appear as themselves, and Buster Keaton, H. B. Warner and Anna Q. Nilsson appear in cameo roles. At the 23rd Academy Awards in 1951 the film won Best Story and Screenplay, Best Art Direction in black and white, and Best Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture.

The narrator is a corpse. Joe Gillis, a screenwriter behind on his car payments, swings into a driveway on Sunset Boulevard to hide from the men repossessing the car, and tells the rest from face-down in Norma Desmond's swimming pool, so the ending arrives first and the picture becomes a question of how. Wilder had Hollywood dissect itself and cast the operation accordingly: a genuine silent star, Gloria Swanson, as a forgotten silent star; a genuine silent director, Erich von Stroheim, as the butler who was once her director and once her husband, and who still forges the fan mail that keeps her upright. Norma's line about the pictures being the thing that got small carries the arrogance and the injury of being left behind in the same breath. In the last scene she mistakes newsreel cameras for a film crew and comes down the staircase announcing she is ready for her close-up. The film stops short of mocking her, and it has no intention of rescuing her either. Wilder has been imitated a great deal since, and what gets imitated is nearly always the cruelty rather than the pity sitting underneath it.

Mainland China

日落大道

Hong Kong

紅樓金粉

Taiwan

日落大道

English

Sunset Boulevard

Original

Sunset Blvd.

• Gloria Swansonas Norma Desmond
• William Holdenas Joe Gillis