Seventy-five years after its release, Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard returns to the big screen, its power to mesmerise and unsettle completely undimmed. The film, starring Gloria Swanson and William Holden, has evolved from sharp Tinseltown satire into something more profound: a chilling ghost story about the industry's captive souls and the perils of living in the past.
A Haunting Vision of Faded Stardom
The story follows Joe Gillis (William Holden), a penniless young screenwriter on the run from repo men. His desperate escape leads him to the crumbling mansion of Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), a reclusive former silent movie star who lives with her butler and the memory of her lost fame. Mistaking him for an undertaker for her dead pet chimpanzee, Norma soon enlists Joe to polish her handwritten epic screenplay for a Salome film, plotting her grand 'return' to the screen.
What unfolds is a gothic tale of dependency and delusion. Joe becomes a kept man, adorned with gifts, while secretly collaborating on a script with a young studio reader, Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson). Norma's possessive jealousy and escalating madness drive the narrative towards its now-legendary, devastating conclusion.
Swanson's Undimmed, Sensual Brilliance
Gloria Swanson's performance as Norma Desmond remains extraordinary. A veteran of the silent era herself, she embodies a performer whose extravagant mannerisms were forged before microphones and who can never adapt. Her delivery of iconic lines like "I am big; it's the pictures that got small" is both hilarious and heartbreaking. The film is clear that she and Joe have a sexual relationship, a twisted sentimental education for the writer.
Wilder packs the film with self-referential cameos from real Hollywood figures, including Cecil B. DeMille, Buster Keaton, and gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. This blurring of reality and fiction forms the core of the film's terrible warning: while artists should respect the past, they must not be held captive by it, as Joe is by Norma. The silent era was innovative, not quaint, and cinema must always move forward.
A Legacy of Influence and a Satisfying End
The film's influence is vast, notably on Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, and its ending is one of cinema's most satisfying. The final descent of the delusional Norma, her eyes pinwheeling as she surrenders to the authorities and grimaces directly into the camera, is pure cinematic perfection. The tragedy, perhaps, is that Swanson's own undimmed style and comic flair were seldom used so intelligently again; she made only three more films after this, her masterpiece.
Sunset Boulevard is more than a noir or a comedy; it is a sobering study of cinephilia gone wrong and the ghosts that haunt the dream factories. It serves as a timeless reminder that in Hollywood, the writer is often the ultimate chump. The film is in UK cinemas from 5 December.
