Billy Wilder's noir about Hollywood. A failed screenwriter, a faded silent-film star, and a swimming pool that holds the protagonist's body before the film tells you why.
Hollywood, 1950. Joe Gillis, an unsuccessful screenwriter facing eviction from his apartment, drives to evade repossession of his car and pulls into the driveway of a decaying mansion on Sunset Boulevard. The house belongs to Norma Desmond, a silent-film star who has not been on screen since the introduction of sound twenty-two years earlier. Norma believes she is preparing for a major comeback. Her butler Max protects her delusion.
Joe agrees to edit a screenplay Norma has written about Salome — her planned comeback vehicle. He moves into the mansion. The arrangement progressively becomes a sexual one Joe is uncomfortable with but cannot extract himself from. The film opens with Joe's body face-down in Norma's swimming pool and is narrated, in voiceover, by Joe himself from beyond the grave. The closing sequence is Norma walking down the staircase toward the police camera, believing it is a movie camera, delivering the famous line: 'All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up.'
Sunset Boulevard is, by general critical consensus, one of the two or three greatest films Billy Wilder directed. The film won three Oscars (Best Art Direction, Best Music, Best Story and Screenplay) on eleven nominations including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Supporting Actor (for both Erich von Stroheim and Nancy Olson).
What makes the film a masterwork is the specificity of its target. Most Hollywood-about-Hollywood films are either celebratory (Singin' in the Rain) or generally critical (The Player). Sunset Boulevard is specifically attacking the industry's treatment of its own aging female stars. Norma Desmond is, on the page, a precise caricature of multiple actual silent-era actresses (Pola Negri, Mae Murray, Norma Talmadge) whose careers had been ended by the introduction of sound and whose lives had become public objects of pity. The film's accusation — that Hollywood discards women after a certain age, that the industry's economy depends on that discarding, and that the women's resulting psychological collapse is the industry's own product — was extraordinary to make in 1950 and remains extraordinary.
Gloria Swanson had been one of the biggest silent-film stars of the 1920s; her career had largely ended after the introduction of sound. By 1950 she had not appeared in a major American film in over a decade. The role of Norma Desmond was reportedly turned down by Mary Pickford and Pola Negri before Swanson took it. Swanson's casting is, in some sense, the film's structural casting joke — the role of a former silent star delivered by an actual former silent star.
What Swanson does with the role is more than the meta-joke could have supported. The performance moves between camp comedy and genuine pathos, often within a single scene. The famous staircase descent at the film's end is theatrical to the point of self-parody; the close-up that follows is one of the most-disturbing pieces of Hollywood acting of the post-war period. Swanson was Oscar-nominated for Best Actress; she lost to Judy Holliday for Born Yesterday. The omission is, in retrospect, widely considered one of the Academy's more-debated decisions.
Sunset Boulevard's opening voiceover is one of the most-imitated structural devices in modern American cinema. Joe Gillis narrates the entire film — and the famous opening shows his floating corpse in Norma's pool. The audience is then taken back to 'a few months earlier' and shown how he got there. The technique is, in 1950, structurally unusual. Mainstream American cinema almost never used dead-narrator framing.
Wilder reportedly considered an even more elaborate opening — Joe's body in the L.A. county morgue, telling his story to the other corpses around him. He shot the sequence, tested it for audiences who laughed at it, and removed it. The released version — the pool, the floating body, the voiceover that begins 'The poor dope. He always wanted a pool' — is the result of that revision.