Sunset Boulevard
is a multi award winning 1950 melodrama which turns the camera on Hollywood and tells the
story of a faded silent movie star’s relationship with an ambitious but
unsuccessful young writer. Nominated for eleven Oscars it is often regarded as
one of the greatest films ever made and appears on numerous Top 10 lists. In
1989 it was selected as one of the first films to be preserved in the National
Film Registry and today, over sixty years after its release it continues to stand
up thanks to its excellent writing, direction, performances and Noir sensibility.
Joe Gills (William Holden) is a struggling writer in search
of a job. He has little success and with debt collectors on his tail he drives
into the seemingly abandoned driveway of an old Sunset Boulevard mansion. He
soon discovers that the decrepit house is in fact occupied by a former movie
star called Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) and her mysterious butler Max (Erich
von Stroheim). After initially being mistaken for an undertaker, Joe announces
himself as a screenwriter and the former star puts him to work rewriting her
screenplay with the hope that it will rekindle her career. Desmond, it soon
turns out, is living in a delusion and cannot grasp that her time has been and
gone while Joe uses his time in the house to further his career.
