Lindsey Lowson / 28 January 2025 / Categories: Movie and TV Shows, Movie

Sunset Boulevard

You could read a hundred reviews, a thousand reviews even about this movie and you would never get why so many reviews are written until you watch it.

This classic film received a staggering 11 academy award nominations, scooping three for Best Art Direction

Best Story and Screenplay, and Best Score. Sunset Boulevard is considered by many film buffs one of the greatest movies of all time.

It’s a Billy Wilder masterpiece, many might say his best, 1950 Hollywood and tells the tale of an aging actress, Norma Desmond struggling to come to terms with her now less than star studded lifestyle, and a tragic story that leads to a murderr mystery.

The movie opens with a dramatic scene of the police arriving at a Hollywood mansion on the famed Sunset Boulevard to find a man floating in the swimming pool, he’s Hollywood screenwriter Joe Gillies, played by William Holden.

The movie closes around the same swimming pool as a deranged Norma Desmond descends the spiral staircase to cameras and the hullabaloo of a movie set, and it’s here Gloria Swanson delivers the famous line “I am ready for my close up Mr. Demille”

After the opening scenes of the same hullabaloo director Wilder takes us back in time, 6 months to hear struggling writer Joe narrate the story of how he winds up face down in said swimming pool.

We discover a cast of characters, the lead played by Gloria Swanson, and Erik Von as her loyal attendant Max telling a story of love, loss, and sometimes just life and how the cards land. These are the things that connect audiences to this film.

It’s a tale often told, and very common in Hollywood where the glitz and glamour is seldom bright enough to cover the desperation that comes when the brutal movie bosses are done with you and moving on to the next big star’s name going up in lights.

This movie offers a nostalgic look back to a time not so different from

today when fame and fortune, position and power can catch up with you regardless of which side of the street you live on and the delusion that comes over time when anyone puts too much stock and reliance on something unreal.

The movie reaches a dramatic climax when the young writer Joe Gillies realises he has been taken as a fool, pretending to be happy to play the Gigolo to feed Norma Desmond’s ego backs fires on him and he shatters the illusion of the aging star’s beauty and fan base, revealing all the fan mail is actually written by Ms Desmond’s loyal and devoted manservant Max.

I think the reason this movie has been placed in the pure class when it comes to cinema is because it explores the frailty of the human experience and shows us the traps and pitfalls of life are the same whether you have made it or you haven’t whether you are young or old.

It’s considered film noir, a black comedy and is very funny in places. Like all fantastic films the director is able to show us all a glimpse of ourselves, that side we try to keep under wraps.