Sunset Boulevard is a real classic I first learned about from parodies on The Carol Burnett Show in the 1970s. I didn't see the film until some 20 years later, when I found it fascinating. William Holden (Rachel And The Sranger, The Earthling) plays Joe Gillis, a bankrupt B-movie writer who drives his car into the garage of an apparently abandoned mansion on Sunset Boulevard to dodge the repo men. But the dilapidated place is occupied by two fascinating but weird characters, former silent screen star Norma Desmond (Goria Swanson) and her butler, balding, German-accented Max (Erich von Stroheim). Norma hires Joe to ghost-write a screenplay for her come-back, but he soon finds he's as much a kept-man as a writer, enabling more than one of the has-been starlet's delusions. The characters of both Norma and Max are fascinating enough to keep the movie going, and their relationship turns out to be more than it seems. The cast includes a very young Jack Webb, actually speaking like a human being, and appearances by Buster Keaton, Hedda Hopper, and Cecil B. DeMille as themselves. Carol Burnett made great fun of the role with Harvey Korman in the Max role 2 decades later, but the movie (directed and co-written by Billy Wilder) remains a grand drama, character study, and serious comment on the Hollywood star system.
Review of Sunset Boulevard
