Director: Billy Wilder
It's a real shame that most of Sunset Boulevard's behind-the-scenes tropes have been taken by lesser entertainments: the reclusive ex-film star, those who enable her fantastical life, and the crippling effect that diminishing fame and obsolescence has had on said film star. Even so, Sunset Boulevard still stands out. Its power mostly resides in Swanson's performance as silent film star Norma Desmond - she plays all the parts, from doting, to self-important, to pathetic, all quite believably.
Not helping the film is Wilder's need to reveal the end of the film at the beginning - he also does this in Double Indemnity, but here it seems to serve two purposes, neither good: it hooks the audience unnecessarily, and it makes the ending more believable. In both films, Wilder fails to trust his lead actor Everyman to hold the audience's attention, here larding up the first quarter of the film with reams of narration. While the overwhelming voiceover is cutely ironic in light of Desmond's insistence that films used to be done better without words, Holden's wry asides age poorly.
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