Sunset Blvd. (1950)

SUNSET BLVD.  (1950)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Billy Wilder
    Gloria Swanson, William Holden, Erich von Stroheim,
    Nancy Olson, Jack Webb, Cecil B. DeMille,
    Buster Keaton, Anna Q. Nilsson, H.B. Warner
Tinseltown noir, with William Holden as a down-and-out screenwriter who stumbles into the decaying mansion of a silent-era star and ends up moving in to ghostwrite her comeback vehicle, a pathetically misguided remake of "Salome", to be directed (she says) by Cecil B. DeMille. You get a clue about where this is going in the opening shot, the movie's title painted on the street edge of a sidewalk. It's the first thing you see: a gutter. What follows is as morbid and comical as movies about movies get, a funny, despairing look at the dark side of Hollywood, narrated by a corpse. A number of silent stars turn up in cameos, playing themselves, along with von Stroheim as a butler and DeMille as DeMille on the set of "Samson and Delilah", which he was shooting at the time. But the movie belongs to Gloria Swanson, who turns in one of the screen's great unhinged performances: a grotesque caricature, and considering the vanity of most movie stars, an incredibly gutsy piece of work. Her final descent toward the camera (and into madness) is justifiably famous, but if the only thing you know Gloria Swanson from is "Sunset Blvd.", you owe it to yourself to check out some of her silent films. In the decade before movies started to talk, she really was one of Hollywood's greatest stars, and you get a brief glimpse of that here. She was something.